On Writing a Testimonial
I've been putting this off for months. There is no doubt that my chiropractors have helped, and continue to help, me tremendously. So why haven't I written the testimonial that I said I was going to write yet? Well, there are two reasons.
The first reason is that I keep making progress. It's not a straight path. There is no linear progression. It's somewhat more akin to riding a rollercoaster blind. You know that there are going to be ups and downs, but you don't know when. This means that in the near future, it's always the near future, that I could have a much better conclusion to my testimonial. I'll do it next week when I'm even better, I'll do it next week when I've recovered from this downturn, I'll do it next week when I'm even stronger, etc. Luckily next week has finally arrived, it only took a few months.
The second reason is that the story is quite large, decently long, and pretty complex. I don't want to write a memoir on it at this time. So, what do I include? It's an interesting problem. I was thinking about writing short and long versions, but I don't want to write the long version. I'm just going to do various short versions.
Let's begin with a blurb of some sort.
"Trust is a rare thing. You can trust the Beacoms."
That seems fairly decent.
"Who to trust is a hard decision. I can fully recommend trusting the Beacoms."
I would put that in the fairly decent category as well.
"Who can you trust with your health? I don't presume that I can make that decision for you, but I can say that I go to Beacom Chiropractic every week. I do that because I am confident in two things - their concern and their competence."
Alright, that's enough with the little blurbs for now. I'm going to do a little story version.
In December of 2015 I got sick in Africa. It was intense. I was vomiting blood and was told I was going to die. Through an odd series of circumstances I was able to make it back to Michigan. I assumed that after a few weeks of medication and rest I would be back out on another adventure, or at least better. I was wrong. It took me 6 months and 3 antibiotic treatments just to beat the bacteria. And the least treatment, which is the one that worked, was a 3-month holistic treatment not available at hospitals. Even after that I didn't recover. My symptoms are legion. An insanely intense migraine, I basically moved between the couch and my bed avoiding light and sound for a few months because I was so sensitive to those things. My joints ached. I had lost most of my strength. I went to pick up a 3 lb hammer at one point and could barely grip it. My hands would shake. One half of my face, the right side, would twitch uncontrollably. My resting heart rate was over 100 all the time. I couldn't walk across the street to get the mail and make it back without running out of breath and having to take a break and lean on a car for awhile. My weight was going up like someone blowing up a balloon. I gained 10 lbs in one week, and then 10 lbs the next week. I have a few stretch marks. I went from 170 lbs to 235 lbs in a few weeks. Everything was wrong. Luckily I have a friend that is a chiropractor, Michael Rykse. He was the one that found my spinal deformities. I have four major deformities: my C1 is partially fused to my skull (occipitalization of the atlas) and only partially formed, my C2 and C3 are fused in the back and my odontoid is retroflexed, I have partially formed cervical ribs off of my C7 vertebrae, and I have a fully formed L6 (it should only go to L5). Even though I've had a bunch of concussions from football, baseball, mountain biking, sailing, etc. I never had spinal x-rays done. I don't know why. Come to find out my C1 had slid to the right at some point. I think it was during the flight from Kenya, to Amsterdam, to Chicago, to Grand Rapids, where I had to fake being okay because you aren't supposed to fly internationally while you're sick with an unknown disease from East Africa, but you will do it if your life is on the line, and I mixed my time between being passed out with my head kinked and running to the bathroom to expel blood from my body in various ways. Needless to say - it was a fun trip (read that last sentence in a sarcastic tone). My symptoms became really scary when I started having memory issues. Not minor memory issues, major memory issues. Short term memory issues are quite annoying. I started testing it and my working memory dropped to four digits. A normal person can do about double that. At one point I had a high IQ, in the top 1 or 2 percent, now my IQ dropped below average. But, more frightening than all of that is long-term memory loss. I got lost, quite a few times, trying to drive roads I have been driving my entire life. I was having trouble reading, which is insane. I've read thousands of books, I own thousands of books, and my reading comprehension scores had always been near perfect. I remember asking someone what a word was. I just didn't recognize it. The word was "piece." They thought I was joking. It was a scary moment to realize how quickly my memory was deteriorating. What have you forgotten? How would you know? I did and tried many things with multiple different practitioners. Traction, supplements, various adjustments, and movement therapy with pain specialists. I learned things the entire way, but I wasn't making too much progress. Some, but it was still not an uptrend. The medical system is a story in itself. I was rejected by surgeons in Muskegon and at Cornell University because they didn't want to touch it. The Michigan Head and Spine Institute told me they didn't think they were competent enough to deal with it. The Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders said I should take some painkillers. Doctors are so helpful - I'm joking, I've found them to be the opposite. I had an argument with a Physicians Assistant one time about whether cause and effect exists. She strongly believed that there is no such thing and that I should take a bunch of pills to slow down my heart and numb the pain. Not only did she not want to look into the cause, she didn't believe there is such a thing as a cause. It was an odd conversation. I had an MD explain to me that he can't read x-rays. I told him that the shiny white things are bones. It went how you would expect. I was casting a fairly wide net to see what to try. The best source of information was Facebook. There are specific groups set up for specific issues and the people that have actually been dealing with the issue are significantly more knowledgeable about it than any doctor I've ever encountered. My spinal deformities have the name Klippel-Feil Syndrome, KFS for short, and most doctors have never heard of it. It's fairly rare and there has been little research on it, but I did spend several hundred dollars collecting the research articles I could find. Oh, I didn't have insurance either, so I basically went bankrupt, although I don't see how filing that paperwork would help so I didn't. When I thought I was going to get better quickly, in the beginning, I paid a few of the bills on the credit card. I had used all of my savings trying to survive and escape Africa. I figured I would be back to work soon so it wouldn't be a big deal. I was wrong. I had made a general post on Facebook asking for ideas and a friend of mine, Dawn, mentioned that there was a unique chiropractor in Whitehall. Helena Beacom can make adjustments to the skull. I had eighte theories that I was contemplating at the time on why I was having so many issues. One of them was that the retroflexed odontoid, meaning a bone in the front of my neck is pressing back against the brainstem (this deformities are congenital, from birth, so my entire brainstem is in a different position because of this), and the odontoid might be cutting off the proper flow of cerebral spinal fluid, which is the juice that keeps your brain clean (and a few other things). I had talked to someone that does cranio-sacral adjustments before to move the fluid around, but if the odontoid really was causing a block then that