My pain in the neck saga

In March of 2017, I suffered with what was diagnosed as spinal stenosis and for clarity, I'll add the definition. "Spinal stenosis in the neck is a common source of chronic pain that is caused by a gradual narrowing of nerve pathways in the cervical (upper) spine." I awoke with a stiff neck and 4 hours later, it was blinding pain. I learned a lot about pain from this malady.

I wrote about it before so there is no sense beating my neck against a dead horse. To sum up the journey since this prognosis is easy. I took a lot of pills. Pain pills which barely took the edge off, followed by massive treatments of steroids. Then my blood pressure spiked dangerously high to the point that I was living on the edge of a stroke. This went on for months and no matter what I did or ate or drank, it stayed up around 180/110.

I went from being on blood pressure medicine to taking 13 pills a day. I finally said stop and I did. I went cold turkey for a month and opted for acupuncture, which of course is alternative medicine. I experienced instant results and after the first treatment, I could actually turn my head side to side. Have you ever tried to drive a car without turning your head to check behind or beside you? It is challenging, as you have to turn your entire body to see.

You do not feel the needles; they are that small. What a difference it made and it sure beat sitting in a waiting room with all the sick people. I went 2 times a week and with each visit, I became more flexible and was slowly moving away from the constant pain. I used Fusion Acupuncture & Holistic Healthcare off the North 610 loop.

I now wanted to try and realign my spine and through the VA, I requested a chiropractor. They sent me to San Jacinto chiropractic on Massey Tompkins which suited me just fine. It sure beat a 30 mile one way drive to the VA. While on about my 8th treatment, I came to learn that Dr. Lindberg had been tragically killed in a car accident. I was making excellent progress and was transferred to a chiropractor in La Porte named Victor Peres. I finished my allotted treatments under his skillful techniques. At this point, pain was not really the issue. It was learning to live with stenosis and what I could and couldn't do.

I am most likely never going to be neck injury free and I have some days where my neck lets me know I over did it yesterday. Most all of it is self-inflicted I might add. You and I are probably on the same page as all of us have an issue of some kind and the point of this column is not really about my particular injury, as much as it is my quest to use alternative medicine rather than taking a fistful of pills.

Bill Daley has been after me for months to try reflexology and I finally agreed to 4 treatments. Bill also does bee sting and honey therapy and I may try that next. Bill treated his wife for many years with reflexology and the stings and I think he told me over the years, he had stung her 40,000 times. He has the exact number recorded of every sting of all his many visitors.

So, after 4 treatments, I have arrived at a very favorable conclusion. Reflexology deals with the manipulation of your hands and feet through pressure and massage. Bill explained everything in detail and gave me laminated cards to keep for reference. The first treatment was 2 hours and the others were more like 1.5 hours. He doesn't like to do them until 3 full days have passed since the last one.

During the first treatment, I was very aware of every squeeze and massage point. Some hurt, some didn't, but none of it was really painful. He can feel stuff there that he knows will hurt and you simply confirm it as he draws conclusions about what he is affecting. Push here for your pituitary gland. Push there for your colon. All of it is pressure on your hands and feet.

The next evening, I looked in the mirror and I was as red as if I had suntanned. It was very noticeable. I also slept like a log and I was very thirsty. Now I lived in Missouri, the show me state and I don't do so well when someone tries to use The Force on me or some other trickery, but I truly felt better. On top of that, my bowels appeared to work better and have now for the last 3 weeks.

This past Monday I had the 4th treatment and I all but fell asleep in the massage lounger I sat in. I was no longer concerned with what exactly he was doing and it magnified my experience. I have now scheduled my bride for 4 sessions, even though she swears she doesn't need it. I want her to make that statement after 4 sessions. Most of us recognize the benefits of a real massage, so why would we have an issue with deep tissue massage of the hands and feet? Like I learned in acupuncture, the person administering the technique is sending a cry for help for the brain to release healing hormones to the area they've targeted.

Or you can simply take a pill and then another pill (to counter the side effects of the 1st pill) and then take another pill. Or you can look up Bill Daley at the corner of East Baker and Barkuloo and give it a go. After all, why live in pain and misery if there's alternatives?

The trick is to get back on

 March 21, 2017 started out like every day before it. I was on a roll. In the last year I had instructed over 125 spin classes as a substitute instructor and was covering 12 gyms. Quite often in that time period, I would awaken about 4am, check my email and realize an instructor in Houston, or the Galleria had called in sick for the 5:30am class. I would log into the gym web site and "claim" the class and when 5:30am arrived, I would be 35 miles away and crank out a class. Sometimes I would be in Pasadena a few hours later and instruct another one. Or League City, or Webster. I was bullet-proof. Or so it seemed.

My sister and 3 brothers and I are all in our 60's and we share the common complaint of seniors, that stuff stops working like it did when we were younger. I appeared to be blessed in that I could hike down into the Grand Canyon and back out with nothing more than a bit of discomfort to my flat-lander's legs the next day. If I desired to ride a bike 30 miles, no big deal and the next day, it was business as usual. I got the message that I was doing everything right physically.

I was filling in for an instructor at the NASA gym location at 8am and drove over and instructed the class with my usual amount of vigor and enthusiasm and I really enjoy pushing a difficult, high-resistance hill-climbing class. Most spin class instructors are go-go-go with an abundance of very fast lower resistance peddling. Its called sprinting and they add a lot of upper body movements to keep people from being bored. I don't. In fact, I try to stay pure to the exercise and don't do anything on a spin bike that I wouldn't do on a road or mountain bike. To be clear, a spin bike is a stationary bicycle with a resistance knob. I like to push a class where the rider motivates themselves to get the best work-out possible. I am not a "driver". I'm a motivator.

I remember that morning I awoke with a stiff neck, like I had slept on it wrong or something, but by the time that class was over, my stiff neck went from mild discomfort to straight through the roof excruciating, eye-watering pain. I could hardly drive back to Baytown. My right arm was becoming so numb I simply laid it in my lap on the drive home. I was panicking and wondering if I was having a stroke.

To make a long story shorter here I am one year later - better, but unable to resume instructing. I'm not in pain and I can function fairly normally. What happened is called cervical spinal stenosis and what my VA doctor describes as "nasty neck" and affects the top 7 vertebra. To sum it up, the vertebra are impinging on the nerves causing the pain and numbness and headaches, bad headaches.

The Veterans Administration's treatment was massive amounts of steroids and shots and pills, lots of pills and I went 5-6 months this route with little success and lots of discomfort. My blood pressure had escalated and the VA's treatment was simply more meds until I was on a total of 13. Then I got gout. No one in my family has gout. One of my meds specifically claimed to increase the chances of getting the horrible malady. The VA's answer was yet more drugs. I again voluntarily stopped all of them except 2 blood pressure meds and sat it out cold turkey for two weeks. My next visit to the VA appeared that everything had returned to normal except my blood pressure which to this day has stayed dangerously high.

My big break - no pun intended - came when I asked for alternative treatment and began a twice a week acupuncture treatment at Fusion Acupuncture & Holistic Healthcare in Houston. I got immediate relief after the first visit and it was at this point that I began to scrutinize my medicine. I evolved into chiropractic and after 3 months of this, I am fairly back to normal physically.

I have 5 more appointments at the VA between now and June so they can aggressively solve this BP problem and until they do, I cannot push myself at the gym or instruct the class that I love. So, I've fallen off the horse and this horse requires a lot more than simply sitting. It took me over 2 years of constant riding to get in shape to instruct a class on the level members deserve. Can I get back on? I guess its up to me, but hasn't it always been?

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