Category — 1

Wednesday, July 16th — I’ve been thinking about this on and off all day, even in between doing some editing for an online buyer and actually beginning another original article. This keeps getting in the way, so I’d better get it out of my head.

10) Whale vertebra in the front waiting room. At first I thought it was some oddly beautiful modern piece of sculpture, but when I asked Roseanna, last March, she said it was a whale vertebra that had washed up on one of La Jolla’s beaches. A patient had found it and brought it in to Dr. Klein. It’s huge, and strange, and gorgeous. I can only imagine what a whole chain of them would look like.

9) Snacks on the counter behind which is the front desk. Emily is the Snack Monitor, and she picks out wonderful things every day, from crisp and juicy organic green seedless grapes, to fake Cheetos from Whole Foods Market (maybe healthier than the originals?), to incredibly sinful little Trader Joe’s brownies. When you know something yummy is going to be waiting for you, it’s even another incentive to get yourself in there instead of dawdling around looking in the shop windows and reading the menus outside the restaurants.

VIII) Plastic spines all over the place. Like the whale vertebra, they sort of focus your mind on what this place is all about. Aside from the snacks, I mean. (Sorry about the Roman numeral — when I put an 8 next to a parenthesis, it kept turning into a Happy Face.)

7) Dan’s little landscapes in oil on the walls. I really love Dan’s work. As I said a while ago, I want to buy one of these little treasures someday when I have some $$$. He is really good.

6)  Patient education, more and more and more of it. I think DK’s plan is to have every patient be so knowledgeable about chiropractic, and how it all works, and why it all works, that all of us can answer questions and maybe even give little talks about it, should the occasion arise. Education and learning new stuff is what I love most of all, so I thrive on getting these little quizzes every day from Emily and Roseanna.

5) Framed testimonial letters on the walls, even in the bathroom. And a big book of them in addition, on the table in the waiting room. In 17 years of Dr. Klein’s practice, there are a whole heck of a lot of people who have been helped by, and hence “converted to,” chiropractic! It’s fun to read what people have to say about how much better their lives are since they got themselves adjusted.

4) Orchids all along the front counter. You see orchids everywhere here in Southern California; not necessarily outside in people’s gardens, although you do see that sometimes, but I guess everybody has a few in pots. I believe Seaside has somebody who takes them away when they’ve finished blooming and brings in a bunch of new ones. At any rate, they are always beautiful, and always different. I just wish they had some sort of fragrance; anything that gorgeous ought to smell good, too, I think.

3) Laughter and smiles and giggles everywhere in the office! These folks have so much fun in their daily work! Once upon a time, for twenty years, I was privileged to be able to work with children every single day in a Montessori school I founded with my sister. We used to refer to it (privately) as the GW — for Great Work. That was what it was for me, and for her too — the thing we loved doing above all else, and were really, really good at doing. The laughter at Seaside makes me realize that the staff here are also involved in a GW of their own, and are having as much fun doing it as I did with my own.

2)  Roseanna and Emily, singly and together. These are two beautiful, wonderful, smart, compassionate, caring, altogether excellent young women, whom I feel fortunate to have met. The two of them keep things running like a perfectly-balanced machine. Nothing fazes them, nothing seems to annoy them or bother them; they smile, and hug you, and welcome you in as if you were the best thing that’s happened yet in their day. I love them both exceedingly.

1) It’s gotta be Dr. David Klein! Think a combination of Mr. Clean and Gandalf the Grey: he looks kind of like Mr. Clean (no long gray hair or beard… hey, no hair at all!) but he functions kind of like Gandalf. He makes magical things happen for unbelievers. He knows EVERYTHING about the Internet, and is willing to teach you anything you want to know. He has some paintings by his mother hanging in the office (how neat is that??). He is incredibly funny, very wise in a huge variety of topics, and he is crazy about his beautiful wife. He’s half my age, and I think of him as sort of a guru. Go figure.

So those are my Top Ten Things I Love about Seaside Chiropractic. Now I can concentrate on work, now that I’ve gotten them off my chest.

