More About the Journey…

Tuesday, March 25th –  Well, I apparently got it a bit wrong. The musical sound actually emanated from the robot, but was triggered by the resonating frequency of the bone.

I believe I would still rather think of it as “singing bones.”  I love the thought of that.

But the best thing is, the sound is perceptible to someone OUTSIDE my body. Dr. Klein could hear it perfectly well.  That is so neat!

When I got home after my adjustment today, I was feeling pretty stretchy and limber… not a usual feeling for me. And I suddenly thought:  “I have to fill out a form each time I go to see Dr. Klein, with a drawing of a human figure. I shade in the places where I feel pain, and assign each place a number on the pain scale from 1 to 10. When I started seeing him just under a month ago, I was giving each area a 4 or a5; and the past week, I’ve been giving every area a 3.  But hey, I can hardly believe it — if I had to fill out that form right now, I’d put a 2 on every single pain area!”

This may not seem very significant to you, but to me, it’s almost miraculous. I haven’t been down to 2 for at least three years. I mentioned at the beginning of this blog that in the past two and a half years I’ve had three revisions of earlier bilateral total hip replacements. The second one turned out to require rebuilding of the whole left side of the pelvic bone with a special porous metal, into which new bone would grow and fuse. This was due to the fact that the polymer coating on the original implant had eaten away a big hole in the bone, which had to be cleared of necrotic tissue and then covered with metal plates so there would be something that could hold the screws of the new implant.  (No wonder I was having a lot, A LOT, of pain!)

That revision dislocated within ten days, but I didn’t realize it (and neither did anyone at the rehab facility) because I was on such a high level of opiates for pain management. The surgery had to be redone two months later. My surgeon said the pelvic bone couldn’t be rebuilt a third time. If this went wrong for any reason, I would be in a wheelchair the rest of my life. I spent a total of four months in a skilled nursing facility, with two months of placing no weight on the operated side. The only time I could get out of bed was to lurch to the bathroom on my walker: hop with all my weight on the right foot, then a tippy-toe touchdown on the left, just for a second. The rest of the time I spent with physical therapy and learning to walk again. When I came home from rehab in March 2007, I then had the task of coming off a strong dependency on Fentanyl — not at all fun, in fact, pretty awful. I was on the walker through August 2007, in fact, and have been walking with a cane ever since. On good days my pain level was 3; on many days it was 5.  I thought it would be that way permanently, and so I learned to live with it and got on with my life.

I don’t suppose it is realistic to expect that 2 will be repeated every day from now on. But I do, now, have a reasonable hope that my regular adjustments will really get rid of my pain eventually. I cannot thank David Klein enough! It’s so exciting to see how quickly I’m making progress under his care. In addition, his wonderful staff — Roseanna and Emily and Cheng Cheng — are so supportive and cheerful, so happy to witness my improvement:  I love coming to this office. (Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to mention that there is always a basket of chocolate-covered peppermint patties on the front desk, and a daily plateful of some kind of sinful cookie or little pastry.  No wonder my diet has ground to a halt…)

Chiropractic is a journey I never thought I’d be making, and I am inexpressibly grateful to all the folks at Seaside Chiropractic.