Editor’s Page: Storyteller Syndrome

On August 10, I was mowing the lawn like I do when the grass gets to a level unsightly enough for my wife to demand action when I inadvertently steered my trusty self-propelling Honda lawnmower went right over a wasp’s nest I didn’t know existed.

At least a handful of the little bastards stung me before I even recognized what was happening and booked it away from the nest, cursing and flailing wildly to the delight of neighbors who were lucky enough to witness the spectacle (My friend Johnny Q said, “You looked like you were fighting an imaginary army — it was amazing!”).

That night I went to bed and a sore neck that had been bothering me on and off for a few months and woke up in excruciating pain that started in my neck and shoulder blade and radiated all the way down my right arm. It was the type of pain I hadn’t experienced before, and it scared the hell out of me.

What followed were a several frustrating doctor’s visits until I stumbled upon Rothman Orthopaedics Walk-In Clinic, an ortho oasis in a healthcare desert filled with long waits to see a primary doctor who would simply refer you to a specialist who probably won’t be able to get you in for several weeks or months and who would probably would just send you off to PT before you could even get the X-ray or MRI you knew you needed from the jump.

This Rothman Walk-In Clinic — yes the same Rothman that Mike “Trendelenburg” Morsch refers to in his uplifting patient story in this issue — operated with the type of efficiency that would earn it an OR Excellence Award.

Within 10 minutes of walking in, I had an X-ray done, and I left with a script for an MRI, which was conveniently done in an office across the hall from the clinic, and a course of steroids powerful enough to make me think I was well enough to go for a test jog. Hindsight proved this was a terrible, terrible idea.

As phenomenal as Rothman was at virtually every aspect of the patient experience, I do have one constructive criticism to offer. Guys: CNN is not the right channel to have blaring in the waiting room filled with people who have sprains, fractures and lots of pain during an election year, perhaps the tensest election year in our country’s history. Between the sky-is-falling segments and the barrage of abhorrent attack ads (I’ve had the phrase “David McCormick got rich in China” playing on loop in my head since I went to Rothman), you could cut the polarizing tension in that lobby with a knife.

My MRI revealed a herniated disc at the C4 vertebra in the cervical spine, probably from decades of hunching over a laptop and ignoring the throbbing neck and shoulder muscles that were begging me to consider proper ergonomics. Before I even got my treatment plan, an insidious little thought crept into my mind: What if I need surgery?

Obviously dread was the primary response to the thought of spine surgery, but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t at least a part of me that was like, That would make for some awfully compelling content … The latter is what I like to call storyteller syndrome — a disorder that forces sufferers to always see life for the story material it presents, even if that material causes direct harm to them.

As this issue goes to print, my treatment plan is an epidural injection coupled with physical therapy. My insanely fit ortho doc (How do all orthopods get themselves in that type of shape?!) said that in 90% of cases, the disc will resolve itself before the effects of the injection even wear off.

But there’s always that other 10% ... OSM