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Monday, July 14th – Today I had an appointment with my terrific Primary Care Physician at Scripps Clinic, Dr. Sanjeev Shah. And, just as with Dr. William Bugbee in June and Dr. H. Arthur Silverman in April, I was looking forward to seeing Dr. Shah with a certain amount of trepidation. I never know how MDs are going to react to hearing that I have been receiving chiropractic adjustments three or four times a week for more than four months now. Twice now I’ve been more than pleasantly surprised — I would say instead, I’ve been astonished — by the positive and encouraging attitude my doctors have shown. Since I previously had only my late OB/GYN father’s long-standing and negative opinion of chiropractic to go by, it has been nothing short of a revelation to see how open these MDs are to chiropractic, and to “alternative medicine” in general. Scripps Clinic actually has a Department of Alternative Medicine. And, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the University of California San Diego Medical School is now sending its Fellows seeking Board certification in Pain Management to Seaside Chiropractic, for a certain number of hours learning from Dr. David Klein how chiropractic can be efficacious in managing pain.

Dr.Sanjeev Shah commented on how good my blood pressure looked, and how great I  looked, having lost a fair bit of weight since I last saw him in February. He also mentioned that I seemed to be walking better than I had been. So then I told him the story of my Skeptic’s Journey with Chiropractic. I showed him how I can now move the right foot, that had been “like a block of wood attached to the leg,” to quote Dr. Klein; I showed him how I can wiggle the toes, which a few months ago just sat there, immobile, no matter what I did. (Still can’t quite pick up marbles with them, but that will happen soon.) I showed him how I can now reach both arms behind my back — also new in the last couple of months.   I told him how much better I feel, overall. I reported Dr. Bugbee’s remark about “keeping me out of the hands of the surgeons,” and awaited his comments.

Dr. Sanjeev Shah did not disappoint me. He said: “That’s quite a statement, coming from a surgeon! I would say, it’s obviously working for you — keep at it. And I’ll see you in six months!”

I told him I hoped to be walking without the cane at that appointment in January!

So three out of my three regular MDs have unequivocally given me the thumbs-up I guess I was hoping for!  Cheers to Dr. Sanjeev Shah and his two colleagues, who are to be congratulated for their open-mindedness to chiropractic in the face of the evidence:  ME!

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Friday, July 11th –  Yesterday I realized, rather suddenly, that my mermaid antics while struggling onto the segmented chiropractic table had changed. And rather significantly, too. Maybe you remember that back in May, there was a whole series of weird movements I had to go through to get myself face-down on that table… falling onto the table while the bottom leg-segment was slanted down, then dragging myself forward like a mermaid trying to get ashore, then having Emily raise the bottom of the table so it sort of slid me down the chute onto the table. There was much hilarity and Mermaid Mockery every time I attempted to climb aboard, so to speak.

But yesterday, there I was: kneeling (unbelievably!) on the heavily-cushioned table, then pulling myself into a prone position in a matter of seconds, not minutes. It had all happened gradually, without my even realizing anything had changed. Those artificial knees haven’t been able to bend farther than 90 degrees since 1998, when I got the second one! And I certainly have never been able to kneel on them.

How does all this change in my body take place, so subtly and gradually, day by day, without a signal of some kind? I don’t understand it. I can look back a week and not see much happening; but if I look back a month, or two months, I find extraordinary differences have become part of me, almost imperceptibly. All I can say is — WOW! and then, THANK YOU, DR. KLEIN!

So I guess that’s the end of the Mermaid.  I will rather miss her. But there will certainly be no dearth of laughter and affectionate mockery at Seaside Chiropractic, mermaid or no. Now it’s the blind-as-a-bat syndrome that has Dr. K, Emily, and Roseanna whooping at my expense. Here’s the story of that.

There’s a long-time patient at Seaside by the name of Dan, who paints incredibly beautiful small oil landscapes of La Jolla areas and puts them up in the office. I love Dan’s paintings: someday I want to buy one to put in our house, in some special little corner. They tend to have a lot of palm trees in them, and he does seascapes really well — you can almost hear and smell the waves splashing as they crest. As I say, I love Dan’s work.

So yesterday, I knew there was an electrician there at Seaside Chiropractic, who was puttering around the fuse box and talking to DK on and off; but I didn’t really pay much attention. I had most of my adjustment, with the accompanying snaps, creaks, and groans as usual. Then I sat up so Dr. K could use the robot (CAM) on my lower spine. We’re still hoping that one particularly intransigent vertebra will decide to move for us… it’s the only one that’s still sticking way out of place on the diagram that shows up on the laptop screen… and I’m up to having 30 pounds of pressure from the robot now.

