Get Yourself Checked

I've had one hell of a week. As y'all have seen, it's been really busy at the office lately. I only have time to post on this blog at the end of the week. If you've read Zelda's last post, you'll know that I've had my very first referral. As it turned out, that referral has Metastatic Disease. Simply put, he has cancer that has moved out from its source.

This referral went to his general practioner who took x-rays and wanted to send him to a surgeon to have his lumbar spine repaired due to what appeared to be a slippage of the vertebrae. As I performed another exam on him, I noticed that something wasn't quite right. I told him that I wanted to take additional x-rays. It was a DAMN good thing too. I wanted to focus just a little lower on his lower spine. That's when I saw something that stopped my heart for a brief second. Something that shouldn't show up on normal x-rays.

His previous doctor missed it because the x-rays taken were just a tiny bit too high. I saw the slippage. But, I saw the possible reason why there was a slippage. The cancer had "eaten" away the posterior aspects of the vertebrae which caused the slippage.

Gentlemen, dudes, assholes, or whatever you want to call yourselves (yes, I call some of my closest friends "assholes") please get yourself checked out every year. Ladies, please encourage your loved ones to get checked out every year. I cannot stress this enough. Telling this to one patient was hard enough. Some chiros never see this in all their years of practice. In just 4 months of my early career, I've seen 3.