could just put more pressure on the brain and cause more damage, so I hadn't done that. But this was different and I wanted to look into it. I must say that the cranial adjustments that Helena made were pretty crazy. Remember those 12 concussions I've had? Well, some stuff was off. I had already been seeing stars and hearing buzzing on a daily basis for a long time, but she would press softly on these little spots and my entire field of vision would go nuts with patterns of green and black, or it would do something else. It was different everytime. That's not the primary thing that helped though. My C1 was pressing up against my brainstem. Your brainstem controls all sorts of things, so it would make sense that many of my issues stemmed from that issue with my stem. Helena, and her husband Brent, often work with children. And adjusting children can be a bit different. Helena did not start out doing normal adjustments on me. She started by just pressing against my C1. Basically trying to press it out of my brainstem. This she eventually did. It's unusual, this isn't a normal issue even for people that are having issues. They had reached out to their mentors for consultations as well. We discussed each step along the way. I prefer, and do, make all of my own decisions on my treatment. There is an issue with trying to solve difficult problems while losing your cognitive ability at the same time. Believe me, it's frustrating. Also, if your identity is based on being intelligent and adventurous and then you're no longer intelligent and can't be adventurous then you can run right into a wall of existential despair, but that could be a small book in itself so I'll leave that for another time. Within a few minutes of Helena pushing that bone away from my brainstem it would slide back though. So, for a little while at first we did this unusual thing where I would get adjusted, sit in the waiting area (which is unique with dogs and kids running around, completely unlike the horrible doctor office waiting areas), and then get adjusted again. We started making decent progress with a week or two. Now it's not like it's been all smooth sailing from there. I was still on that rollercoaster blind folded, but things did start to go better. For quite awhile I had given up driving and walking because I found that the impact on my spine was too much and significantly dimished my brains ability to function. I have slowly been regaining my ability to withstand impact. I go for small walks in Oakhurst Cemetary in Whitehall on Thursdays after my adjustments now. I also do quite a bit of driving again. Near the beginning of 2018 I took a trip from Michigan to Nebraska with my mother and my aunt to see my older sister and did fairly well. My cognitive abilities have returned. In 2018 I took the necessary tests and joined the high IQ society Mensa. It's the largest IQ society in the world and only takes the top 2 percent. My working memory scores are back up to average, not what mine once were, but still a huge improvement. My weight has dropped from that insanely high number of 235 with 35 percent bodyfat to about 172 with 13 percent bodyfat. That's more normal for me. Now it's not just the adjustments that have gotten me here. I'm always experimenting, always trying to find the better path. After 1 year of adjustments with Helena I had seemed to have plateaued in my progress. So, I started getting adjustments from Brent and progress picked back up again. Now I get one adjustment a week from Brent and one from Helena. The next time I hit a plateau I might get adjusted by their other partner Nate. That bacterial infection I had for 6 months did a number on my whole digestive system. I track everything I eat and all of my reactions. I found that the only thing I didn't react to was basically beef and pork. So I only ate that for quite awhile. To help repair my digestive system I tried a number of things and found the GAPS diet to be by far the most effective. I've recovered the ability to eat quite a few things without having any bad digestive issues or immune reactions, although I still am limited and have to be careful. I've been making progress on my resting heart rate as well, although it is quite unsteady. Some mornings it is all the way down in the 80s, and some mornings it is still above 100. Statisically my life expectancy is between the ages of 35 and 45, primarily because the issues with the nerves in the neck and brainstem because of the deformities cause damage to other organs and then those give out. Another 5 to 10 years of life isn't no time, but if I can get that heart rate down then hopefully that will extend a bit further. I did find an x-ray from a man with almost my same deformities that lived to be 68. Much of my strength has returned. I've found that I can only do very light weights, I started with 3 lb weights and now I've worked my way up to 6 lb weights. I used to do powerlifting and have Crossfit and kettlebell certifications, so it's a bit different. I can only do some motions, and I only workout once every 7 to 14 days, but it's still a ton of progress. I'm very happy with it. I don't know how far I will be able to go with my adventures, I've done things like mountain climbing, skydiving, jumping horses, winter luge, whitewater rafting, etc. I'm not sure if I will be able to get back up to taking the impact of something like riding a horse, but I think at some point I will own and ride a motorcycle again. I'm also working on adventure plans for next summer. I either want to dive with sharks, I already have my Scuba certification, or I want to wrestle alligators. I've also tried to dive into more intellectual adventures. I teach English online to kids in China and I'm a local reading tutor. I'm editing an international anthology of horror stories with my Russian friend Oleg that's due out in 2019. I've also been writing some stories and a bit of philosophy. This is basically the shortest version of the story that I can tell while also including a decent number of the relevant events. I'm not sure even I will ever be able to recall all that has happened over the last few years concerning my health, but this a pretty good summary. The difference between the depths of where I've been and my current level of performance and health is huge. And the wouldn't have been possible without the Beacoms.
Whoa! I wrote that stream of consiousness just as it appears. Now I'm going to break it down into paragraphs so it's a bit easier to read, but I don't think I'm going to edit it. I like the fact that it is just off the cuff.
Oh, but before I do I want to do another blurb involving a little saying I came up with. I'm sure I'm no the first to say it, but I like the fact that I co-invented/discovered it - millimeters matter. I want a blurb that includes that.
"When millimeters matter, you want Beacom Chiropractic."
Lol, that seems like a cheesy billboard.
"I have spinal deformities. The difference between a good and a bad day can be measured in millimeters. That's why I go to Beacom Chiropractic, because millimeters matter."
Alright, back to the breaking the story into paragraphs.
Well, holy mackerel! I wasn't planning on changing anything, but my plans changed. I added a number of things in there. It's a weird testimonial, to say the least. They can read through it and pick and choose what they want to quote and take out too, so that's helpful.
I don't usually write testimonials, and I don't usually write reviews. I did write a bad review for a doctor in Muskegon that told me I didn't have spinal deformities and that if I came in and complained about anything else he would recommend that I get committed to the psych ward. Is Dr. Halasa evil? I'm going to go with yes, so I wrote a review for him.
We'll see what the Beacoms think of this one, and if they want something else I have no problem writing a different recommendation for them. There is one other thing I have noticed in my Facebook discussion with people that have KFS and have looked into chiropractic, but I think I'm going to save that for another article.
