Columns
My achin’ back
I pulled into the parking lot, edged into a space by the side of the building, and carefully negotiated my exit from the car. My face was scrunched from the unbearable pain as I shuffled into my chiropractor’s office.
I cautiously lowered myself into a chair in the waiting area. Now I had the dubious pleasure of perusing several charts of the skeletal system, each one a reminder of all the ways that any one of the 206 bones or 639 muscles in your body can turn on you and ruin a perfectly good weekend.
I tried to make conversation with a few other people who apparently were in great pain.
“So, how did you hurt your back?” I asked one of the patients, an elderly gentleman with thinning gray hair in a pale blue cardigan.
“I’m a firefighter and I rescued a 300-pound man from a burning building. What happened to you?”
“I sneezed.”
This caused quite a stir in the waiting room. The weightlifter was amused; so was the salt delivery guy. The two women from Fay and Fran’s Piano Moving Company thought it was just a hoot.
Everyone thought I was kidding. I wasn’t. An explosive sneeze had done something wicked to my lower back and sent me crashing to the kitchen floor the day before.
The receptionist told me it was my turn to see the doctor. He asked, “So what happened to your back, Dick? I heard you just sneezed. Look, I have some very needy patients out in that waiting room.”
“Well, you just heard part of the story, Doc. Yes, I sneezed, but it wasn’t just a normal sneeze. It was a sneeze of gargantuan proportions. Saving a guy from a burning building, delivering pianos, hoisting bags of salt — these are not the kind of stories you can slap together for an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. I’m the case history every chiropractor wants hobbling into his office.”
He took an x-ray of my back, which he said was in pretty good shape considering I had 61,000 miles on my body, apparently a reference to my age. Coincidentally, my car also has 61,000 miles on it. To be fair, it’s been in for service a lot more than I have. But no one is offering me an extended warranty.
Just to lighten things up, the chiropractor asked if I had heard any good jokes lately.
“Sure, here’s a favorite, Doc. How many chiropractors does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but it will take him seven visits to do it.”
He didn’t think that was at all funny, so I was concerned when he slapped pads on my back to send electric current though my body. It scared the willies out of me when I peeked over my shoulder. I’d swear there were two witnesses and a priest watching the procedure from the other room.
After being jolted, I was adjusted, which meant the doctor folded me up in a little ball and smashed all 280 pounds of himself into my side. It actually felt pretty good. And I know he thought this was a beneficial procedure because then he jumped on the adjacent table and said, “Okay, now it’s my turn.”
When I left his office, I did feel better. As I got into my car, I saw a frail old woman limping into the clinic. “This is my first time here,” she declared. “Does the treatment work?”
I tried to be honest. “It’s nothing to sneeze at.”
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