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#126 Will It Snap?

5/1/2014

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            Imagine in your mind’s eye you are skiing very fast down a medium steep slope.  It is late winter so the temperatures are brisk but you are comfortable in your gear. The snow is a bit on the slushy side.  You can feel the snow gliding underneath your feet and the cold buffeting you, and hear the roar of the wind rushing passed your ears.  It’s like flying but not.  Suddenly and without any warning you have fallen face first straight forward landing flat on the snow, almost spread eagle, with your head downhill from your feet.  Your skis have flown off as they are supposed to during a serious fall.  It feels as if someone is dragging you face down, head first, at a high rate of speed straight downhill.  Your eyes are closed and all you can feel is the snow underneath your face and body as you, foot by foot, dig a trough in the snow with your head and body.  Then, due to the momentum of the speed you were travelling before you fell and the fact that your body is moving faster than your head, your feet and body begin to lift off the ground, and fold over your head and neck, increasingly bending your neck.  Pretty soon, your face is the only part of your body that is touching the earth as your body, legs, and feet are speeding downhill above your head.  It is an odd phenomenon that during moments like this, time seems to slow down, and you are thinking to yourself, “So this is what it feels like to break your neck.  I wonder if I’ll hear it snap.”  Your neck has reached its limit of tolerance for extension and tension in general.  If something does not happen soon, the ligaments that hold your spine together are going to rupture and the bones of the neck will slice or sever your spinal cord.  Quadriplegia, paraplegia, death.  Just as your mind has accepted your immediate future, your head literally snaps out of the trough it has dug and you land on your back with your feet downhill from your head. 

You are lying on your back facing the sky and you immediately begin damage assessment.  You are still alive.  Good.  You still feel your hands and feet.  Better.  You can move them.  Best.  Anything broken?  You gingerly get up to your feet and quickly realize that you were in full view of the riders on the chairlift.  It is a convention among skiers to cheer a spectacular fall as long as the person is not obviously hurt.  You get your requisite cheers from your audience as they are appreciative of your fall, and that it was you and not them. 

You find your skis, strap them on, and in a slightly dizzy state limp down to the ski lodge where your spouse and child are waiting for you.  This was the planned last run.  You decided you are going to downplay your fall, but the first thing they say to you as their faces convey a look of shock is, “What happened to you?”  How did they know, you wonder?  What gave it away?  Was it the look in your eyes?  “Why do you ask?”  “You have blood all over your face,” they explode.  It turns out that the ice crystals in the snow cut the skin all over your face so not only do you have a severe neck injury, but your face is going to scab over in the next few days so everyone will be staring at you asking, “What happened to you?”  So over and over you will be forced to tell the story of how you were skiing too fast for the conditions causing your right ski’s edge to catch, literally nearly killing or permanently disabling you.   

            This is certainly one of the most serious neck injuries I have encountered, right up there with the body surfing one that tore the disc away from the bone.  The reason I can tell this in such detail is that I was the skier.  It was my carelessness, my face (which explains a lot, right?), and it was my neck.  Since joints are made of cartilage and cartilage has no blood supply, there is always some permanent damage from such an injury, but I underwent a fresh course of Intensive Care to heal the injury and minimize the damage, and then I returned to my normal Wellness Care.  Even chiropractors need a good chiropractor.

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    Dr. Rick

    After writing an article per week for a year, I just kept going.  These are most of my collection.  They are written with my existing patients in mind, so some stuff may seem odd or unusual, but would make perfect sense to those who know chiropractic and who know me.  Enjoy and share!  For my personal blog visit: 

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Yolanda wrote:
     
     I used to suffer severe headaches and migraines on a daily basis, usually all day.  I managed to work in an office because I had to.  When I went home at the end of the day I would often close the shades and go to bed.  I could not plan weekend events because I simply never knew how I was going to feel tomorrow.  If there were a special event such as a birthday or wedding, I would begin to medicate myself two weeks in advance to give myself the best chance of making the event.
     Friends and fellow church-goers had been trying to get me to see Dr. Rick for some time before I finally gave in.  Looking back, I don’t know why I waited.  Within a month, I was headache free.  I couldn’t remember what it was like to not feel pain.  I could do whatever I wanted and not live in fear of the headache.  This was a miracle for me, but the story does not end here.
     An opportunity came up for us to adopt a newborn baby girl not long after I began chiropractic care.  This baby was particularly important to me and my husband because her mother is a relative.  Tragically, her mother was also a drug user and did drugs during her pregnancy.  If we could not adopt the baby she would have been put into the foster system since the biological mother was incapable of raising her.
     To keep a long story short, we did adopt her and she is doing fantastically.  There is no sign of any effect of the drugs on her as of yet, and with God’s help, there never will be.  We think that is because of the vast amounts of love and attention she gets from us, her real mommy and daddy.
     What does this have to do with chiropractic?  The reality is that without chiropractic, I would still be nearly an invalid with headaches.  I COULD NOT HAVE TAKEN CARE OF AN INFANT OR RAISED A YOUNG CHILD.  THEREFORE, SHE WOULD NOT HAVE ANY OF THE OPPORTUNITIES IN LIFE THAT MY HUSBAND AND I WILL BE ABLE TO PROVIDE FOR HER.  MY DAUGHTER’S LIFE IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE SOMEBODY MADE ME GO TO A CHIROPRACTOR. 
     You need to tell everyone you know what you know about chiropractic.  Who knows who’s life you will change too.
Andrew's mother, Barbara, wrote:

     Hello, My name is Andrew and I am a happy, healthy one year old.  But I wasn’t so happy or healthy when I first met Dr. Rick a few months ago.  I had been having problems with my ears for four months, I couldn’t sleep at night and I was miserable.  We’d been to the doctor lots of times but nothing was helping.  In fact, all the medicines the doctor had tried seemed to make me worse instead of better!  Both the regular doctor and the Ear-Nose and Throat doctor said that if the antibiotics didn’t work, then they’d just have to put tubes in.  Now my Mom and dad weren’t about to let them do surgery on me, especially since they had been reading and learned that tubes can cause more problems than they solve.  My mom and dad did a lot of praying.  Then my mom heard that sometimes babies who have a traumatic birth like mine have ear trouble.  You see when I was born they used a vacuum extractor and forceps to pull me out.  I guess all that yanking on my head, hurt my neck.  She also heard that chiropractic care can be the answer.  Now she was skeptical because she couldn’t imagine a chiropractor helping ear infections!?!  But at that point she was willing to try anything!!  Happily, a few weeks of adjustments and my ears were all cleared up.  In addition, I no longer had a stiff neck or shoulders and my whole personality was happier.  I have to tell all babies who have ear troubles, don’t let them give you tubes until you at least try chiropractic care first.  After all, it can’t hurt and if you’re like me, you could be perfectly well with no drugs and no surgery.  In my family, we thank God for Dr. Rick, because I feel better, my mom and dad are happier and sometimes, I even sleep through the night.