And while I was sitting there, I happened to glance at the back wall of the room. There was a new painting by Dan — quite a departure for him, I thought, since it appeared to be an interior, with a couple of tall arches, and a big queen palm in the center. Then I remembered that UCSD Thornton Hospital (laughingly called Hotel Thornton by those who’ve been there, because it is so opulent and fancy) has a double row of mummified, or otherwise freeze-dried, queen palms down its marble-floored entrance area. Of course, I thought. Dan’s painted one of those palms at Thornton, and the arches that frame it just so… I’ll have to look at it more carefully after I’m through getting jackhammered by CAM.

So I made some offhand comment about how nice the new painting was, and how I hadn’t realized that Dan was getting into interior views.  I was more than surprised when David Klein burst into loud laughter, and said, “Let me get your glasses for you from your purse… now, take another look.”

Oh… my…god! It was the FUSE BOX, with the door open, and all the fuses nicely displayed at the top of a vertical fuse-holder-thing. Yes, it looked rather like double arches with a palm tree, but not much, not with my eyes able to see fifteen feet now. Oh, for goodness’ sake! I was more than embarrassed. Dr. Klein was still wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, and telling me how he could hardly wait to tell Emily and Roseanna. “You’ll be hearing about this for months, I can promise you,” he assured me.

Yeah, I bet I will.

And I suppose he will tell Dan, too.

Oh well… just another inevitable feature of the famed Golden Years, I suppose: bat-blindness. I can still see that beautiful painting in my mind’s eye… the arches, with perfect perspective leading into the distance, to something I couldn’t quite make out… and the queen palm tree in the middle, with all its wonderful foliage. Maybe Dan will take a look at the Thornton Hospital entrance pavilion one of these days, and the painting I saw will be born…

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Friday, June 27th – Last week I had my fourth re-exam, the usual go-round of DK asking me to do certain movements, then telling Emily whether to write Normal or Restricted next to whatever it was on the report. Cheng Cheng, who does the graphing and other clever techy stuff, was away in New York all week. So I had to wait till a couple of days ago to get that graph I was so eagerly awaiting.

Maybe you remember that last time I was warned by Dr. Klein that “most of the easy stuff has been taken care of; now we’ll be working on what’s harder to get at, and you may not make such sharp progress from here on in. Your graph may level out in the next couple of months.” Not if I have anything to do with it , said I silently to myself. No leveling off allowed: only upward progress, even if not so quickly. I won’t have anything else.

And when I saw the graph, finally, just yesterday — woo-hoo! Another upward climb! I am up to 52% of the possible improvements from where I started on March 5th! If I could have jumped up and down, I would have. As it was, I just sort of wiggled vertically a little bit.

Thanks so much to David Klein for putting the graph into this blog, so you can see what I mean. I found it incredibly encouraging, especially since those ten days in Toronto without chiropractic or yoga made me feel as though I had been set back a bit. I was prepared for little, if any, improvement, I suppose. But maybe not, because I keep telling myself the story of how I am able to do this, and this, and the other thing, that I haven’t been able to manage for years. I keep telling myself the story of how I am just a tiny bit away from normal…

Actually, Dr Klein said my spine looks “almost normal” now, so I guess my body is listening to me telling myself that story.

When I got on the table, there were lots of good snaps and crackles all the way down; and when he “cracked my neck,” as the expression goes — WOW! Apparently the very top cervical vertebra, which had not moved at all in four months, was ready to dance with glee at my chart results. With my head turned to the right — SNAP! And with my head turned to the left — CRACK! Dr. Klein and I said at the same moment, “Wow! Did you hear that?”

I am in a mighty good mood, moving on toward Independence Day, even if I find myself sitting in front of my computer way too many hours a day. My beloved spouse is alive and kicking, I am getting towards Normal, my 28-year-old cat Amy has neither diabetes nor thyroid disease nor kidney disease, my 9-year-old cat Chloe is The Cat Who Walks By Herself, it has been a beautiful day… what more could I ask!

