I had a final visit with my doctor this morning.

My back's been bothering me for weeks....I fell down the stairs and he thinks I probably re-herniated the L2 disc.  It's been painful, enough to make me sleep on the futon instead of our bed, and I've had a steady supply of pain meds to enable me to get about and do what's been neccessary.

So, this morning he mentioned that once we in-process our next base I'll probably need to start a series of steroid shots directly into the problem area.  Surgery really isn't an option because I have arthritis in the L2 vertebrae and so the bone isn't in great condition to begin with and probably wouldn't react well to being fused or having metal plates screwed into it.

I mentioned that there's a DOM (Doctor of Oriental Medicine) in St Louis and that I was considering going and getting acupuncture done to see if that helped...that I'd rather do that than have the steroid shots. To my immense surprise, he wholeheartedly agreed. 

Wow.  A physician, a western physician, agreeing that acupuncture is benficial.  That's highly unusual.  Mind you, my doctor is cool, so I really shouldn't have been surprised.

I had acupuncture a couple of times before, when I was a teenager, for a knee injury.  If you've never undergone it before, it's a hard sensation to describe....the needles going in really don't hurt, but once they are in there's a sensation of great warmth followed be a weakness of sorts...my entire leg started shaking.  It's the strangest thing, it really is.....but it works.  When I went in there I had been using a cane to walk for almost a month....3 days later I was able to walk comfortably unassisted and was off all pain medications.

I'm hoping to have the same kind of reaction with this back problem.  Western medicine seems to be limited in it's solutions, so I'm going to go see what Eastern has to offer.

It can't hurt, right?