Just As You Think You’re Flying High…

Thursday, August 7th – So there I am, feeling rather smug about my Shockingly Normal Spine and all… and it’s 6:00 a.m., just getting light out. The cat has announced, as always, in no uncertain terms, that it is Breakfast Time, and I’m in the kitchen/family room, just coming back from opening the door to let in the lovely early-morning air, on my way to get the cat food and shut her up.

(I digress for a moment: a year ago, when I was bumbling around on a walker, we were Extremely Careful about things like throw rugs, and grab bars in the bathroom, and making sure there was enough space to get past furniture, etc. I guess we have gotten complacent, now that I’ve been on a cane for 11 months and am pretty much zipping about at normal speed, even though I’m gimpy as all get-out: think Igor in “Young Frankenstein,” or Lurch in “The Addams Family”.)

Anyhow, my beloved spouse had been sorting some of the gazillion papers he keeps in large volume-like files, and there are a couple of those files near the corner of the sofa… the passage is thus reduced to about 18 inches… and to make a long story short, my cane catches on the rocker of the rocking chair and I go staggering about eight feet to the kitchen wall.

Since we’re expecting plumbers at 9:00 a.m. to install new faucets in the kitchen, said kitchen wall is lined with cartons containing all the stuff from under the kitchen sink. And a bag of tennis balls, which I used to use on the legs of my walker. And several more, full of papers. And more. And more. So I bash my hand very hard against the wall to end the stagger, do a sort of half-spin in mid-fall, and wind up sitting on the carton full of papers. At least it ’s not the cleaning products, or the tennis balls!

The noise is stupendous enough to bring my beloved spouse flying from the bedroom, thinking that we’re being burglarized. (No self-respecting burglar would make anything like that amount of noise; but I appreciate the sentiment.) There I am, sitting on the box; my lower back hurts, my eyebrow-bone hurts (where did I bash that, I wonder?), my left leg hurts like anything below the knee… and I have no idea how to get up. Remember, the cartons are about 14 inches off the floor, and I am six feet tall, with knees that don’t bend very well.

And Amy, my poor old 28-year-old kitty, is all agitated because of the noise, and because Robert has come running, and mostly because no food has yet appeared on the counter — so she continues to yell at top volume.

Well, long-story-short here… it took me about twenty minutes to figure out how in hell to get myself up to a standing position. Robert wanted to pull me up by an arm, but the shoulders refused to entertain any such notion. I tried to push off from the boxes, but tennis balls are not great to push off from. Nor are cleaning products. Finally I had Robert sit in one of the bar chairs we have in the kitchen, with his back to me, and I took a deeeeeep breath… and on the exhale, I pulled myself up to the verticle by hauling on the back of the bar chairs. (Thank you, Kelli-my-physical-therapist, for teaching me that thing about exerting on the exhale.)

I felt as I suppose a surfer must feel when bashed about by a huge wave. Ouch, in other words, ouch almost everywhere.

I called Seaside Chiropractic, even though it was only 7:00 a.m. by now, and left a message saying I needed to arrange some extra time for my appointment today so Dr. Klein could check and see if anything was amiss. And then the plumbers came… and seemingly quite soon it was time to go see Dr. Klein.

Before he even examined me, he made me sign something that said he had advised me to have a x-ray before being adjusted, but I (O recalcitrant and uncooperative Betsy!) had refused, and said I wished to be adjusted without an x-ray. Hey, who wanted to wait another day while I tried to get an appointment with Radiology, etc.? Not I! I signed happily.

DK suggested there might be a compressed fracture of a lower vertebra, and explained that if that were the case, the only thing, really, that could be done was gradually to un-compress it, stretch it out again to its usual cylindrical shape, by gentle adjusting. However, his guess was that it was not a fracture, given that I was able to laugh AND talk to Emily at the same time that  my legs were going up and down on the lower part of the Moving Table. (Does he realize, I wonder, that I have been able to laugh and talk simultaneously while hippity-hopping around on a walker with a dislocated hip revision?)

A guess from David Klein is as good as an affadavit from anyone else, as far as I’m concerned. I have assumed that there is no fracture. I am assuming that my bruises will heal quickly, and that in a week or so I will feel back to Shockingly Normal again. Oh yeah… he did find two vertebrae out of alignment, one in the lower back and one under the shoulders… just where it hurt the most. They aren’t so painful today. I guess he just slipped them right back into place.

And what is the moral of this story? Jeez, the only one I can pull out of it is that I shouldn’t get all uppity just because I’m doing well.  I guess it’s back to being careful, and making sure the passageways are wider, and not walking too fast. RATS!

I still vow that by the end of 2008, I will be walking sans cane, and gimp-less. That is my Resolution.

Thanks for reading — Betsy