It’s never good when I’m lying on the physical therapist’s spine table and see him coming at me with a twinkle in his eye and a frightening piece of hardware that looks like a wheel attached to a crowbar. I know that I’ve got some, well, unique things going on in my muscles and spinal structure and other body workers have gotten varying results through unusual means, but Christ.
“Should I be nervous?” I say.
He smiles. “Just turn onto your side.”
He jabs said piece of hardware into the side of the table and said table gains the ability to pivot like one of those adjustable triangles I used back in the days when I used to bend over drafting tables and probably developed at least some of the spinal deterioration that led our paths to cross. (“It’s a temporary condition,” he often jokes, when someone about my age comes in with a back problem. “It’s called ‘40s’”)
Meanwhile, as I’m thinking up rude jokes about hardware that I would never, ever say in front of him, he brings both ends of the table together so I end up in an exaggerated fetal curl and all the stuff that’s holding my upper and middle back together feels like it’s going to tear like a hunk of overstretched Silly Putty. “Hey, watch it!” I say. “Those muscles haven’t stretched for over a year.”
“Come on,” he says. “I’ve done this to you before.”
“Tom. If you had done this to me before, I’m sure I would have remembered.”
He of course employs what he calls the “best trait in a physical therapist” which is the ability to ignore the bitching and whining of his patients while he twists them up like pretzels.
Then he eases off and stabilizes the table. “I’m not letting you leave until we get 100% range of motion.”
Easy for him to say. Tomorrow’s his day off. He won’t be around when my fibromyalgic muscles decide that they don’t like the lengths to which they’ve been taken and snap back to their original tautness. I mention this to him every time he stretches me and while he’s a good listener about other things, this bit of information he never seems to believe.
“Then you might as well have my mail delivered here and set up my computer in the corner.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Just for one day,” I say. “For one day I wish we could trade bodies. Let’s make it tomorrow.”
“Can’t,” he grins. “I’m going golfing.” He didn’t actually say this. If he had the ability to hear the bitching and whining of his patients, then this is what he might have said.
Instead he says, “Get onto your hands and knees.”
Said in a different context, and if I were healthier, I might have been intrigued. But this doesn’t sound good either. Again, rude jokes are going through my head faster than I can process them.
“I want you to sit back on your heels,” he says.
“I want to look like Halle Berry, but that’s not going to happen, either.” I didn’t actually say this, either. But if I wasn’t so busy thinking up rude jokes I might have.
I try. I try so hard. I drop my head down like he’d instructed and sit backward and, Christ. It doesn’t hurt, but it just doesn’t want to go. Even after twenty minutes of heat packs, electrical stimulation and ultrasound, it doesn’t want to go. I take a straw poll and all of my body parts want to be in a lounge chair in the Bahamas sipping a margarita.
He goes to check on another victim – I mean, patient. “Keep at it,” he calls to me as he’s walking away. “Or else I’ll come sit on your back.”
This I didn’t want to even think about, thought I doubt he’d ever do it. He’s six-foot-forever and solid.
“I don’t like you anymore, “ I say, and I can hear him laugh. I try again. A little closer this time. Each time a little closer. Then I reach my ending point. It’s where the muscles entering my kneecap scream “ENOUGH.”
He returns to my cubicle and raises his eyebrows at me, now flat on my back. “What, giving up already?”
I’ve been going to this guy for a year. I have no problem being called a wimp. I try to do what he asks, because he knows his stuff, and eventually, what he does helps me, but when my body says stop I stop. If he teases me, then I just ignore him.
“Enough,” I say.
“Then do your stretches.”
The bread-and-butter stretch in my program is what he calls the side-to-side, where you’re on your back, with your knees bent, and with feet and knees together, move your knees from side to side. It’s supposed to correct any misalignments in your spine and stretch your back muscles. When I first started I could only move my knees between 11:00 and 1:00. He’d wanted me to get to 10:00 and 2:00, and that’s where I’ve been for months, less when something in my back is stuck. Now he seems to want more. He watches me for a while, shaking his head with amusement, then, apparently unsatisfied with my timid attempts to go farther, puts out a hand so far from where I think I can move my knees it might as well be on Pluto.
Eventually I touched it with my knee.
“There you go,” he says. “Keep doing it.”
I’m doing it. I’m going to be sore as hell tomorrow, but I’m doing it. My knees are almost resting flat against the table – well, if the table were wider. I feel something in my upper lumbar snap – don’t worry, this is a good kind of snap, a misalignment that both he and my chiropractor haven’t been able to fix for a while. Christ. I’m moving. I’m moving. I’m almost…Gumby.
I’m released. I’ve done it. He high-fives me and tells me to walk on the treadmill
I walk. I feel taller. I feel…strange.
He’d gone to check on something in his office, then after a few minutes, comes back in. “So how do you feel?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet,” I say. “My body’s still in shock.”
“No, no. You’re supposed to say, ‘Tom, I’ve never felt so good.”
And in a different context…oh, stop it. I smile into the mirror. “Tom, I never felt so good.”
I might have a different answer tomorrow. But for now, this is enough.
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