"The City of Peace" - A future history science fiction utopia/dystopia action adventure in a framed story of a father telling his son a story about the child's grandfather.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/08/the-xprize-writing-contest-part-5-of-5.html
"The Birth of Hanniba'al" - A dark, somewhat alternative, historical origin story for the Carthage General Hannibal.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/11/write-michigan-short-story-contest-part_30.html
Here are three of my most popular posts.
"The Making of a Great First Line in Fiction"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/12/the-making-of-great-first-line-in.html
"A Letter to My Niece in 2034"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/12/a-letter-to-my-niece-in-2034.html
"The Most Important Question in Philosophy - Part 4 of 4"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/11/the-most-important-question-in.html
You can find more of what I'm doing here: http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com
You can support this page at https://www.patreon.com/JeffreyAlexanderMartin
The first reason is that I keep making progress. It's not a straight path. There is no linear progression. It's somewhat more akin to riding a rollercoaster blind. You know that there are going to be ups and downs, but you don't know when. This means that in the near future, it's always the near future, that I could have a much better conclusion to my testimonial. I'll do it next week when I'm even better, I'll do it next week when I've recovered from this downturn, I'll do it next week when I'm even stronger, etc. Luckily next week has finally arrived, it only took a few months.
The second reason is that the story is quite large, decently long, and pretty complex. I don't want to write a memoir on it at this time. So, what do I include? It's an interesting problem. I was thinking about writing short and long versions, but I don't want to write the long version. I'm just going to do various short versions.
Let's begin with a blurb of some sort.
"Trust is a rare thing. You can trust the Beacoms."
That seems fairly decent.
"Who to trust is a hard decision. I can fully recommend trusting the Beacoms."
I would put that in the fairly decent category as well.
"Who can you trust with your health? I don't presume that I can make that decision for you, but I can say that I go to Beacom Chiropractic every week. I do that because I am confident in two things - their concern and their competence."
Alright, that's enough with the little blurbs for now. I'm going to do a little story version.
- - - - - - -
In December of 2015 I got sick in Africa. It was intense. I was vomiting blood and was told I was going to die. Through an odd series of circumstances I was able to make it back to Michigan. I assumed that after a few weeks of medication and rest I would be back out on another adventure, or at least better. I was wrong. It took me 6 months and 3 antibiotic treatments just to beat the bacteria. And the least treatment, which is the one that worked, was a 3-month holistic treatment not available at hospitals. Even after that I didn't recover. My symptoms are legion. An insanely intense migraine, I basically moved between the couch and my bed avoiding light and sound for a few months because I was so sensitive to those things. My joints ached. I had lost most of my strength. I went to pick up a 3 lb hammer at one point and could barely grip it. My hands would shake. One half of my face, the right side, would twitch uncontrollably. My resting heart rate was over 100 all the time. I couldn't walk across the street to get the mail and make it back without running out of breath and having to take a break and lean on a car for awhile. My weight was going up like someone blowing up a balloon. I gained 10 lbs in one week, and then 10 lbs the next week. I have a few stretch marks. I went from 170 lbs to 235 lbs in a few weeks. Everything was wrong. Luckily I have a friend that is a chiropractor, Michael Rykse. He was the one that found my spinal deformities. I have four major deformities: my C1 is partially fused to my skull (occipitalization of the atlas) and only partially formed, my C2 and C3 are fused in the back and my odontoid is retroflexed, I have partially formed cervical ribs off of my C7 vertebrae, and I have a fully formed L6 (it should only go to L5). Even though I've had a bunch of concussions from football, baseball, mountain biking, sailing, etc. I never had spinal x-rays done. I don't know why. Come to find out my C1 had slid to the right at some point. I think it was during the flight from Kenya, to Amsterdam, to Chicago, to Grand Rapids, where I had to fake being okay because you aren't supposed to fly internationally while you're sick with an unknown disease from East Africa, but you will do it if your life is on the line, and I mixed my time between being passed out with my head kinked and running to the bathroom to expel blood from my body in various ways. Needless to say - it was a fun trip (read that last sentence in a sarcastic tone). My symptoms became really scary when I started having memory issues. Not minor memory issues, major memory issues. Short term memory issues are quite annoying. I started testing it and my working memory dropped to four digits. A normal person can do about double that. At one point I had a high IQ, in the top 1 or 2 percent, now my IQ dropped below average. But, more frightening than all of that is long-term memory loss. I got lost, quite a few times, trying to drive roads I have been driving my entire life. I was having trouble reading, which is insane. I've read thousands of books, I own thousands of books, and my reading comprehension scores had always been near perfect. I remember asking someone what a word was. I just didn't recognize it. The word was "piece." They thought I was joking. It was a scary moment to realize how quickly my memory was deteriorating. What have you forgotten? How would you know? I did and tried many things with multiple different practitioners. Traction, supplements, various adjustments, and movement therapy with pain specialists. I learned things the entire way, but I wasn't making too much progress. Some, but it was still not an uptrend. The medical system is a story in itself. I was rejected by surgeons in Muskegon and at Cornell University because they didn't want to touch it. The Michigan Head and Spine Institute told me they didn't think they were competent enough to deal with it. The Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders said I should take some painkillers. Doctors are so helpful - I'm joking, I've found them to be the opposite. I had an argument with a Physicians Assistant one time about whether cause and effect exists. She strongly believed that there is no such thing and that I should take a bunch of pills to slow down my heart and numb the pain. Not only did she not want to look into the cause, she didn't believe there is such a thing as a cause. It was an odd conversation. I had an MD explain to me that he can't read x-rays. I told him that the shiny white things are bones. It went how you would expect. I was casting a fairly wide net to see what to try. The best source of information was Facebook. There are specific groups set up for specific issues and the people that have actually been dealing with the issue are significantly more knowledgeable about it than any doctor I've ever encountered. My spinal deformities have the name Klippel-Feil Syndrome, KFS for short, and most doctors have never heard of it. It's fairly rare and there has been little research on it, but I did spend several hundred dollars collecting the research articles I could find. Oh, I didn't have insurance either, so I basically went bankrupt, although I don't see how filing that paperwork would help so I didn't. When I thought I was going to get better quickly, in the beginning, I paid a few of the bills on the credit card. I had used all of my savings trying to survive