Thanks for reading — Betsy

And P.S. — I would so love it if you would leave a comment!

Friday, June 20th — On Monday I had my 18-month checkup after my last hip revision. Once again, I was expecting it to be difficult to tell one of my physicians — this time, my wonderful orthopedic surgeon, Dr. William Bugbee, whom I’ve known for nearly 12 years — that I’ve been going to Seaside Chiropractic since early March. And once again I was blown right out of the ball park.

After he told me that the x-rays looked great, and the hips were doing just what they should be, I told him the whole story. About halfway through, he sat down opposite me, took my hands, and just listened. When I finished, he said, “I am really, really happy that you’ve found something that works for you. Anything that keeps you out of the hands of the surgeons has got to be good. You’ve had more surgery than anybody should have to have, and if you can prevent the need to have more, that’s fantastic.”

I could hardly believe it. This is a very unusual surgeon anyhow: not only is Dr. William Bugbee cutting-edge (no pun intended) in research, but he’s extremely well-respected as an orthopedic surgeon. Also, he is an incredibly kind and caring person, not an ordinary trait among his cut-and-run colleagues, I’m told. It was that second line that blew my mind. I did tell him I realized he wouldn’t be doing the shoulders and the foot anyway; Dr. William Bugbee is the knee-and-hip guy at Scripps Clinic, and there’s a shoulder guy and a foot guy with whom I would have to be dealing if I went ahead with the further joint replacements and the foot fusion.

I guess I should have realized that this was exactly what he would do. What an amazing person he is, and how fortunate I am to have had him to do the surgeries that were needed to allow me to live more or less pain-free. (If I had begun chiropractic years ago, it might have been another story; but given the story that I got, I am so glad it was Dr. William Bugbee who was holding the knife.)

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Sunday, June 7th — Well, I suppose everyone but me already knew this. But I still respect my Alma Mater enough to think that most of the professors and researchers at Harvard can be trusted to keep their hands clean as far as their work is concerned. Okay, okay, so a person of my advanced age ought not to be so naive, I can hear you all saying.

Here’s the thing: Three world-famous and well-respected Harvard child psychiatrists, who have been forerunners in popularizing the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs in children with bipolar disease, have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, so to speak. They failed to report or disclose large amounts of outside income from pharmaceutical companies and other entities that would constitute a conflict of interest, if their research were to remain objective and free of any hint of influence. These individuals were among the best-known researchers to be working on the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in young people — and such diagnosis and treatment has soared in the past few years.  Billions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations were involved.

You can read the article if this interests you at all. It’s from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/us/08conflict.html?ex=1213502400&en=23737184f344c4ca&ei=5070&emc=eta1. So, does this scandal mean that their grants for future study are down the drain? Probably. Could it mean that a good percentage of the kids who have been on these extremely powerful drugs for years might not have needed them? Maybe. I am really saddened by this, and annoyed at myself for still thinking that just because researchers are supposedly working on behalf of children, they aren’t also taking kickbacks from Pharma.

The Ivory Tower of Academia isn’t, I guess, quite so far away from the nastiness of the everyday down-in-the-dirt world as it was in my day. Or maybe it wasn’t then, either, and I was just too gullible and trusting to know it. (That’s my beloved spouse’s view: “The trouble with you is, you like everybody!“  Oh, wow, that’s really a dreadful fault, I’ll have to work on that!)

I wonder how many of those kids with bipolar disorder might have been helped in some way by chiropractic, instead of by drugs that will knock your socks off and turn you into a sort of robot? Guess we’ll never know.

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Sunday, June 8th – Sometimes I get so involved with my own life, and — especially where this blog is concerned — with my own personal experiences of chiropractic, that I completely forget there’s a whole world of opinions, pro and con, floating around in the air out there.

I belong to an e-mail listserve of freelance medical writers who are members of the American Medical Writers Assocation (AMWA). Mostly I’m a “lurker”: I just read what everyone else is saying about whatever. Once in a great while I stick in my two cents’ worth; but since I am doing very little medical writing right now, I don’t think what I have to say is terribly pertinent. However, imagine my surprise, and interest, a couple of days ago to discover that a thread was forming on Alternative Medicine. It all started with someone posting a link to an article called “Word Use and Semantics in Alternative Medicine: A Survey of Editors of Medical and Related Journals.” (The article is available on Medscape, in case you happen to be into semantics: here’s the link — http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/572553?src=mp&spon=17&uac=117226CY.)

