“Shockingly Normal!”

Sunday, August 3rd — It’s been a while longer than I would have liked since my last post, but Life — in that funny way it has — just sort of intervened. I’ve had a weeklong visit from my Toronto sister and her husband, another few days of waiting-to-hear-what’s-going-on while my husband’s MDs hemmed and hawed after he had another cardiac episode (he is okay for now), and various house crises that all seemed to happen at once.  These included: need for new guest bathroom faucets INSTANTLY because of IMMINENT guest arrival, trip with husband (before sudden hospitalization) to select and order faucets and decision by husband to replace ALL faucet sets in ALL bathrooms AND kitchen at the same time, permanent demise of guest bathroom toilet seat during visit of sister (while husband was in hospital), trip to Home Depot to find new toilet seat and installation of same by brother-in-law, return of husband a day earlier than expected… and, of course, figuring out what to feed everybody twice a day in the midst of all this. Who had time to blog? Certainly not me!

But I really wanted to, because — I had my fifth re-exam with Dr. Klein last Wednesday. While I’m lying prone on the table, he’s checking my spine manually. He gets to the bottom, pauses, says “Hmmmmm…” in a pensive tone, then: “I think I’ll do that again.” Checks the spine again, and remarks, “Your spine is shockingly normal!” Then he checks the hips, and: “This is the very first time in — what is it, five months now? — that your hips have been straight and even!” And a minute later: “If we could just attach new shoulders and new feet to this normally straight spine — you’d be a whole new normal person!”

This is all good news, right? Finally, as he’s checking the legs, I hear: “Roseanna… Emily… come over here a minute.  Now, what do you notice?” And the ladies chorus, “Her left leg is an inch shorter than her right one!”

This is NOT good news. Apparently, even though the orthopedic surgeons were excruciatingly careful to  take measurements and make certain my legs were the same length the last time they did a hip revision, they were working from hips that were twisted to some degree. So when the hips were evened out by chiropractic manipulation, I wound up with one leg shorter than the other.

No wonder I limp when I walk without my cane — like Igor in Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein, I imagine. Or maybe Lurch in The Addams Family. One dratted leg is AN INCH SHORTER THAN THE OTHER.

Well, we’ll see what a few more months of chiropractic will do. Perhaps DK will be able to lengthen out the left one a bit. Perhaps I’ll have to buy an orthotic to build up that side. I refuse to walk this way for the rest of my life!

But the good news is that I have improved now by 62.4% since Day One. I can now perform several motions that I couldn’t manage in March. They are things like touching the top of my head with my left hand — silly little motions that you don’t even realize you have, until you don’t have them any more. I’m hoping Dr. K will be able to include my graph in this blog, because the upward slope of the whole thing thoroughly delights me! No leveling-out to be seen yet!

Onward and upward! Thanks for reading — Betsy