and escape Africa. I figured I would be back to work soon so it wouldn't be a big deal. I was wrong. I had made a general post on Facebook asking for ideas and a friend of mine, Dawn, mentioned that there was a unique chiropractor in Whitehall. Helena Beacom can make adjustments to the skull. I had eighte theories that I was contemplating at the time on why I was having so many issues. One of them was that the retroflexed odontoid, meaning a bone in the front of my neck is pressing back against the brainstem (this deformities are congenital, from birth, so my entire brainstem is in a different position because of this), and the odontoid might be cutting off the proper flow of cerebral spinal fluid, which is the juice that keeps your brain clean (and a few other things). I had talked to someone that does cranio-sacral adjustments before to move the fluid around, but if the odontoid really was causing a block then that could just put more pressure on the brain and cause more damage, so I hadn't done that. But this was different and I wanted to look into it. I must say that the cranial adjustments that Helena made were pretty crazy. Remember those 12 concussions I've had? Well, some stuff was off. I had already been seeing stars and hearing buzzing on a daily basis for a long time, but she would press softly on these little spots and my entire field of vision would go nuts with patterns of green and black, or it would do something else. It was different everytime. That's not the primary thing that helped though. My C1 was pressing up against my brainstem. Your brainstem controls all sorts of things, so it would make sense that many of my issues stemmed from that issue with my stem. Helena, and her husband Brent, often work with children. And adjusting children can be a bit different. Helena did not start out doing normal adjustments on me. She started by just pressing against my C1. Basically trying to press it out of my brainstem. This she eventually did. It's unusual, this isn't a normal issue even for people that are having issues. They had reached out to their mentors for consultations as well. We discussed each step along the way. I prefer, and do, make all of my own decisions on my treatment. There is an issue with trying to solve difficult problems while losing your cognitive ability at the same time. Believe me, it's frustrating. Also, if your identity is based on being intelligent and adventurous and then you're no longer intelligent and can't be adventurous then you can run right into a wall of existential despair, but that could be a small book in itself so I'll leave that for another time. Within a few minutes of Helena pushing that bone away from my brainstem it would slide back though. So, for a little while at first we did this unusual thing where I would get adjusted, sit in the waiting area (which is unique with dogs and kids running around, completely unlike the horrible doctor office waiting areas), and then get adjusted again. We started making decent progress with a week or two. Now it's not like it's been all smooth sailing from there. I was still on that rollercoaster blind folded, but things did start to go better. For quite awhile I had given up driving and walking because I found that the impact on my spine was too much and significantly dimished my brains ability to function. I have slowly been regaining my ability to withstand impact. I go for small walks in Oakhurst Cemetary in Whitehall on Thursdays after my adjustments now. I also do quite a bit of driving again. Near the beginning of 2018 I took a trip from Michigan to Nebraska with my mother and my aunt to see my older sister and did fairly well. My cognitive abilities have returned. In 2018 I took the necessary tests and joined the high IQ society Mensa. It's the largest IQ society in the world and only takes the top 2 percent. My working memory scores are back up to average, not what mine once were, but still a huge improvement. My weight has dropped from that insanely high number of 235 with 35 percent bodyfat to about 172 with 13 percent bodyfat. That's more normal for me. Now it's not just the adjustments that have gotten me here. I'm always experimenting, always trying to find the better path. After 1 year of adjustments with Helena I had seemed to have plateaued in my progress. So, I started getting adjustments from Brent and progress picked back up again. Now I get one adjustment a week from Brent and one from Helena. The next time I hit a plateau I might get adjusted by their other partner Nate. That bacterial infection I had for 6 months did a number on my whole digestive system. I track everything I eat and all of my reactions. I found that the only thing I didn't react to was basically beef and pork. So I only ate that for quite awhile. To help repair my digestive system I tried a number of things and found the GAPS diet to be by far the most effective. I've recovered the ability to eat quite a few things without having any bad digestive issues or immune reactions, although I still am limited and have to be careful. I've been making progress on my resting heart rate as well, although it is quite unsteady. Some mornings it is all the way down in the 80s, and some mornings it is still above 100. Statisically my life expectancy is between the ages of 35 and 45, primarily because the issues with the nerves in the neck and brainstem because of the deformities cause damage to other organs and then those give out. Another 5 to 10 years of life isn't no time, but if I can get that heart rate down then hopefully that will extend a bit further. I did find an x-ray from a man with almost my same deformities that lived to be 68. Much of my strength has returned. I've found that I can only do very light weights, I started with 3 lb weights and now I've worked my way up to 6 lb weights. I used to do powerlifting and have Crossfit and kettlebell certifications, so it's a bit different. I can only do some motions, and I only workout once every 7 to 14 days, but it's still a ton of progress. I'm very happy with it. I don't know how far I will be able to go with my adventures, I've done things like mountain climbing, skydiving, jumping horses, winter luge, whitewater rafting, etc. I'm not sure if I will be able to get back up to taking the impact of something like riding a horse, but I think at some point I will own and ride a motorcycle again. I'm also working on adventure plans for next summer. I either want to dive with sharks, I already have my Scuba certification, or I want to wrestle alligators. I've also tried to dive into more intellectual adventures. I teach English online to kids in China and I'm a local reading tutor. I'm editing an international anthology of horror stories with my Russian friend Oleg that's due out in 2019. I've also been writing some stories and a bit of philosophy. This is basically the shortest version of the story that I can tell while also including a decent number of the relevant events. I'm not sure even I will ever be able to recall all that has happened over the last few years concerning my health, but this a pretty good summary. The difference between the depths of where I've been and my current level of performance and health is huge. And the wouldn't have been possible without the Beacoms.
- - - - - - -
Whoa! I wrote that stream of consiousness just as it appears. Now I'm going to break it down into paragraphs so it's a bit easier to read, but I don't think I'm going to edit it. I like the fact that it is just off the cuff.
Oh, but before I do I want to do another blurb involving a little saying I came up with. I'm sure I'm no the first to say it, but I like the fact that I co-invented/discovered it - millimeters matter. I want a blurb that includes that.
"When millimeters matter, you want Beacom Chiropractic."
Lol, that seems like a cheesy billboard.
"I have spinal deformities. The difference between a good and a bad day can be measured in millimeters. That's why I go to Beacom Chiropractic, because millimeters matter."
