When I had first pulled into the transmission place in Lexington, I will confess that I felt a thrill of Providential Comfort, the sense we have from time to time that our decisions are being guided by a benevolent Power, and may be settled into with confidence. Whether this is truly an inkling of divine planning or just a lazy creature’s joy in useful coincidences I will not venture to say. But it is a form of human experience. Just a few doors down from the the transmission place was a chiropractor, and it seemed to me that everything had been arranged beforehand.
For a week I had had serious back trouble. It started the last week at the sugar shack, where I had been moving some barrels of syrup. I hadn’t felt anything at the time, but the next day – my last day of work – my back was quite sore. And what was worse, I had done something bad to my nervous system: my entire right leg was tingly and numb, as if I had slept on it wrong, and I had strange sharp pains along its length as well. But massaging the numb parts made no difference. I had experienced this before with my arms, so I felt that I knew what this was. It wasn’t a circulatory problem: it was a pinched nerve in my back. The nerve was no longer sending good data to the brain.
In every other instance, a few days of proper exercise had fixed the problem. Normal motion restored normal position to the vertebrae, the odd numbness went away, and occasionally some muscle soreness lingered but I could tell I was fine.
But this had not happened in this instance. Perhaps it was that I was getting older, and my back just wasn’t healing itself as quickly. I figured this was something you just had to suffer through – after all, professional athletes my age (38) often sat out baseball or basketball games for “back spasms,” which seemed to indicate that this was something that physical fitness and modern medicine could not entirely prevent. Stretching and normal activity would be restorative, but I had to wait.
But really things had only gotten worse. My mother shot me all kinds of accusing looks when I came through New York City – “You can go to my doctor he’s very good, I’ll pay don’t worry,” or “I know a sports massage therapist I can call, if you want me to” – but I stuck by patience and gentle stretching as the cure. Then I set off on the long drive; and this seemed to exacerbate the problem. I won’t say that I couldn’t walk – that would be a bit of an exaggeration – but I couldn’t change my spine’s position without real wincing. Going from a sitting to a standing position – or dismounting off a bike – would send a little jolt of pain through my body strong enough to briefly dissolve the muscle tension in my body. At least once getting off my bike I thought I would pass out.
So I had never been to a chiropractor, but I felt maybe it was time. Everyone had always told me I would have back trouble – I was tall, not terribly muscular, and I did all kinds of physical labor and gardening. My mother had had back trouble as well. So perhaps I should get used to chiropractic care.
So to the chiropractor I went. I explained the situation and he said he could take me in an hour. I checked on the truck – made it clear I’d love to have it by the afternoon if possible – and then came back and sat in the doctor’s waiting room for awhile. I was reading John Muir’s A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf – a beautiful early birthday present – and reading its descriptions of the grand oak forests of Kentucky made me reach for a book on the waiting-room table, The Spirit of Appalachian Kentucky, by Dean Hill. I enjoyed the book so much – it was a photography book – that I think I had looked at every page, and looked with desire, filling up all the time until the chiropractor came out.
“Sorry to make you wait,” he said.
“No it’s really no problem. I’m grateful you could take me on such short notice. I’ve been looking through this Spirit of Appalachian Kentucky book it’s great.”
“Oh that thing… yeah my friend Dean prints those books, I guess he sells them online I don’t know.”
I was charmed by this – things seemed smaller here. The chiropractor knew the author of the books in his waiting room. He knew the transmission guys as well, and had good things to say about them. He seemed to be of Asian descent and did not have a strong accent, but he seemed at home. And in general he radiated pleasantness. I liked just being in the same room with him.
He brought me in and I laid down on his table. He moved my body around in various ways, grunting thoughtfully to himself as he went. At one point he lifted up my leg and told me to try to keep it upright while he tried to push it down. I could resist with my right leg but not my left. He then did something I found highly unusual, which I cannot explain in any above-the-board way: he placed two fingers above my left ear, leaving them there for about a minute. He then lifted my left leg and then pushed it down, telling me to resist. This time I could. He said that a core muscle going from the spine to the left leg had been “blown out,” and that likely some of the back’s misalignment had come from trying to overcompensate for this injury. He said that up above the ear was the acupuncture point for that muscle, and he had “reset” it.
It made no sense to me, but it did feel stronger after he had touched that spot. He could have been conning me – after all he was the person who provided the force trying to bring my leg down, and so he could simply have applied less pressure – but it certainly seemed real. I have no way of explaining acupuncture at all, and this was my nearest experience of it.
He then gave his diagnosis. He said my back was basically fine. It needed an adjustment, but there was no serious problem. I was getting to an age where the disks in my back were probably getting a bit dried out, and I would probably need to start thinking about caring for my back more. He recommended some stretches, and he noted that pelvic thrusts and bouncing on the spine were both very good for getting fluid into it. Pelvic thrusts especially for the lower back. It made me think, as all of us do think sometimes, I suppose, when you know you have too little, that more sex really was the answer. But he said I was generally fine and the fact that I was not overweight would be of great help in keeping good spinal health.
He then said he would do an adjustment on my back. He rolled me to my side, grabbed my leg, and pushed me around a bit, though it didn’t feel terribly effective. He then said I wouldn’t necessarily feel an immediate change – things were locked up and sore – but “within 24 to 72 hours” there should be notable improvement. He charged me only $30 and I was out the door, hobbling as ever, but I felt I had taken some kind of step toward getting my house in order.
That changed soon enough.
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