Mother of God.  So.  Today, I had my fourth chiropractic appointment.  I started going last week to help out with the injury I inflicted on myself from my NYE fall on the escalator – during which I apparently misaligned my hip, which created a subluxation in my sacrum & L5 vertebrae.  Because I’m awesome like that.

So anyway, the first consultation was fun; it basically consisted of her telling me that my back is all jacked up in a variety of ways.  Which was fun.

1) This is what a misaligned hip with a sacral subluxation looks like.

So then we began the first adjustment.  The first part of the treatment is attaching electro-stimulus pads to various places on my back & cranking up the electricity, while lying on a doctor’s office type seat that has a rolling massage underneath it.  Next I lie face-down on a table while she takes out an “instrument” that sounds a little bit like a chainsaw, but is actually a fairly pleasant massaging device thingamajig.  And finally, she takes this thing that looks like a gun and pops like a popgun.  It’s job is to push joints back into alignment.  This is somewhat uncomfortable, but by no means excruciating.

The next 2 appointments are essentially the same – 2 or 3 of the 3 above mentioned components.  At my last appointment, she tells me “Your lower back [where the injury occurred] is looking much better.  However, your mid & upper back still need a lot of work.”  Because, oh yeah, these are the other 2 things that were jacked up about my back:

2) Mild scoliosis.  More or less, this is what my scoliosis looks like. 

And 3) slight dowager’s hump at the base of my neck. 

So, there you have it.  These last 2 are the things we’re beginning to tackle.  I go to my appointment today, and things start out all business as usual – except a lot more of those electro-stimulus thingamajigs are in varying locations on my back.  And I happen to mention that my neck has been hurting a lot lately.

Then we get to the part where I lay face down on the table.  At this point she says to me “Are you alright with me using my hands?”  Friends, if a chiropractor asks you if you are alright with them using your hands, and you have never been to a chiropractor before, you might want to hesitate before you say yes.  The next 10 minutes (and it could not have been more than 10 minutes) were insanely fast and shocking and full of discomforting popping sounds.  First she just told me to inhale (on my stomach) and then blow all the air out really quickly…as I’m doing that, she’s putting all her body weight on various spinal/shoulder bones and popping them into place.  Then I lay first on one side, then the other, and she kind of does this thing where she like launches her body onto my hips to knock them back into place.

Then we get to the neck.

She basically grabs my head and twists it in varying positions, causing my body to emit the most sickening crunching sounds I have ever heard it make.  I became a *little* concerned – well, terrified might be a better description.  She even commented at one point, “You’ve been under chiropractic care before?”  Me: “No I haven’t.”  Her:  “Really?  Wow, I’m surprised you didn’t leap off the table when those popping sounds happened.”  So now I’m really freaked out and start to tense up, which is apparently my body’s defense mechanism because now she can’t do anything else   Also she began referring to me in the 3rd person, which was a little awkward, so I was just generally confused.  I was also concerned that if she wanted to, she could potentially snap my head off my body.  It was kind of scary.

But unfortunately, she is right, and my neck and back do feel so much more amazing now.  I can’t believe I still supposedly have 8 more adjustments…I don’t know what else is going to happen.  This came out of *nowhere* and I felt vastly unprepared for it.  I would have preferred the nice little massaging machine that sounds a little bit like a chainsaw, honestly.

Tags: back, chiropractors, falling, injury, treatment

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Health, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.