Alright, back to the breaking the story into paragraphs.
- - - - - - -
In December of 2015 I got sick in Africa. It was intense. I was vomiting blood and was told I was going to die.
Through an odd series of circumstances I was able to make it back to Michigan. I assumed that after a few weeks of medication and rest I would be back out on another adventure, or at least better. I was wrong.
It took me 6 months and 3 antibiotic treatments just to beat the bacteria. And the least treatment, which is the one that worked, was a 3-month holistic treatment not available at hospitals. Even after that I didn't recover.
My symptoms are legion. An insanely intense migraine, I basically moved between the couch and my bed avoiding light and sound for a few months because I was so sensitive to those things. My joints ached. I had lost most of my strength. I went to pick up a 3 lb hammer at one point and could barely grip it. My hands would shake. One half of my face, the right side, would twitch uncontrollably. My resting heart rate was over 100 all the time. I couldn't walk across the street to get the mail and make it back without running out of breath and having to take a break and lean on a car for awhile. My weight was going up like someone blowing up a balloon. I gained 10 lbs in one week, and then 10 lbs the next week. I have a few stretch marks. I went from 170 lbs to 235 lbs in a few weeks. Everything was wrong.
Luckily I have a friend that is a chiropractor, Michael Rykse. He was the one that found my spinal deformities. I have four major deformities: my C1 is partially fused to my skull (occipitalization of the atlas) and only partially formed, my C2 and C3 are fused in the back and my odontoid is retroflexed, I have partially formed cervical ribs off of my C7 vertebrae, and I have a fully formed L6 (it should only go to L5). Even though I've had a bunch of concussions from football, baseball, mountain biking, sailing, etc. I never had spinal x-rays done. I don't know why.
Come to find out my C1 had slid to the right at some point. I think it was during the flight from Kenya, to Amsterdam, to Chicago, to Grand Rapids, where I had to fake being okay because you aren't supposed to fly internationally while you're sick with an unknown disease from East Africa, but you will do it if your life is on the line, and I mixed my time between being passed out with my head kinked and running to the bathroom to expel blood from my body in various ways. Needless to say - it was a fun trip (read that last sentence in a sarcastic tone).
My symptoms became really scary when I started having memory issues. Not minor memory issues, major memory issues. Short term memory issues are quite annoying. I started testing it and my working memory dropped to four digits. A normal person can do about double that. At one point I had a high IQ, in the top 1 or 2 percent, now my IQ dropped below average. But, more frightening than all of that is long-term memory loss. I got lost, quite a few times, trying to drive roads I have been driving my entire life. I was having trouble reading, which is insane. I've read thousands of books, I own thousands of books, and my reading comprehension scores had always been near perfect. I remember asking someone what a word was. I just didn't recognize it. The word was "piece." They thought I was joking. It was a scary moment to realize how quickly my memory was deteriorating. What have you forgotten? How would you know?
I did and tried many things with multiple different practitioners. Traction, supplements, various adjustments, and movement therapy with pain specialists. I learned things the entire way, but I wasn't making too much progress. Some, but it was still not an uptrend. The medical system is a story in itself. They couldn't figure out what infection I had (and ran the wrong tests), and that's just the beginning. I was rejected by surgeons in Muskegon and at Cornell University because they didn't want to touch it. The Michigan Head and Spine Institute told me they didn't think they were competent enough to deal with it, and I believe them. The Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders said I should take some painkillers. Doctors are so helpful - I'm joking, I've found them to be the opposite.
I had an argument with a Physicians Assistant one time about whether cause and effect exists. She strongly believed that there is no such thing and that I should take a bunch of pills to slow down my heart and numb the pain. Not only did she not want to look into the cause, she didn't believe there is such a thing as a cause. It was an odd conversation. I had an MD explain to me that he can't read x-rays. I told him that the shiny white things are bones. It went how you would expect.
I was casting a fairly wide net to see what to try. The best source of information was Facebook. There are specific groups set up for specific issues and the people that have actually been dealing with the issue are significantly more knowledgeable about it than any doctor I've ever encountered. My spinal deformities have the name Klippel-Feil Syndrome, KFS for short, and most doctors have never heard of it. It's fairly rare and there has been little research on it, but I did spend several hundred dollars collecting the research articles I could find.
Oh, I didn't have insurance either, so I basically went bankrupt, although I don't see how filing that paperwork would help so I didn't. When I thought I was going to get better quickly, in the beginning, I paid a few of the bills on the credit card. I had used all of my savings trying to survive and escape Africa. I figured I would be back to work soon so it wouldn't be a big deal. I was wrong.
I had made a general post on Facebook asking for ideas and a friend of mine, Dawn, mentioned that there was a unique chiropractor in Whitehall. Helena Beacom can make adjustments to the skull. I had eight theories that I was contemplating at the time on why I was having so many issues. One of them was that the retroflexed odontoid, meaning a bone in the front of my neck is pressing back against the brainstem (these deformities are congenital, from birth, so my entire brainstem is in a different position because of this), and the odontoid might be cutting off the proper flow of cerebral spinal fluid, which is the juice that keeps your brain clean (and a few other things). I had talked to someone that does cranio-sacral adjustments before to move the fluid around, but if the odontoid really was causing a block then that could just put more pressure on the brain and cause more damage, so I hadn't done that. But this was different and I wanted to look into it.
I must say that the cranial adjustments that Helena made were pretty crazy. Remember those 12 concussions I've had? Well, some stuff was off. I had already been seeing stars and hearing buzzing on a daily basis for a long time (since December 2015), but she would press softly on these little spots and my entire field of vision would go nuts with patterns of green and black, or it would do something else. It was different everytime. That's not the primary thing that helped though.
My C1 was pressing up against my brainstem. Your brainstem controls all sorts of things, so it would make sense that many of my issues stemmed from that issue with my stem. Helena, and her husband Brent, often work with children. And adjusting children can be a bit different. Helena did not start out doing normal adjustments on me. She started by just pressing against my C1. Basically trying to press it out of my brainstem. This she eventually did. It's unusual, this isn't a normal issue even for people that are having issues. They had reached out to their mentors for consultations as well. We discussed each step along the way. I prefer, and do, make all of my own decisions on my treatment.
