Part One
They say everything happens for a reason. You couldn’t have convinced me of that in 2020 for reasons that don’t need mentioning. But especially not in November of 2020. My husband, Ross, was involved in a freak accident at work. He worked in residential construction at the time. When walking around at a project site, a sheet of plywood was thrown from 10 feet above, hitting him right on top of the head. It knocked him out for a bit before he went to the hospital for staples in his head. They sent him home and said wait for the concussion to set in.
Well, the concussion really did set in. It was more like a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury). What followed was over 8 months of the worst concussion symptoms for him that you can imagine. He referred to riding in the car to his bi-weekly physical therapy appointments as “a roller coaster ride” due to the nausea. After more physical therapy sessions, checkup appointments, prescriptions, and days spent laying in a dark room than we could count, they essentially told him that his memory and quality of life just was going to suffer. They said the piercing migraines keeping him up all night while screaming in pain were now just a fact of life for him.
This was gut wrenching, essentially a life sentence. I felt the weight of this just as I had when I was diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease.
The last appointment until he was “cleared” was with a neurologist. At the time we had seen several other neurologists, all saying they were unable to help him. We paid this doctor $200 (that was just the co-pay) for her to tell him that he would need to make lists to remember things and she could prescribe him additional migraine medication. She never even looked at him or assessed him in any way. She simply clicked around and typed on the computer for the 5 whole minutes that she was in the room. I wasn’t even the one suffering from debilitating symptoms and I was frustrated.
Maybe a month later (9 months post-concussion), a friend’s mom invited us to a free community dinner at a chiropractor’s office. To be honest I thought this was pretty weird. A chiropractor asking us to dinner? What kind of doctor takes you out to dinner?
I think we went mainly to be nice and partially because it was a free meal. I also think we went because we had a small feeling of hope left that this may help the concussion symptoms. The truth was, at this point we were desperate for anything.
As soon as the Doctor started speaking, I knew what she was telling us was true. It’s hard to put into words, but she spoke with such conviction and certainty. I needed to know more. At the time I didn’t want to believe it, but after the many appointments I had been to related to my own health, and now my husband’s, I had never heard a doctor speak this way. She was certain she could help us, and she wanted to help us heal. Heal, not just get by with a slew of prescriptions and a grim diagnosis.
We heard her. The principle is simple. The spinal cord is what powers our entire body. If it’s out of alignment (i.e., subluxated), it can’t communicate properly and tell every cell in our body how to function. Each part of our spinal cord tells different body parts how to work and controls different processes. When subluxated, our nerve supply can be shut down, and if subluxated long enough, dis-ease begins to set in. But when adjusted regularly by a chiropractor, we can realign the spine, and we can turn that nerve supply back on. Our bodies can heal when given the right tools.
In some weird way, this all made sense to me. I didn’t need to question anything, but I was eager to know more. Something in me knew this would help not only my husband, but also me. She said she would start the process by taking X-rays of our spines and develop a customized treatment plan for each of us based on the scans. I couldn’t wait to get back into her office and see our X-rays.
We scheduled an appointment to see her a week later and hit the ground running.
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