I was amazed, as the responses started coming in thick and fast, that a lot of the comments had to do with chiropractic. They were not all positive. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will remember that I originally carried around my MD father’s prejudice against chiropractic as “a bunch of hooey.” I was startled to discover that some folks still feel that way. Hey, isn’t this the 21st century? Aren’t we all supposed to be open-minded and interested in discovering new knowledge in many fields? Isn’t the Internet supposed to be educating all of us in ways we never even imagined earlier?

Some of the more moderate comments of my medical-writer colleagues leaned toward the view that chiropractic doesn’t really work at all, and those who think they benefit from chiropractic adjustments are experiencing the “placebo effect.” (By the way, acupuncture came in for the same sort of criticism, for what it’s worth.) I was even moved to hop in and briefly tell my tale of conversion and success with chiropractic, heaven help me! Then the chiropractors and former chiropractors started popping out of the woodwork, standing up for what they do and their profession in general. It got very interesting, for me, at least.

It actually got rather hot. The anti-faction was throwing out accusations of all the dreadful conditions that could be caused by chiropractic adjustments. Finally, one guy, who is Senior Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Palmer College of Chiropractic, offered a number of recent references showing that studies indicate there is NO such connection, any more than there is with ordinary primary care allopathic medicine. I followed up on those, and found the abstracts pretty reasonable.

For example: from the abstract of an article in the February 15, 2008 issue of SPINE, by J. David Cassidy et al., titled “Risk of Vertebrobasilar Stroke and Chiropractic Care: Results of a Population-Based Case-Control and Case-Crossover Study” — just a few lines:

“Study Design. Population-based, case-control and case-crossover study.

“Objective. To investigate associations between chiropractic visits and vertebrobasilar artery (VBA) stroke and to contrast this with primary care physician (PCP) visits and VBA stroke.

“We found no evidence of excess risk of VBA stroke associated (with) chiropractic care compared to primary care.”

Someone among the freelancers eventually suggested that we’d gone as far as we could with this thread, and it was beginning to turn into one of those things where nobody is convincing anybody of anything. (Like many political discussions to which I have lately been privy…) I found myself a bit offended by the viewpoint that the reason acupuncture and chiropractic have such a success rate is the BELIEF FACTOR. I take that to be another way to describe the PLACEBO EFFECT, and it really annoys me.  I, if you will recall, started out with no belief at all in chiropractic, just a willingness to take a chance and try something that sounded plausible and interesting. The results I’ve seen in three months have convinced me that it’s worth continuing, since I wasn’t getting anywhere with conventional medicine except on the road to more joint replacement surgeries.

So I just thought I’d share this with anybody who’s reading the blog. I guess the air out there isn’t as clear as I was hoping it was. Okay, I’m not out to convince anyone else; I’ll just keep on keeping on, and reporting what happens with this particular 70-year-old body.  Thanks for reading — Betsy

Thursday, June 5th — On Tuesday, June 3rd, La Jolla’s own Seaside Chiropractic office was part of a truly historic moment in world medicine. There will no doubt be a press release about this event, but I want to add my own personal woo-hoo! and hooray! and It’s about time!

For the first time ever, and as far as we know, anywhere, medical Fellows are being required to obtain training in chiropractic as a condition of earning Board Certification in Pain Management. The School of Medicine at University of California San Diego (UCSD) has appointed Dr. David Klein to work with Fellows who aspire to Board Certification in Pain Management.  Dr. Mark Wallace, who runs the Pain Management Center at UCSD, has for several years routinely referred patients to Dr. Klein for chiropractic adjustment, to ease their symptoms of pain. Often the pain these patients were experiencing has been alleviated to a remarkable degree, or even completely eliminated, after Dr. Klein adjusted them. A testimonial letter from Dr. Wallace appears, in fact, on the Seaside Chiropractic website (http://www.bodyabcs.com/UCSD/SimpleDrWallace.html). The first Fellow to receive this on-site training from Dr. Klein spent the afternoon at Seaside Chiropractic on Tuesday afternoon! Dr. Klein will be demonstrating the use of chiropractic adjustment on various patients, as well as teaching these Fellows about how chiropractic works on the body, and how it can work in harmony with allopathic medicine to alleviate chronic pain in many instances.

