*squish*
Thanks to some crazy accident on 205, I pretty much missed my chiropractor’s appointment today. But we had 10 minutes, and she looked at my MRI with me, and showed me some things I wouldn’t have seen myself.
all that craziness about the C1 slipping out and rotating and cutting off nerve supply? The swelling in the back of my neck due to extreme muscle tension? severely pitched ear canals? It was all right there. Once she showed me, it was plain as day, and kind of shocking. There was also a spot, right in my first or second thoracic, that appears to be a slight tension deformation of the vertebra, enough to pinch off yet more nerves. I have straight-neck syndrome so severely that my vertebra are almost touching in the front – two of them appear nearly fused (but they’re not).
And no sign whatsoever of an inner ear problem 
I can deal with structural issues. I can re-shape my spine (it’ll take a while, granted), reduce the swelling and get those muscles to just relax their darn selves. But inner ear issues… that wouldn’t be so easy. I’m relieved. And it was amazing for me to see, now with better trained eyes, just what I’ve done to my poor neck.
My treatment, until my rescheduled appointment, is to try to hang my head upside-down off the edge of the bed to open up the front of my neck. We’ll see if I can; it’ll likely get me spinning but I finally see an end in sight for that as well. There just wasn’t any syndrome whose symptoms aligned with mine – this appears to be all purely mechanical. I’m pretty stoked. I hope that’s the case.
I’ve got the follow-up with the ENT in two weeks, and we’ll see what she says, too. I think if I can recognize the twist in my spine, the squished nerves, the overall mess that is the right side of my neck, then she will too. I wish I could show you too, but my docs have my MRI disks! 
Oh – and it appears that the scar tissue in my brain is in the mid-brain, not the frontal lobe – so if it is actually scar tissue, it would have been caused by mental/emotional trauma, not physical. That I’ll ask my other doctor as well. It’s really hard for me to understand just exactly where it is in the grand scheme of the brain.
Who knew seeing inside yourself was so fun?
I keep getting phone messages from the first doc I went to (in September) wanting me to get blood work – how do I tell her I never want to go to her office again because she just wants to shove drugs in me? She wanted to treat this problem with painkillers. Can you imagine? Ugh. That’s why I’ve been to so many docs at this point… her approach is contrary to everything I want out of this treatment.
Well, off to tend my plants, and maybe hang upside down a little
I had to have V-man pick it up. That does not help the ego. It does help my shoulder muscle, though, which is slowly knitting itself back together. See? i can talk about knitting on my blog! Ha! I also haven’t dislocated either of my shoulders now in several weeks – I really am making progress. You have to lose to gain sometimes, I guess. Maybe when I get back in the gym and stop eating so much I’ll lose the newly-converted-to-fat-muscle before I gain new muscle, and get to be a normal size. Yeah right.
