Medical Matters #1 :: The Furious Compassion of Diligent Dr Payne

Last week I went back to Dr Payne, my vicious, needle-wielding osteopath. Physically, Dr Payne is rather intimidating. He’s a little shorter than me, and he certainly weighs less, but somehow he seems bigger. He has presence. I guess it’s because he knows who he is. Which is to say, he has no doubts as to his role in the world. Actually, maybe he does have doubts. I don’t know. He has confidence though. He knows what he’s doing. Plus he has huge muscular hands and he looks like a 50-year-old Mark Ronson.

Before he got on with the important business of kneading my spine, he wanted to know how I’d been getting on with the stretches he’d recommended. I had to confess that I hadn’t really made them a regular part of my life. I’d done them twice in fact. At which point, suddenly and surprisingly, Dr Payne got really rather angry with me.

He wanted to know why I hadn’t been doing them. I had to think about it. Why hadn’t I been doing them? I was pretty sure that they would cause me less pain and generally improve the quality of my life, so why wasn’t I doing them?

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been going through a bit of a down period actually.’

‘What do you mean, a down period?’

‘Well, I’ve been a bit down.’

‘Why?’ he wanted to know. He was very brusque, and slightly unconvinced, like already he didn’t believe me.

‘I dunno really….’

‘Why don’t you know? What’s wrong with you?’

Incredibly brusque.

‘Nothing. It’s just that I’ve been trying hard to get my life to go in a certain direction and nothing seems to be working out.’

‘Well, it doesn’t sound like you’ve been trying very hard to me. I gave you a few simple exercises to do, which would take no more than ten minutes a day, and you haven’t even managed that. Have you been swimming? You said you were going to go swimming.’

I shook my head.

He shook his head.

‘So what’s the problem?’

I didn’t know what to tell him. The truth would probably have been, ‘I’m feeling a little sorry for myself and a little self-indulgent, and very lazy, and I need a good kick up the arse.’ But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, stupidly, ‘Well, I lost a lot of stuff in a laptop accident and… you know, I just got down.’

He looked at me like I’d just started speaking Afrikaans. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ he said. ‘What’s that got to do with your back?’

‘Well, no, nothing really. I just… it’ll mean a lot of extra work….’

‘Oh, boo hoo,’ he said.

I laughed.

‘You don’t know you’re born, do you?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Am I born?’ I shrugged.

He shook his head again and glared at me. I blushed.

‘Take off your shirt then. Loosen your trousers and lie face down.’

Then – there’s really no other way of putting it – he beat me up. It was under the guise of massage and osteopathic manipulation, but in reality, he beat the crap out of me. When I actually cried out at a couple of points, with tears springing to my eyes, he told me to stop whining. ‘Your muscles are soggy!’ he yelled. Then he stuck some acupuncture needles in my back and sat down opposite me.

‘How’s the weight loss going?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

I sighed. ‘Not well,’ I answered.

‘Any idea why that might be?’ he asked, injecting a little softness into his voice in order that I might relax a little and make myself more vulnerable to attack.

‘Well, yeah. I’ve not been exercising and I’ve been eating a lot of junk again.’

‘Any idea why that might be?’ he asked again.

‘I just….’ I harrumphed. ‘I’ve given up again, a bit. I suppose. I’m pissed off, frankly, and I’ve stopped caring.’

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s a shame. Do you read?’

‘Not as much as I used to,’ I answered.

‘Not as much as you used to,’ he said. Then he stood up and walked around behind me muttering. I was annoying him, I could tell. I was annoying myself.

It is amazing how quickly one loses one’s motivation. It’s amazing how easily it just evaporates, along with all that good feeling you had from actually getting off your arse and doing something – that good feeling which you swore had changed your life and made you realise what you were capable of. That evaporates too. In a matter of days. In fact, it’s like a Tamagotchi. If you don’t keep feeding it, it just dies.

Payne twiddled the needles. ‘Have you read a book called She’s Come Undone?’ he asked.

I told him I hadn’t heard of it.

‘Read it,’ he said. ‘Now put your clothes on.’

We made another appointment, for another two weeks’ time. Before I left, he said, ‘Do me a favour, will you?’

‘Do my stretches?’ I guessed.

He gave me a little scowl. ‘Just make an effort,’ he said.

It reminded me of that scene in Naked, when the embittered security guard takes Johnny to a café and tells him, ‘Don’t waste your life’.

‘OK,’ I said.

And so I did. Because it meant a lot to me that this complete stranger had taken the time and the effort to actually get annoyed with me. I was rather touched. So I went into town and I tracked down a copy of She’s Come Undone. And then I came home and I stretched. Then I ate a vat of rice pudding with some choc chip cookies in it, turned on the telly and told Gordon Ramsay, ‘I’ll make an effort in September’.

And I will.

I am.

I’ll show him.