1.20.03 – dance motherfucker, dance!

so i’ve been seeing this special chiropractor three times a week lately, trying to finally get enough consistent therapy to fix the damage i did to my neck a few years ago in a ski accident that left me with chronic headaches and dizzy spells. i like this new doctor, plus i feel really lucky to have him, given how few of these specialists there are in the country. today he sent me for some neurological testing designed to get a better picture of the nerve damage. the first test was pretty straight forward, an ultrasound of my upper spine, but the second one, called something like nerve response testing, consisted of hooking up a couple of electrodes to my arm, a few to my head, and then giving me mild electric shocks with this two-pronged cattle-prod sort of thing. as the technician explained the process to me, he mentioned in a off-hand sort of way that this was going to take about forty minutes. “you’re going to shock me for forty minutes??” i asked. he wasn’t kidding. he smeared this electrically conductive gel on my skin under the electrodes (which he repeatedly referred to as “barbeque sauce”) and gave me these mild shocks, not enough to really hurt, but enough to feel like i’d just smashed my funny bone repeatedly, while my arm and sometimes my legs would jerk uncontrollably. the whole experience was weird. the technician was obviously trained to make small talk to keep the patient calm, so i just pestered him with questions about how it worked. “can i see what’s on the computer?” “is that sine wave normal?” “does this test respond to electrostatic interference? what if i turned on my cell phone right now?” “what does the red electrode do? what does the black one do?” the whole experience made me think of that project in high school science class where we ran electrical current through a dissected frog and made the dead frog legs dance. that was weird, too.