This is a normal neck X-ray:
This is the X-ray of my neck that the chiropractor showed me today:
I look like I’m going full retard. This might explain why I always have a headache and my shoulders are always sore.
I went to the chiropractor because my trainer at Crossfit says my right shoulder is much lower than my left shoulder. It’s not so much that he says it as that he contorts his body to mimic my beastly shoulder inequality and wanders around the gym like that and then tells the rest of the gym to look at how uneven my shoulders are and then they all gasp and nod in agreement until I am so sad and scared I agree to go get X-rays.
(I have been surprised to learn that a trainer who behaves with this level of disregard to my emotional well-being is capable of making me push myself far harder in the gym than anyone who’s ever been nice to me. And this, in turn, is actually really, really good for my emotional well-being. But we’ll save the ‘Crossfit changed my life’ spiel for another post.)
I have, for as long as I can remember, felt like my body was uneven. I’m always squirming and contorting my spine and it never seems to quite feel right. I was hoping, actually, that these X-rays would reveal a clear problem with the curvature of my spine and then we could work toward doing something that would fix the need to constantly squirm. Here’s the X-ray of the rest of my spine:
You can see the slight unevenness in my shoulders, but there’s not the clear skeletal curvature I was hoping for. I guess that’s not really something you should hope for, but I guess I kind of hoped there would be a “Here! Here’s why your body always feels wrong. We can fix it!”
The chiropractor said it’s not that big of a deal, but we could start doing “adjustments” to see if it had any impact on how I felt. I’d never had a back adjustment before, and I spent the entirety of it giggling uncontrollably, because a) having any part of my body make a cracking sound is enormously frightening to me, and I cope with that by giggling and b) When the chiropractor bends over you to do adjustments, it is not at all unlike what a man would do when he, say, was about to have sex with you. I couldn’t stop laughing. The adjustment also didn’t make much of a difference. I’m still sitting on the couch, squirming as I write this, because my freakin’ spine is uneven.
