The day Mrs. Flynn hurt her knee was the best day of Helen Bibb's life. That mishap launched a chain of events for Bibb's daughter Laura, a 10-year old, developmentally delayed girl, who went from being the neighborhood pity to the neighborhood Rocky. This happened all because Pam Flynn hurt her knee and went to see a local chiropractor for her injuries.
It's one of those quiet, tree-lined residential blocks where people move in and stay a lifetime. It's where neighbors know more about each other than their names and what kind of cars they drive. They know their personal lives, both the good and the bad. Pam Flynn and neighbor Tracy Johnson and Elaine Alexander have shared many cups of morning coffee with Helen Bibb. And over the years, they've heard how Helen's daughter, Laura, was diagnosed as a baby as being mildly mentally retarded. And that when it came true for her to start school, her skills and test scores placed her at the severely retarded level in her class.
They learned that Helen and her husband never stopped fighting for their daughter and that Helen spent half her lifetime looking for the answer to her daughter's problems. She wanted to know why she kept falling, or would start to binge-eat and refuse to talk to even her family for long stretches of time.
The Internet and the television didn't give her the answers that she hoped for, and neither did her doctors, who vowed that everything medical science had to offer was being done to help her daughter. "I was on the diagnosis merry-go-round, going nowhere," Helen says. "There were plenty of explanations and excuses, but no answers." She looked everywhere.
The latest problem came when Laura began to suffer from swelling in her knees that were diagnosed as very bad growing pains. "She had foot orthotics put in her shoes, but her knees were still swollen and getting worse." Helen said "Her right leg and foot were starting to turn in. The orthopedic doctors suggested knee braces and painkillers." This was not the answer for her problem.
From behind their window on her street the neighbors watched the slow deterioration of this little girl they had known since birth. She was now barely able to walk down the street without falling down on the sidewalk.
"We had all watched her grow up, and to see her in pain, falling down like this, well, it was heartbreaking," said the neighbor. There was nothing they could do but give the Bibb family moral support. They weren't doctors and didn't know what to do.
Then one day Pam Flynn hurt her knee and went to see a local chiropractor for her pain. While she was being treated by the local chiropractor at his clinic, she mentioned her 10-year-old neighbor who was falling down all the time on the floor and would soon need special braces and a steady diet of painkillers and more medicine just to get around all the time. "The idea of this wonderful girl who had already been through so much, now needing braces to walk really threw me," Pam said.
When she got home later that day, Pam told Helen about her chiropractor that helped her, and that he also treated kids. "Go see him," Pam said. "What could it hurt?" She was trying to help her. She wanted her to get better.
The chiropractor was looking for anything that would interfere with Laura's nervous system, and he found a vertebra at the base of her skull that was way out of place and putting pressure on her nerves. So he adjusted the vertebra. No medication was prescribed. Not braces and painkillers. Just a simple spinal adjustment to fix the problem that ailed her for so long was what was done.
"The first thing Laura did was let out a big sigh of relief," Helen said. "That night she came down the stairs by herself. We were stunned at what was happening. This used to take forever with Laura holding on to both rails to keep from falling down, her dad in front so she wouldn't fall, and me guiding from behind." They did this regularly.
"Laura now wants to move and run and be a real kid for the first time. All the doctors said that her foot would stay turned in and there was nothing they could do. Well, her foot has straightened out too." And during the summer when this all happened, her daughter did something Helen, in her most optimistic dreams, never would have thought possible she could do. Laura swam with the dolphins at Sea World.
"She's an entirely different little girl, mentally as well as physically," says neighbor Elaine. "She used to be shy and hide behind her mother. Now, she's in the open talking. When we'd walk the dogs, Laura couldn't keep up. Now, she's out front. It's been a remarkable transformation."
Miracle or simply an adjustment, Ron and Helen Bibb are feeling like the luckiest people in the world, seeing their daughter smiling and happier than ever. "Look at her - she's so proud of herself," Helen said recently, watching Laura help Pam and Harry Flynn walk their dogs down Hortense Street.
The little girl who used to be the neighborhood pity is now the neighborhood hero. The chiropractic care changed her life forever. Stories like this and more happen every day at the San Diego chiropractic offices of New Century Spine Centers.
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