Social Question
Have you ever had to deal with a doctor, or someone in the medical profession, who seemed short on common sense?
I have, on more than one occasion, but the most recent involved my daughter, who has a degenerative spine disease. For the last 10 months she has been in extreme pain. She had surgery in January, which helped some but not a lot.
She had to quit working and is now on disability. Needless to say she’s learned a lot about the disease, and as everything progressed she kept trying to tell the doctor that there was something else contributing the constant pain. She kept saying there was something else. They wouldn’t listen.
She asked if she should see a chiropractor, they said, “Absolutely not.”
She can barely walk, and when she does it’s a hobble, like an old woman, hanging on to furniture as she tries to move through the house. She’s 37. Her 1 year wedding anniversary just passed.
There have been whole days when she couldn’t get out of bed, because of the pain. She had terrible, constant shooting pains up and down her right leg.
They’ve had her on powerful prescription meds for almost a year, which she hates. She tries to avoid taking them, for fear of getting addicted, but sometimes she just can’t fight her way through.
It’s been a heartbreaking, horrible ordeal. She can’t go on walks, she can’t camp, she can’t do yard work, or work in her beloved garden. She can barely tolerate a car ride, and collapses in pain and exhaustion afterward.
This last 10 months has just been a nightmare. She’s never said it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s contemplated suicide.
She called me yesterday and said, “I’ve been holding off on telling you something till I was sure but….well, last Thursday I fell…..”
I almost threw up.
She was sitting in a “zero gravity” chair, and a spider crawled up on the arm rest. She reacted by jumping up in terror (the big sissy!) and when she did, her leg went out and she crashed down on her right hip.
There was a tremendous popping of her hip and her back, all up and down. She lay there, frozen in terror, thinking she was a paraplegic now…..then, she said, “Mom. I got up. I just….got UP!! I just STOOD UP!!! I didn’t have to hold on to anything to pull my self up! I just STOOD UP!! All by myself!!”
So fuck the specialists, she made an appointment with a chiropractor, for yesterday.
He took x-rays of her back and said her hip, and back, just below the surgery incision, had to have been an inch out before she fell, and they were still about a1/2 an inch out. And this had been going on for years. He said something about there being a groove where the bones kept sliding back and forth.
He realigned her back and hip.
She said the release of pain, for the first time in so many months, was immediate! It almost made her sick to her stomach.
She said she feels like she’s floating!
When telling me this, she was alternating between euphoric laughter, and hysterical anger and crying about everything she’d been going through for so long…for NO REASON.
She can walk like a normal person.
I’m just left breathless, torn between utter, shocked, magical relief and unbelievable anger.
Sorry this is so long…long as it is, it doesn’t begin to cover the hell she’s been through these last months.
How could this happen? I said, “Surely the specialists have been taking X-rays! How could they miss it?”
She said, “They didn’t miss it. They ignored it.”
Have you ever had to deal with anything like this?
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