2 + 2 = 1.4 (Drat!)

Wednesday, September 3rd — I had my sixth re-exam last week, but it wasn’t till today that I had the graph in hand so I could share it with you. (Hopefully, Dr. Klein will find a moment to insert it into this post… but he is crazy busy right now. Every moment that he isn’t cracking necks and leaning on backs (i.e. , waving his magic wand and performing miracles) he is on the phone making plans for a great and wonderful Event he’s planning in Del Mar in about three weeks.)

So back to my re-exam. Happily, two of the original Objective Findings from March 5th now appear normal: my left shoulder is no longer higher than the right, and I now can tip my head backwards to a normal degree (no more “limited cervical ROM extension”). Still can’t turn my head from side to side in either direction as far as I should be able to (”limited cervical ROM rotation” both left and right), but now I can nod with visible enthusiasm. That should come in really handy.

Unhappily, there were two NEW Objective Findings. I couldn’t believe what they were!

Last month, at the end of July, David found that for the first time, my hips were normally even and straight. Apparently, they had both been slightly twisted — the left one a little bit forward and the right one a little bit backward. That was also when he discovered that, once the hips were normally aligned, my left leg was about an inch shorter than the right one. Despite the orthopedic surgeons’ ultra-careful calibrations after my last hip revision, those measurements were based on slightly twisted hips. Alas!

And now, by some weird cosmic twist of humor, they were slightly twisted in the opposite direction: “ilium bone posterior left” (twisted backward) and “ilium bone anterior left” (twisted forward). But only a wee bit, just enough to make it so that my left leg is now only half an inch shorter than the right.

So two improvements plus two new problems, given the point value of each Objective Finding (which has changed slightly because there are now more Findings to fix), gives me a total of (sigh) an improvement over last month of only 1.4%. Drat! Crap! Damn! Yes, I said them all when I saw the graph, and thought others as well.

Okay: but the good thing is that the line on the graph didn’t go down, and it actually did creep up, even though it’s an infinitesimal difference. So maybe by the end of September I will be progressing visibly again. I sure will be working on it as hard as I can. Meanwhile, I can say that I have made 66.7% of the expected overall improvement. Only 33.3% to go!

Wish me luck. Thanks for reading — Betsy