Demanding Drug Dealer

I'm starting to think it would be easier to be a meth addict as hard street drugs are generally sold by dealers requiring no more than a bundle of cash from their prospective buyers and a seedly location for the transaction to occur. My drug of choice, endorphins, come at a much higher price from a demanding dealer: the anterior pituitary gland. That particular part of the gland, which secretes hormones controlling everything from tissue growth to sex hormone production, gets a massive ego rub whenever someone requests something of it.

The posterior pituitary, the siamese twin of the anterior, boasts a far less bloated ego on account of only being responsible for anti-diuretic hormone and oxytocin (though that is important for couples gettin' it on- I suppose if they feel like going the personification-of-glands route, ladies can claim that they had to fake because their posterior pituitary simply refused to dole out the oxy). If the kidney asks for some anti-diuretic hormone, posterior pituitary happily obliges, or decides to be a jerk and gives you diabetes insipidus (which makes you pee everything out, basically).

Yet Mr. Anterior Pituitary, as I mentioned, is not the kindest gland in the body for a variety of reasons. If you rub him the wrong way at all, there's no telling what he will do (I don't know why the anterior pituitary is a guy in my mind- the image of a woman is not the first thing that jumps into my mind when I think of a seedy drug dealer). Well, actually there is: he can screw you over and give you gigantism or pituitary dwarfism by bombarding you with or withholding growth hormone, mess with your estrogen or testosterone levels via secretion of luteinizing hormone, make you fat, crazy, anxious, and depressed via hypo or hypersecretion of thyroid-stimulating hormone, give you Cushing's disease from unleashing too much adrenocorticotropic hormone, fatten you up by holding back on lipotropins... the list goes on. And that list is ridiculously long as it is. I have just educated you all on the endocrine system, you're welcome.

I shove those dreadful evils of which Anterior Pituitary is capable, however, on the back burner when I remember my favorite hormone he stashes away in a glass case on the top shelf- endorphins. Anyone who has watched Legally Blonde has heard of endorphins from the famous line: "exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people don't shoot their husbands- they just don't!" Well, Elle Woods is right.

Endorphin highs morph crotchety Scrooges into hippie life lovers who, let's face it, drive those who haven't just run five miles insane. When you realize the demands of Anterior Pituitary to convince him to release that addictive hormone, it's easy to see why people turn to crack/meth/insert street drug of choice here as opposed to giving in to his absurd demands. Our encounters go something like this:

Me: yo man, I'm jonesing... I need my fix. I just need a tiny dose of endorphins to get me through the next couple of hours!
Anterior Pituitary: you know I can't just go givin' handouts, dawg (he talks like a dealer, too). You gonna have to earn it (because drug dealers have notoriously bad grammar).
Me: anything you want, man, I'll do it!
AP: I need you to go do a killer workout- none of this sissy stuff. You ain't gettin' the goods til you're sweating and about to collapse with a racing heart after at least an hour of cardio. Get yo desperate ass to that point, come see me, and we'll talk. (What a jerk, he just called me desperate!)

That anterior pituitary is the bane of my existence! He's such a self-righous jerk! I want to give him a piece of my mind (even though that's exactly what he is...)! Maybe I'll just give meth a chance instead. I've always wanted to partake in a drug deal in the parking garage of a seedy motel (if it's one that even has a parking garage). Okay, maybe not...

I WISH it were this easy....

My Deformed, Broken, Strong, Flexible, Beautiful Spine

Deformed, flexible, to-may-toe, tom-ah-toe. People both complimented and berated my spine in the past few weeks, causing me to whip out my glass-half-full optimistic attitude by electing to ignore the insults and bask only in the compliments. Prior to attending the Boulder Creek Festival where I first decided to dabble in the chiropractic world (a Boulder chiropractor who will not be named [Voldemort style] was offering free adjustments at his booth), I never gave much thought to my spine. I gave about as much thought to my spine as the aloof hipster at the bar gives to the nerdy girl in the corner considering hitting on him. Shame on you, hipster guy! But now, the roles are reversed and I have become the nerdy girl and my spine the hipster.

Companies that set up booths offering deals are just fishing for suckers like me to take the bait. The bait being, in this case, a free initial consultation and follow-up appointment. Well, I attacked that deal like a fat kid attacks birthday cake and ignored the nagging premonition that I would come to regret it.

At my first appointment, Dr. He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (man, he needs a different pseudonym) took pictures from different angles of me standing, and with every click of the camera made a face that would suggest he was about to diagnose me with an increasingly worse stage of brain cancer. Yet I still left feeling chipper about my posture, as it was not until my follow-up that he informed me, to continue with the brain cancer metaphor, that I was advanced stage 3 and may as well say goodbye to my loved ones within the hour. Basically, he showed me the developed pictures and warned me that despite my crippled, deformed spine being in dire need of repair, he could fix it for the low, low price of $4,000 a year if I agreed to come in three plus times a week. By the time I walked out of the building I felt like the mutant offspring resulting from the inter-species breeding of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and a two-humped camel. The Hulk Theme song, The Lonely Man, should have been playing in the background as I shamefully wandered back to my car.

The whole afternoon following that second appointment, I wanted to throw in the towel and embrace my new life as a recently diagnosed spinal cripple. It won't be all bad, I thought; I can just spend it in a back brace like JFK and eventually be assassinated as a result from wearing it (it kept him upright after the first bullet hit him, allowing the second one to end his life). Or, I could just lay down and never get up again. Both totally valid options in my mind at the time.

After sharing the ordeal with my parents, they referred me to their chiropractor to obtain a second opinion. I love second opinions- eventually, if you see enough people, you are bound to get the opinion you want, right? I told chiropractor number two about the ordeal which left her in gut wrenching laughter about the absurdity of chiropractor number one and his desperate treatment of chiropractic care as if it were a Wall Street biz. She assured me that my spine was fine- yes, my posture could be improved but whose couldn't, really? She gave me some useful exercises to do at home to make my shoulders feel more relaxed and gave me a good adjustment complete with popping and cracking sounds as she yanked my head into positions I hardly thought it capable of being in. End scene.

Walking out of her office, I felt less like the daughter of the hunchback but still like my spine could use a whole lot more lovin'. Flash forward another two weeks (warp speed, Sulu! [or is Spock in charge of warp speed? Trekies? Anyone??]). Now we are in hot yoga class, and going into camel pose. Ever since I started doing yoga, I never felt challenged by camel. As yoga instructors say, we all have our "hang-out posture," and that one happens to be mine. This particular class, however, the instructor came over to me and asked if I felt challenged or like I wanted a more advanced posture. I said I wanted to go for it, and the next thing I knew he had me looking like this:

Instead of my usual:

I felt like a badass. After class, he told me my spine is flexible and beautiful and that it was incredible I could do advanced camel. I'm thinking that yoga teacher should consider becoming a chiropractor. Take that, chiropractor number one! My spine knocks it out of the park!