Today I met with Lindsay Hathcock, a local chiropractor. He is a very nice person, and he cares a lot about others. I arrived at his office at about 10 a.m., and after checking some stuff on his computer, he showed me around the workplace. In one of the rooms sat a hydrotherapy bed, which is basically a flat bed with water jets inside. They sometimes use it to help with arthritis problems in the legs, but they mainly use it to help with back problems. The jets shoot water into your back in different places (don’t worry, you won’t get wet), and if you have back problems, you just come in for a ten minute session, and it is supposed to make your back stop hurting. He said that when patients lay there for thirty minutes, he frequently has to wake them up. Lindsay let me try it, and I wanted to just lay there all day, it felt so good.
Probably everybody has heard someone say “don’t pop your knuckles; it’s bad for you,” but Lindsay told me that lacing your fingers together and cracking is fine; as long as you keep your fingers going natural, it’s okay. It is when you twist your fingers or pop them in an abnormal motion that you get arthritis.
After that, he showed me the X-ray machine and how it works. See, the X-ray travels through your body and into the plate they slide in the back. the light that goes into the plate unimpeded turns out black; the light which hits your bones and goes into the plate turns out white. Then, to illustrate, Lindsay X-rayed me. He had me stand up, to check the straightness of how I stood. When the plates were finished developing, he started showing me my skeletal structure. He measured the levelness of my hips, and my right hip was 2/8 of an inch higher than my left hip, which is because I involuntarily lean toward my left side.
When we were finished with that, he took me to his house to see his son, Trip. Trip is 17, but he has Spina bifida, so he can’t walk and has limited talking ability. But don’t let that fool you; Trip is an incredibly bright kid, especially in math, and he has an amazing memory. For instance, if you told him your telephone number, two weeks later you could call him and he would tell it to you right back. It was around noon, so when I had said hi to him and his nurse, Lindsay and I left and went to lunch.
We ate at 5 Guys Burgers and Fries (best fries in the world), and on the way there I asked questions. He told me about some of his life, first, and how he met his wife Peggy. He had been dating a nice, beautiful girl for six or seven years, and during that time he had met Peggy. But one night while he was at a New Year’s Eve party with the girl, he looked around at his surroundings. The girl had some friends who were drunk, even though she personally wasn’t drinking, and Lindsay said to himself, “This isn’t where I want to be.” So he went over to Peggy’s house and she was simply watching a movie, and he said to himself “This is where I want to be.” So after a few months, he proposed, she accepted, and the rest, as they say, is history. Lindsay used that story to give me a life lesson;
You never just marry the person, you marry their family and their friends.
Another question I had for Lindsay was how he made it through his teenage years. He said that it was the prayers of his Grandparents and the respect he had for his mother. For instance, if a friend might invite him to go drinking or something like that, he would think of himself coming home to his mom drunk and how that would disappoint her.
I also asked Lindsay how he became a chiropractor. He said that when his sister got married, she went to the Bahamas on her honeymoon, but when she came back, she was gravely ill, even though she left in perfect health. She stayed in the hospital for three days without anyone knowing what was wrong with her. But then, someone suggested that she visit a chiropractor. After three sessions, she was fine. It turned out that she was lifting up her luggage, twisted around, and tore up her back. Lindsay was a Sophomore in high school, and thought that being a chiropractor seemed like a really fun job. However, there is a downside. Because chiropractors are constantly pushing on joints, and because they can’t exactly exercise, they have a lot of shoulder and hip pains. After we left 5 Guys we drove over to Dad’s workplace to end my time with Lindsay. It was a very interesting day, and I learned a lot about the human body and its muscles.