I am absolutely thrilled about this development. I attended Dr. Wallace’s Pain Management Center for a time in the summer of 2007. He and his staff were very helpful to me in reducing the pain associated with discontinuing the large doses of opioids I had been taking for months, by prescription, to get me through three revisions of two hip replacements in a year. However, once I was off the Fentanyl, the “Pain Clinic” couldn’t offer me anything but more drugs to control my daily level of pain due to two pretty-much-disintegrated shoulders that were going to be replaced once I was able to walk without a cane. I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t get a recommendation to Dr. Klein at that point; maybe Dr. Wallace thought I was too old, or too far gone, to be a good candidate for chiropractic adjustment. I guess I’ll never know the answer. But I am delighted that his Fellows will now have some knowledge of what chiropractic can do to help people like me, and other sorts of folks who don’t want to be on huge doses of painkillers.

So three cheers for David Klein, his wonderful staff, and Seaside Chiropractic of La Jolla! I feel honored to have a connection with them all.

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Tuesday, June 3rd — The long weekend in Toronto was fantastic! The birthday party was so much fun! My daughter-in-law had made me a scrapbook, with letters from loads of friends and family, and my sister had made an album titled, “Time Flies When You’re Having Fun!” containing pictures from times throughout my life and before, beginning with photos of my grandparents and parents in their youth, and ending with my wedding photo from January 1996. I looked around at the tables full of people I loved, and thought how incredibly fortunate I was to have THIS family, and THESE friends, and others who weren’t able to make the trip to Toronto. I am really blessed.

I should have realized, though, that every time you think you’ve got it made, every time you’re riding the crest, Life is going to come up behind you and kick you in the butt, just to remind you that You’re Not The Boss!  The butt-kick I received went like this.  We were supposed to fly home late Tuesday afternoon. Monday noon, while we were eating onion soup in Casey’s Grill and planning to see the new Narnia movie with the grandkids after school, Life snuck in and delivered the kick.

Robert was pontificating about something or other — I think it was about homeless people — and all of a sudden he grabbed the table with both hands, stopped in the middle of a word with his mouth open, and froze for about four seconds. Then he shook himself like a dog just out of the swimming pool, and announced, “I just converted.”  I thought that was pretty sudden for a religious experience, and sure enough, what he meant was not that he had Seen the Light.  Apparently, people who experience atrial fibrillation (wildly erratic heart rhythms) often reach a point where the heartbeat slows so much that they feel it has actually stopped beating. Then suddenly it kicks in again, and the rhythm is normal for a while. They refer to this as “conversion,” or — in Canada — “reversion.”  And that’s what had happened to my beloved spouse.

To make a long story short, he was admitted to an Emergency ward after having an EKG that was quite abnormal. He spent 34 hours in Emergency, then was taken to the cardiac intensive care unit for another couple of days. His heart rate was way low, and there was some talk of putting in a pacemaker immediately. That was replaced by readjusting his medications, and by Thursday afternoon he was stable enough for us to fly back to San Diego on Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, Monday, he had made an appointment with Dr. Klein. We both went along to Seaside Chiropractic, me for my usual fairly short adjustment, and him for (I hoped) his first actual adjustment by DK. After that, we were to visit his cardiologist and see what he wanted to do about the pacemaker idea. However, there were lots of people in the office, and DK was really busy; so the time went by, and went by, and my beloved spouse got edgier and edgier. I had my brief adjustment while Robert was meeting with Roseanna and learning what would be happening. We waited some more in the waiting room. All of a sudden Robert stood up and announced that he was leaving. And out he went. What I didn’t realize was that he was in pain again, having more of that arrhythmia that was so troublesome, and becoming more and more anxious as it went on. I was pretty embarrassed, and very annoyed that he would storm out without even seeing DK.  BUT… the plot thickens…

Forty minutes later, there he is, on the table in the cardiologist’s office, and the nurse is attaching electrodes for an EKG, when all of a sudden he goes into atrial fibrillation again.  The EKG needle is jumping all over the place, and the nurse is saying, “Hey! What the heck is going on here?”  She calls the doctor, who comes in and takes a look, and tells us, “Well, we’re going to have to squeeze you in for a pacemaker tomorrow afternoon!”

