How My Life Was Saved by a Neuro-Chiro Who Looks Just Like a Renaissance Cherub

I used to think chiropractors were all hippie quacks who pummeled their patients to karmicky pulps and dipped them in vats of patchouli oil.   Even when my lower back began to explode and “real” doctors proved to be utterly—and I mean utterly to the point of immorally-- useless, and my sister urged me to at least try a chiro, my suspicions of anything hippie-related made me, even while yelping and clutching my  back, stick to my fascist guns and resist.

But when my sister discovered a NEURO-chiro, a field I’d never heard of before, I caved. Lifelong insanity and the occasional (okay, just one so far, that I know of) brain tumor have made me wild for anything Neuro. And since this Neuro-Chiro did not, per his website, look (or write) the least bit like a hippie, last February I went in to see him.

The Cowboy, whose love will elude me unto my death but, oops, more to the point here, has been pretty much crippled by various industrial accidents and the odd horse standing on his foot for two days, warned me that any Chiro I saw (and he has seen millions, though none of them Neuro) would take all my money and leave me in pain.

As it turns out, he’s only half right. Thanks to the evils of health insurance, my Neuro-Chiro has indeed cleaned me out but here is the thing:  I do not even care.  

I do not even care because, and I know how vile and suspect this sounds, the man has removed the pain in my back.

And, as if that weren't enough, he's fixed my neck too, a neck which I had not even realized no longer turned, but which I can now spin around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, if I should want to, and sometimes I do.

As for the Neuro part of it all (the right side of my brain does not seem to exist, so we feed the left with eyelights and such), he tells me I’m far less hysterical than I was when we first met lo these pivotal five months ago. And though I still feel completely hysterical (the cowboy, the moving, the aging, the longing) I think my behavior might look less hysterical, which, for an hysteric, counts for a lot.

Have I fallen in love with my Neuro-Chiro? 

Well, Duh, and No Kidding.  For one thing, he looks like a Renaissance cherub.  For another, he’s acutely present, kind without being the least bit insipid, witty, funny, and screamingly smart. 

But the person with whom I’m truly in love is my Neuro-Chiro-Cherub's receptionist.

The first few times I came in I begged her to turn down the music because it was literally hurting my brain (a reaction my Neuro-Chiro says is not uncommon for people whose brains are missing right sides) and she graciously did.  Later, when she asked me if by "down" I really meant "off" and I said "but of course" she did turn it off.   I'm not kidding you. She turned it OFF.

And-- talk about being not just Personally Accommodated but Thrillingly, Almost Maternally Anticipated--from that day forward she has turned it off the second she sees my hideous car careening to a stop in their parking lot.

And does not turn it on again until she sees for herself that it's careened right back out.

Which is just one reason I'll never stop going, no matter what that mean cowboy says, and damn his eyes anyway, if you know what I mean.