There is an issue with trying to solve difficult problems while losing your cognitive ability at the same time. Believe me, it's frustrating. Also, if your identity is based on being intelligent and adventurous and then you're no longer intelligent and can't be adventurous then you can run right into a wall of existential despair, but that could be a small book in itself so I'll leave that for another time.
Within a few minutes of Helena pushing that bone away from my brainstem it would slide back though. So, for a little while at first we did this unusual thing where I would get adjusted, sit in the waiting area (which is unique with dogs and kids running around, completely unlike the horrible doctor office waiting areas), and then get adjusted again. We started making decent progress within a week or two.
Now, it's not like it's been all smooth sailing from there. I was still on that rollercoaster blind folded, but things did start to go better. For quite awhile I had given up driving and walking because I found that the impact on my spine was too much and significantly dimished my brains ability to function. I have slowly been regaining my ability to withstand impact. I go for small walks in Oakhurst Cemetary in Whitehall on Thursdays after my adjustments now. I also do quite a bit of driving again. Near the beginning of 2018 I took a trip from Michigan to Nebraska with my mother and my aunt to see my older sister and did fairly well.
My cognitive abilities have returned. In 2018 I took the necessary tests and joined the high IQ society Mensa. It's the largest IQ society in the world and only takes the top 2 percent. My working memory scores are back up to average, not what mine once were, but still a huge improvement. My weight has dropped from that insanely high number of 235 with 35 percent bodyfat to about 172 with 13 percent bodyfat. That's more normal for me.
Now it's not just the adjustments that have gotten me here. I'm always experimenting, always trying to find the better path, and I discuss all of my experiments with Brent and Helena. After 1 year of adjustments with Helena I had seemed to have plateaued in my progress. So, I started getting adjustments from Brent and progress picked back up again. Now I get one adjustment a week from Brent and one from Helena. The next time I hit a plateau I might get adjusted by their other partner Nate.
Based off those research articles I've acquired I also started working with my lordotic curve. I don't have x-rays from before I was having major issues, so I don't know what my spine looked like when I was healthy and active, which means some guessing is involved. Because these are deformities from birth I think it could definitely be, and the fact that there isn't much discuss degeneration in my neck also supports this, that my neck has always been straight.
The neck of a normal person is supposed to curve forward, this is a called a lordotic curve. Some research suggests that a lordotic curve can be restored, or in my case created. It was my theory that trying this might make my cervical spine more stable and therefore better able to take impact. It was either going to make things better or worse. It's helped, quite a bit.
There are two major philosophies in chiropractic. On the one side, which I'm going to call the Gonstead method even though it isn't exclusive to that name, the idea is to move the parts of the spine that aren't moving. Then, let the body take control and do what it wants to do with that newfound movement. This is a lot of where you'll hear about the innate intelligence of the body. The other side is Biophysics, and this isn't exclusive to that name either, is the idea that we know how the spine should look. Since we know what we want the shape of the spine to be we can force it into that shape. These are huge differences of the basic approach and perspective of the patient and the chiropractor.
Since I don't know what my spine looked like when I was functioning well it could have been an utter disaster to force it into some other position. In general, and I've had a number of conversations with other people with KFS online about chiropractic, it's a bad idea if you have spinal deformities. But, you'll notice that I now actually combine the methods. At first we were only working with the Gonstead style of adjustments, moving things and letting the body do what it wants with that newfound movement. After a year I decided to try to force some lordotic curve into my cervical spine though. I had been holding off on it for quite awhile even though I had read the research, because I knew it was a major risk. Luckily it turned out well.
That bacterial infection I had for 6 months did a number on my whole digestive system. I track everything I eat and all of my reactions. I found that the only thing I didn't react to was basically beef and pork. So I only ate that for quite awhile. To help repair my digestive system I tried a number of things and found the GAPS diet to be by far the most effective. I've recovered the ability to eat quite a few things without having any bad digestive issues or immune reactions, although I still am limited and have to be careful.
I've been making progress on my resting heart rate as well, although it is quite unsteady. Some mornings it is all the way down in the 80s, and some mornings it is still above 100. Statisically my life expectancy is between the ages of 35 and 45, primarily because the issues with the nerves in the neck and brainstem from the deformities cause damage to other organs and then those give out. Another 5 to 10 years of life isn't no time, but if I can get that heart rate down then hopefully that will extend a bit further. I did find an x-ray from a man with almost my same deformities that lived to be 68.
Much of my strength has returned. I've found that I can only do very light weights, I started with 3 lb weights and now I've worked my way up to 6 lb weights. I used to do powerlifting and have Crossfit and kettlebell certifications, so it's a bit different. I can only do some motions, and I only workout once every 7 to 14 days, but it's still a ton of progress. I'm very happy with it.
I don't know how far I will be able to go with my adventures, I've done things like mountain climbing, skydiving, jumping horses, winter luge, whitewater rafting, etc. I'm not sure if I will be able to get back up to taking the impact of something like riding a horse, but I think at some point I will own and ride a motorcycle again. I'm also working on adventure plans for next summer. I either want to dive with sharks, I already have my Scuba certification, or I want to wrestle alligators.
I've also tried to dive into more intellectual adventures. I teach English online to kids in China and I'm a local reading tutor. I'm editing an international anthology of horror stories with my Russian friend Oleg that's due out in 2019. I've also been writing some stories and a bit of philosophy.
This is basically the shortest version of the story that I can tell while also including a decent number of the relevant events. I'm not sure even I will ever be able to recall all that has happened over the last few years concerning my health, but this a pretty good summary. The difference between the depths of where I've been and my current level of performance and health is huge. And that wouldn't have been possible without the Beacoms.
Through an odd series of circumstances I was able to make it back to Michigan. I assumed that after a few weeks of medication and rest I would be back out on another adventure, or at least better. I was wrong.
It took me 6 months and 3 antibiotic treatments just to beat the bacteria. And the least treatment, which is the one that worked, was a 3-month holistic treatment not available at hospitals. Even after that I didn't recover.
My symptoms are legion. An insanely intense migraine, I basically moved between the couch and my bed avoiding light and sound for a few months because I was so sensitive to those things. My joints ached. I had lost most of my strength. I went to pick up a 3 lb hammer at one point and could barely grip it. My hands would shake. One half of my face, the right side, would twitch uncontrollably. My resting heart rate was over 100 all the time. I couldn't walk across the street to get the mail and make it back without running out of breath and having to take a break and lean on a car for awhile. My weight was going up like someone blowing up a balloon. I gained 10 lbs in one week, and then 10 lbs the next week. I have a few stretch marks. I went from 170 lbs to 235 lbs in a few weeks. Everything was wrong.
