Put the jack-hammer away, doctor.

Some of you may know that my day job is to write surgical technique manuals for spine surgery. All the nerve roots to your whole body connect through a space between moving, hard bone, right? If you screw up the bone or the discs between the bones, they can cause a world of pain. Your limbs may go numb. The muscles will tense up to compensate for misalignment of the bones. Nerves will get crushed.

Apparently one of the vertebral processes in my lower cervical spine is skewed. By this, I mean that when I went to the chiropractor complaining of muscle tension in my upper back, he took and x-ray and it looked something like this:

Spine problems that aren’t caused by trauma are usually degenerative, meaning, before I’m even an old lady I could be in the kind of pain that will make implanting something like this:

using something like this:

sound appealing. So, even though my only symptom is annoying muscle tension and a wonky knob in my back, I need to take care of it now or I’m screwed (literally—a very common surgery is implantation of a pedicle screw system that looks something like this):

So I’m going to the chiropractor, getting massages and today I had doctor who specializes in physiology do an ergonomic assessment of my workspace. So far, it's apparently working.

I’ll end with this disclaimer: The truth is (and I’ve seen in a million times) for sufferers of severe back problems that can’t be resolved through physical therapy, surgery can be an amazingly good solution. It changes people’s lives for the better. Surgeons can do amazing things for people these days, and by the time I’m an old lady they’ll be able to work even bigger miracles. I don't actually have disc herniation or anything super-dramatic at this point. Still, let’s stick with the preventative measures, shall we?