I was playing squash and had to snap far to my right to stop a ball from passing me. Something pinched in my back. I felt a crunching pain grip my spine. My shot made the wall, but I was done. I couldn't keep playing. Basically, I had a typical sports injury.
Besides avoiding the squash court and switching to the orbital strider, I wasn't having much trouble with the injury. The thing was that it didn't get better. The ache was nearly always there and got worse after sitting at my desk, driving my commute. Getting out of bed in the morning was a whole new adventure some days.
Along comes July and I get another birthday. I have learned to take ibuprofen four at a time -- every seven or eight hours. And I get a new doctor and scheduled a physical to see what science will tell me about my condition.
On our first appointment, he asks me if I have anything bothering me. Eight to twelve ibuprofen a day to manage my low back pain, I tell him. He has me laying there already, so he says, "Lift your leg against my hand. Any pain?"
"No."
We do up and down for both legs.
"Well, it's not neurological. Motrin or Advil is enough. It is most likely a muscle strain and it will get better by itself."
Well, that sounded fine, but I still had a lot of discomfort in my back. My full phyiscal exam was scheduled for two weeks or so later, so I figured I would take a more assertive line when I saw him again. Meanwhile, I figured I could find somebody who would take my whining more seriously.
After about two minutes of thinking things over, I felt like a couple weeks with nothing but ibuprofen was just not going to cut it. The next day I went looking for a chiropractor. And found one and .. over the next week and a half I got five "treatments." A treatment is three minutes of infra-red and ultrasonic heating of the area, then fifteen minutes under a heat pad. He then twists me like a pretzel and gets my spine to make snap-crackle-pop noises. To which he always reacted with a "Good!"
After the fifth treatment, he asked me if I am feeling less pain. But no, it was pretty much the same. He wanted to 'see' the disks and spine, so he sent me for an MRI.
A couple weeks go by, I was back at my MD's office for the complete physical.. At the end of the blood letting and the application of the leeches the doctor examined me. I let slip I would be going for an MRI. I asked him if he would like to see a copy of the results once they came back. He was clearly keeping his mouth shut about something when I told him I got treated by a chiropractor. He did want to read the radiologist's diagnosis.
The day after my MRI, I got a call from the MDs office inviting me to come over at my soonest convenience. The chiropractor's office called within 30 minutes too. I got to the chirpractor at 11:30 -- the MD at 4:30 pm. They both explain that the MRI showed something going on with the sacrum. It's a triangluar shaped bone between the hips near the end of the spine. It looks like it has a lesion -- a soft spot. And it looked to the radiologist as if it was thickening inward. I needed more tests: blood tests, urine tests and several regular X-Rays of those bones.
The radiologist's synopsis has a lot of new vocabulary in it. It's about as clear as mud what he was trying to say.
All I wanted to know was; What kind of treatment do I need to get rid of this back pain?
No comments:
Post a Comment