Chiropractors and Cervical Cancer and I Don't Know What All

About 28 years ago, I had to go see a chiropractor because Robb Karlin dropped me on my head on a gymnasium floor. It wasn't a fight, just an innocent experiment gone awry. I still think that if we would have gotten a little more torque it would have worked.

And now, I find myself back in a chiropractor's office after all these years. No, Jodi did not drop me on my head. In fact, there's no good reason for this. Something strange happens each time you pass each decade marker, and that's what happened to me, causing me to seek out a chiropractor.

When I passed the 20-year-old marker, I finally developed shoulders. Before that, my neck just continued in a straight line all the way down to my feet. They weren't great shoulders, but I was thrilled to finally get some. I really could have used them during puberty, I can tell you that.

When I passed the 30-year-old marker, my body suddenly began to tell me that yes, in fact it does matter if you eat cheeseburgers, french fries, and other assorted crap for every single meal. Because at age 30, I began to notice a new set of shoulders growing at my waist.

Then I passed the 40-year-old marker. At that age, stuff started to hurt for no good reason at all. You don't have to do nothin! You just wake up. That's all you have to do. You wake up. You lie there motionless in bed and voila! There's pain somewhere. The one that sent me to the chiropractor was a sharp pain in one of my shoulders that felt like I had been shot at some point and the bullet was still in there. It must be God's way of punishing me for never making good use of the shoulders that he gave me when I was 20.

I'm scared to death to find out what's ahead for me at age 50, 60, 70, etc. I suppose that at age 50 my shoulders will just develop gangrene and fall off. Then at age 60 I'll grow another shoulder in my prostate. Then at age 70 I'll forget that I ever had shoulders anywhere and will just stand there in the middle of Old Country Buffet and pee.

After a 28-year absence, I've discovered that chiropractors have developed new devices of torture. My chiropractor has one bizarre tool that feels like a cross between a woodpecker and a jack hammer whacking away at what's left of my shoulder, back, and neck region. It's like something that my brothers would have invented in our shed to torment neighborhood cats.

So yesterday I'm lying face down on the iron maiden torture table and all of a sudden she says to me, "How do you feel about a few dozen needles stuck in your back?"

Exactly how many correct answers are there to that question? That's what I want to know.

Now, the needles in the back didn't hurt physically. What hurt is that I was lying there thinking, I can't believe it's come to this. I'm going to have to pay her $50 to do something that I could do myself by simply falling backwards into a rose bush. But it's amazing what you'll agree to when you're in pain. I know the Chinese are supposed to be really good at herbs and whacky medicine and checkers and all that stuff, but it just seems weird to me.

I mean, really, who was the first guy to even think of acupuncture anyway? You're squatting there in the mud with your best friend waiting for electricity to be invented and he suddenly says, "Hey! I just remembered! I turned 40 today!... Ow! What's that pain in my shoulder?!!!"

And so you say, "I don't know. I'm only 39. Hold on a second. Let me go grab a stick out of that big pile of dinosaur dung and jab it into your back. Maybe that will help."

This is why I'm so skeptical of any kind of doctor and any kind of medicine. Hell, it wasn't that long ago that doctors thought that the way to cure everything was to cut someone open and bleed them into a bowl. What makes us think that doctors today aren't still guessing? I bet radiation therapy doesn't do anything but give you a bit of a tan.

And God help you if you get cervical cancer. To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure what a cervix is anyway. I think the cervix might be the main control panel in women. I think it's where you specify a woman's resolution, enable the firewall, and determine the TCP/IP settings. Of course, I'm just guessing, but then so are all the doctors. And I figure my guess is as good as theirs.

But I'm thinking that cervical cancer has got to be the WORST kind of cancer that anyone can get. Because I've seen the commercials for that Gardosil stuff that women are supposed to take in order to avoid cervical cancer. The problem is that 95 percent of the commercial time is spent listing all of the side effects that you can get if you take Gardosil. Side effects like blood pouring out of the eyes and permanent explosive diarrhea. There are 8,500 side effects that you can get by taking Gardosil and the most appealing one on the list is death. And this is why cervical cancer has got to be the worst disease anyone can get. Because you've got to be pretty darn motivated to start taking Gardosil.

Hey, I wonder if Gardosil works on shoulder pain.