Luckily I have a friend that is a chiropractor, Michael Rykse. He was the one that found my spinal deformities. I have four major deformities: my C1 is partially fused to my skull (occipitalization of the atlas) and only partially formed, my C2 and C3 are fused in the back and my odontoid is retroflexed, I have partially formed cervical ribs off of my C7 vertebrae, and I have a fully formed L6 (it should only go to L5). Even though I've had a bunch of concussions from football, baseball, mountain biking, sailing, etc. I never had spinal x-rays done. I don't know why.
Come to find out my C1 had slid to the right at some point. I think it was during the flight from Kenya, to Amsterdam, to Chicago, to Grand Rapids, where I had to fake being okay because you aren't supposed to fly internationally while you're sick with an unknown disease from East Africa, but you will do it if your life is on the line, and I mixed my time between being passed out with my head kinked and running to the bathroom to expel blood from my body in various ways. Needless to say - it was a fun trip (read that last sentence in a sarcastic tone).
My symptoms became really scary when I started having memory issues. Not minor memory issues, major memory issues. Short term memory issues are quite annoying. I started testing it and my working memory dropped to four digits. A normal person can do about double that. At one point I had a high IQ, in the top 1 or 2 percent, now my IQ dropped below average. But, more frightening than all of that is long-term memory loss. I got lost, quite a few times, trying to drive roads I have been driving my entire life. I was having trouble reading, which is insane. I've read thousands of books, I own thousands of books, and my reading comprehension scores had always been near perfect. I remember asking someone what a word was. I just didn't recognize it. The word was "piece." They thought I was joking. It was a scary moment to realize how quickly my memory was deteriorating. What have you forgotten? How would you know?
I did and tried many things with multiple different practitioners. Traction, supplements, various adjustments, and movement therapy with pain specialists. I learned things the entire way, but I wasn't making too much progress. Some, but it was still not an uptrend. The medical system is a story in itself. They couldn't figure out what infection I had (and ran the wrong tests), and that's just the beginning. I was rejected by surgeons in Muskegon and at Cornell University because they didn't want to touch it. The Michigan Head and Spine Institute told me they didn't think they were competent enough to deal with it, and I believe them. The Michigan Institute for Neurological Disorders said I should take some painkillers. Doctors are so helpful - I'm joking, I've found them to be the opposite.
I had an argument with a Physicians Assistant one time about whether cause and effect exists. She strongly believed that there is no such thing and that I should take a bunch of pills to slow down my heart and numb the pain. Not only did she not want to look into the cause, she didn't believe there is such a thing as a cause. It was an odd conversation. I had an MD explain to me that he can't read x-rays. I told him that the shiny white things are bones. It went how you would expect.
I was casting a fairly wide net to see what to try. The best source of information was Facebook. There are specific groups set up for specific issues and the people that have actually been dealing with the issue are significantly more knowledgeable about it than any doctor I've ever encountered. My spinal deformities have the name Klippel-Feil Syndrome, KFS for short, and most doctors have never heard of it. It's fairly rare and there has been little research on it, but I did spend several hundred dollars collecting the research articles I could find.
Oh, I didn't have insurance either, so I basically went bankrupt, although I don't see how filing that paperwork would help so I didn't. When I thought I was going to get better quickly, in the beginning, I paid a few of the bills on the credit card. I had used all of my savings trying to survive and escape Africa. I figured I would be back to work soon so it wouldn't be a big deal. I was wrong.
I had made a general post on Facebook asking for ideas and a friend of mine, Dawn, mentioned that there was a unique chiropractor in Whitehall. Helena Beacom can make adjustments to the skull. I had eight theories that I was contemplating at the time on why I was having so many issues. One of them was that the retroflexed odontoid, meaning a bone in the front of my neck is pressing back against the brainstem (these deformities are congenital, from birth, so my entire brainstem is in a different position because of this), and the odontoid might be cutting off the proper flow of cerebral spinal fluid, which is the juice that keeps your brain clean (and a few other things). I had talked to someone that does cranio-sacral adjustments before to move the fluid around, but if the odontoid really was causing a block then that could just put more pressure on the brain and cause more damage, so I hadn't done that. But this was different and I wanted to look into it.
I must say that the cranial adjustments that Helena made were pretty crazy. Remember those 12 concussions I've had? Well, some stuff was off. I had already been seeing stars and hearing buzzing on a daily basis for a long time (since December 2015), but she would press softly on these little spots and my entire field of vision would go nuts with patterns of green and black, or it would do something else. It was different everytime. That's not the primary thing that helped though.
My C1 was pressing up against my brainstem. Your brainstem controls all sorts of things, so it would make sense that many of my issues stemmed from that issue with my stem. Helena, and her husband Brent, often work with children. And adjusting children can be a bit different. Helena did not start out doing normal adjustments on me. She started by just pressing against my C1. Basically trying to press it out of my brainstem. This she eventually did. It's unusual, this isn't a normal issue even for people that are having issues. They had reached out to their mentors for consultations as well. We discussed each step along the way. I prefer, and do, make all of my own decisions on my treatment.
There is an issue with trying to solve difficult problems while losing your cognitive ability at the same time. Believe me, it's frustrating. Also, if your identity is based on being intelligent and adventurous and then you're no longer intelligent and can't be adventurous then you can run right into a wall of existential despair, but that could be a small book in itself so I'll leave that for another time.
Within a few minutes of Helena pushing that bone away from my brainstem it would slide back though. So, for a little while at first we did this unusual thing where I would get adjusted, sit in the waiting area (which is unique with dogs and kids running around, completely unlike the horrible doctor office waiting areas), and then get adjusted again. We started making decent progress within a week or two.
Now, it's not like it's been all smooth sailing from there. I was still on that rollercoaster blind folded, but things did start to go better. For quite awhile I had given up driving and walking because I found that the impact on my spine was too much and significantly dimished my brains ability to function. I have slowly been regaining my ability to withstand impact. I go for small walks in Oakhurst Cemetary in Whitehall on Thursdays after my adjustments now. I also do quite a bit of driving again. Near the beginning of 2018 I took a trip from Michigan to Nebraska with my mother and my aunt to see my older sister and did fairly well.