Now, as I write, I’ve just spoken to the cardiologist. Thanks to a big dose of Versed, my beloved spouse is stoutly claiming that he has had no surgery, and wondering when it’s going to happen, when in actuality he is in the recovery room, and all has gone well. The pacemakers they use these days are no longer the cigarette-pack-size I remember seeing once some years back. Now they are hardly bigger than a silver dollar, and contain, as the cardiologist told us, “more technology than the Hubble space station!”

It was the visit with Dr. Klein that wasn’t quite what I expected. I had thought DK would be able to work on Robert for some time, over weeks and months, maybe loosening free the nerves that are probably caught tightly in subluxations, and that first his neck pain and then his cardiac arrhythmia would slowly show improvement. And then I could say, “See? I TOLD you chiropractic was amazingly effective!”  And we would all smile happily and eat some cookies together. End of beautiful story.

How dopey was that, to expect it to work out the way it ought to have worked? How dopey was I, at my advanced age, even to entertain the thought?

How unfortunate, that now that beautiful story is probably not going to happen.  Well, it is what it is, as my yoga teacher says.

And my beloved spouse is more comfortable than he’s been in a long time, and that can only be a good thing.

Thanks for reading — Betsy

Wednesday, May 14th — This afternoon, as I was struggling to get prone on the moving table, I was wisecracking about feeling like a mermaid thrown up on shore. I stand at the foot of the table, make sure the head/cervical section is level, the thoracic section is also level,  and the bottom section is slightly tilted downward (and the whole business has to be raised a bit so it’s about knee height for me). Then I kind of sprawl and kind of crawl onto it. I am not able to kneel directly, since my fake knees don’t bend terribly well; although the thick and cushy surface of this table makes semi-kneeling less painful than most other surfaces, I must admit. And then there I am, sprawling and creeping upward, hauling myself up — like a mermaid on shore — up toward the top. It’s an exercise in itself just to get in the right position, and I’m usually panting when I get there.

So I’m making smart-ass remarks about mermaids, and Dr. K says, “You know, we ought to have a clip-on mermaid tail that we could put on kids when they come for adjustments. They might like it.” And I say something about “How about some appropriately mermaid-like music? You could have a CD to play while the kid’s being adjusted.” And then Emily starts singing “Under the Sea”, from “The Little Mermaid.” It takes me that long to realize they are mocking me and my sprawly, crawly personal arrangement efforts.  And there I am, whining, “Hey! Don’t MOCK me!”, just as I do when my kids are making fun of me. Have I come full circle, from Toronto to La Jolla, only to find MOCKERY at the end of the line again? Hmmmmm…

Then comes the Martial Arts part. Once, I can’t remember in what context, I told Emily and Dr. K that long ago, when I was taking T’ai Chi and loving it, I learned to break boards. (Hey, maybe that’s one reason my hands are bad now…) And this coming weekend, David is going to Las Vegas to meet with Randy Couture and his son Ryan (http://xtremecouture.wordpress.com/), and couldn’t be more excited if he were planning a weekend at the North Pole with Santa all to himself and freebies at the toy workshop. Randy is the five-tine champion of world martial arts, and some kind of guru to David K, as far as I can tell. So the next wisecrack from David, after we have pretty well exhausted the Mermaid theme, is — “Roseanna, maybe I should take Betsy to Vegas with me. She could probably take Randy right out with one swing!” (demonstrations of me knocking Randy out ensue..)

And all at the same time, the table’s bottom part is moving up and down (with my legs flapping like that ol’ mermaid tail), and David is pushing on bone after bone along my back, and I am groaning involuntarily.

I thought for just a moment how odd this was… and then I relaxed and smiled into the crispy toilet-paper face mat. These folks are my friends! Only people who love you tease you like this.  This is how my three grown kids tease me — “Let’s mock Mum some more, she is so MOCKABLE!”  I have been lucky enough not only to find a chiropractor who is helping me get my body back from the Undead, so to speak, but also to find three good friends with whom I can giggle and joke, and who I know will continue to mock me whenever possible.

I love it.

Thanks for reading — Betsy