Pain In The Neck, Part 2

So I went back to the Naturopath and he worked on my neck again. This time he tells me he doesn't like the way my back looks and would really like an X-ray of it. Insurance won't pay for it if he prescribes it, so I make an appointment to see my regular doctor, who I haven't seen for several years. He is a DO (Doctor of Osteopathy) and runs a spine care clinic, so this might be a better bet. I don't actually get to see him, but I get to see one of his nurse practitioners. All they have to hear is that I am having trouble with my neck and they run me through a whole gamut of tests including half a dozen X-rays.

The X-ray machine is really noisy, it sounds like there are some ball bearings that are getting ready to fail. These things make me nervous. How do you know if they are emitting X-rays or not? You have to trust the technician and the machine. I would like it better if there was a little red light that came on when the high voltage was on, or something to tell you what's going on. Sitting there in front of this machine with bearings grinding away is just a little disconcerting. Maybe if the bearings were quieter it wouldn't bother me as much. I suppose it's the theatrics I've been conditioned to. In the movies, bad things are generally preceded by bad noises. Here I am all alone in a room with a possibly dangerous machine making bad noises. This sounds like the scene from a Science-Fiction/Horror movie. I can see the fake newspaper headlines now: "Man accidentally exposed to massive X-rays turns into drooling monster".

Examiner puts protractor/level on my head and has me tilt my head this way and that to measure my "range of motion". Not very good. Okay, that much I agree with. Nurse-Practitioner Karen comes in and crunches my back a couple of times, or least tries to. It's pretty tight. She shows me the X-rays. Spine looks good, neck vertebrae not so good. Prescribes six weeks of physical therapy.

So I was trying to figure out what I could have done to cause this problem, and I finally remembered the console we bought last Christmas to use as a TV stand for the brand new monster TV. It appears to be made out of wood, and looking at it you wouldn't think that it weighs more than 50 or 75 pounds. It doesn't, it weighs a whole heck of lot more. It was made in China and the Chinese must have been using furniture to get rid of their surplus depleted uranium because this little old console weighs over 200 pounds.

So I think back to last Christmas and remember loading and unloading this beast and thinking I must have pulled a muscle or something that is just now showing up. Talking to the physical therapist this morning, maybe not. More like 20 years of bad posture sitting in front of a computer has finally caught up with me. This bites big time. Just when I was really getting into using my computer for something I wanted to do, instead of just for work. Hopefully you can still teach an old dog new tricks and I will somehow learn to sit up straight. We shall see.

Physical therapist told me a couple other things I did not like hearing. Evidently I cannot spread my fingers very far, not good hands for a piano player. Well, I don't play the piano, but this may explain my unusual typing technique. My legs are little short for my torso. I always thought I was of average proportions. Well, my legs are average length (I wear trousers with a 32 inch inseam), but I am slightly above normal height at a fraction of an inch short of six feet. I don't care what he says, I am not a drooling/misshapen monster, everyone else is. I walk with my right foot splayed out about 30, maybe 45 degrees. He predicted that my shoes would wear unevenly, but this is not the case. Maybe my walk has been influenced by my stiff neck (everything is connected to everything else), so maybe my walk is normally fine.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.