had my first adjustment from the chiropractor this evening. Not bad at all. He started by checking for tenderness in my muscles and then checking the way my body hung. After his initial examination he determined that I was suffering from a couple of problems which are pretty standard to auto wreck victims.
The first was basically my pelvis being slightly disjointed. My bottom vertebrae were contorted, and the hips weren’t quite socketed right. This caused one of my legs to not quite hang as low as it should.
Second I had similar problem with several vertebrae in my back and neck being twisted wrong and not sitting right. He popped these back in. Once he did this, it became a lot easier to move my neck again. I don’t quite have full mobility, but it a whole lot better… I can actually look to my right without turning my whole body (that had frozen up on Sunday).
The third and most serious problem (and the one that apparently is causing all of this to recur) is that the muscles in my back had become so swollen that they were twisting and contorting my my spine. My spine was crushing the nerves in my spinal cord in bad ways, not only causing pain, but also causing the muscles those nerves were connected to tense up more, thus twisting my spine more, thus crushing the nerves more, etc… this is apparently why I was getting worse and not better. Anyway, they hooked me up to some machine that sends electric shocks to my back and loosens up the muscles… They also told me to keep them iced to try and reverse the swelling. This won’t totally work, and I need to go back on wednesday (by which time my spine will probably have retwisted itself but hopefully not as bad).
I have appointments for wed and thur. In theory, after a few weeks of doing this, the muscles will have healed and won’t be twisting me out of shape anymore… my goal is to be ok by mid August for another rafting trip.
Good luck with all of this 🙁
When I went to my chiropractor, every session started with the electro. I loved it and after a few visits found it was the best, most relaxing part of the visit.
He’s right about the ice, too. There are these great squishy ice packets that you can keep in the freezer when you’re not using them–I used to just put one down on the bed and lie on it while reading and it was a big help.