My cognitive abilities have returned. In 2018 I took the necessary tests and joined the high IQ society Mensa. It's the largest IQ society in the world and only takes the top 2 percent. My working memory scores are back up to average, not what mine once were, but still a huge improvement. My weight has dropped from that insanely high number of 235 with 35 percent bodyfat to about 172 with 13 percent bodyfat. That's more normal for me.
Now it's not just the adjustments that have gotten me here. I'm always experimenting, always trying to find the better path, and I discuss all of my experiments with Brent and Helena. After 1 year of adjustments with Helena I had seemed to have plateaued in my progress. So, I started getting adjustments from Brent and progress picked back up again. Now I get one adjustment a week from Brent and one from Helena. The next time I hit a plateau I might get adjusted by their other partner Nate.
Based off those research articles I've acquired I also started working with my lordotic curve. I don't have x-rays from before I was having major issues, so I don't know what my spine looked like when I was healthy and active, which means some guessing is involved. Because these are deformities from birth I think it could definitely be, and the fact that there isn't much discuss degeneration in my neck also supports this, that my neck has always been straight.
The neck of a normal person is supposed to curve forward, this is a called a lordotic curve. Some research suggests that a lordotic curve can be restored, or in my case created. It was my theory that trying this might make my cervical spine more stable and therefore better able to take impact. It was either going to make things better or worse. It's helped, quite a bit.
There are two major philosophies in chiropractic. On the one side, which I'm going to call the Gonstead method even though it isn't exclusive to that name, the idea is to move the parts of the spine that aren't moving. Then, let the body take control and do what it wants to do with that newfound movement. This is a lot of where you'll hear about the innate intelligence of the body. The other side is Biophysics, and this isn't exclusive to that name either, is the idea that we know how the spine should look. Since we know what we want the shape of the spine to be we can force it into that shape. These are huge differences of the basic approach and perspective of the patient and the chiropractor.
Since I don't know what my spine looked like when I was functioning well it could have been an utter disaster to force it into some other position. In general, and I've had a number of conversations with other people with KFS online about chiropractic, it's a bad idea if you have spinal deformities. But, you'll notice that I now actually combine the methods. At first we were only working with the Gonstead style of adjustments, moving things and letting the body do what it wants with that newfound movement. After a year I decided to try to force some lordotic curve into my cervical spine though. I had been holding off on it for quite awhile even though I had read the research, because I knew it was a major risk. Luckily it turned out well.
That bacterial infection I had for 6 months did a number on my whole digestive system. I track everything I eat and all of my reactions. I found that the only thing I didn't react to was basically beef and pork. So I only ate that for quite awhile. To help repair my digestive system I tried a number of things and found the GAPS diet to be by far the most effective. I've recovered the ability to eat quite a few things without having any bad digestive issues or immune reactions, although I still am limited and have to be careful.
I've been making progress on my resting heart rate as well, although it is quite unsteady. Some mornings it is all the way down in the 80s, and some mornings it is still above 100. Statisically my life expectancy is between the ages of 35 and 45, primarily because the issues with the nerves in the neck and brainstem from the deformities cause damage to other organs and then those give out. Another 5 to 10 years of life isn't no time, but if I can get that heart rate down then hopefully that will extend a bit further. I did find an x-ray from a man with almost my same deformities that lived to be 68.
Much of my strength has returned. I've found that I can only do very light weights, I started with 3 lb weights and now I've worked my way up to 6 lb weights. I used to do powerlifting and have Crossfit and kettlebell certifications, so it's a bit different. I can only do some motions, and I only workout once every 7 to 14 days, but it's still a ton of progress. I'm very happy with it.
I don't know how far I will be able to go with my adventures, I've done things like mountain climbing, skydiving, jumping horses, winter luge, whitewater rafting, etc. I'm not sure if I will be able to get back up to taking the impact of something like riding a horse, but I think at some point I will own and ride a motorcycle again. I'm also working on adventure plans for next summer. I either want to dive with sharks, I already have my Scuba certification, or I want to wrestle alligators.
I've also tried to dive into more intellectual adventures. I teach English online to kids in China and I'm a local reading tutor. I'm editing an international anthology of horror stories with my Russian friend Oleg that's due out in 2019. I've also been writing some stories and a bit of philosophy.
This is basically the shortest version of the story that I can tell while also including a decent number of the relevant events. I'm not sure even I will ever be able to recall all that has happened over the last few years concerning my health, but this a pretty good summary. The difference between the depths of where I've been and my current level of performance and health is huge. And that wouldn't have been possible without the Beacoms.
- - - - - - -
Well, holy mackerel! I wasn't planning on changing anything, but my plans changed. I added a number of things in there. It's a weird testimonial, to say the least. They can read through it and pick and choose what they want to quote and take out too, so that's helpful.
I don't usually write testimonials, and I don't usually write reviews. I did write a bad review for a doctor in Muskegon that told me I didn't have spinal deformities and that if I came in and complained about anything else he would recommend that I get committed to the psych ward. Is Dr. Halasa evil? I'm going to go with yes, so I wrote a review for him.
We'll see what the Beacoms think of this one, and if they want something else I have no problem writing a different recommendation for them. There is one other thing I have noticed in my Facebook discussion with people that have KFS and have looked into chiropractic, but I think I'm going to save that for another article.
________________________________________________
I've written two fictional pieces that I like so far.
"The City of Peace" - A future history science fiction utopia/dystopia action adventure in a framed story of a father telling his son a story about the child's grandfather.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/08/the-xprize-writing-contest-part-5-of-5.html
"The Birth of Hanniba'al" - A dark, somewhat alternative, historical origin story for the Carthage General Hannibal.
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/11/write-michigan-short-story-contest-part_30.html
Here are three of my most popular posts.
"The Making of a Great First Line in Fiction"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/12/the-making-of-great-first-line-in.html
"A Letter to My Niece in 2034"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/12/a-letter-to-my-niece-in-2034.html
"The Most Important Question in Philosophy - Part 4 of 4"
http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2017/11/the-most-important-question-in.html
You can find more of what I'm doing here: http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com
You can support this page at https://www.patreon.com/JeffreyAlexanderMartin
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