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.

Medical Monday :: Progress

Let’s call her ‘Nursey’. Actually, let’s not. That’s a rubbish name, and also potentially rather patronising. Let’s call her Dr Lovely.

So, after hearing all about my stomach pain on Friday, and then prodding me for a while, both physically and verbally, Dr Lovely gave me a couple of pieces of paper. One of them I'm to take to one hospital and have blood taken from me, after first fasting for twelve hours; the other I have to take to another hospital and arrange for an ultrasound.

‘Is that OK?’ she said. ‘Are you content?’

I liked Dr Lovely. She was extortionately personable.

I’d also told her about my back problems and the fact that I’d been seeing a very expensive chiropractor. In response, Dr Lovely not only gave me a brief but detailed and useful overview of workstation ergonomics, but she also informed me that her surgery had a resident osteopath with whom I was welcome to make an appointment.

When we were all done and she was writing up my request forms, I mentioned the knot of lactic acid which Naomi had identified in the small of my back. I told her that when I’d first discovered it, aged 19 or so, I had assumed it was cancer and had gone along to the doctors to receive the last rites, only to be told that it merely a sebaceous cyst, and utterly benign. Charming even. Dr Lovely had a little look and told me immediately that it was too near the surface to be lactic acid. It was definitely a cyst of some kind. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘I mean, is there no room for doubt?’ She shook her head. ‘This doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in my chiropractor,’ I said.

‘I can understand that,’ said Dr Lovely.

At reception on my way out, I was informed that there'd been a cancellation later that afternoon, so I returned a couple of hours later and shook the stout strong hand of the osteopath. Let’s call him Dr Payne.

Half an hour later, on leaving the surgery, I actually felt better. It didn’t last that long, but for a while I could feel a definite improvement. Plus, where Naomi couldn’t actually manage to make my lower spine go ‘pop’, Dr Payne managed it in seconds. He even stuck some needles in me for good measure. And he explained lots of things to me about the two sets of muscles in my back and how the smaller, postural ones which deal with the day to day movement of the body sometimes get a little lazy and fall into disuse. Plus when he massaged the larger muscles in my back, it really really hurt. At one stage, just to illustrate something he was saying, he had a go at one of my shoulders. I can’t actually remember what he was saying because the tremendous pain immediately blocked everything else out. I do remember telling him that what he was doing was agony, and he explained – whilst gleefully digging in a thumb – ‘That’s because this what we call a “trigger point”.’ The sadistic bastard.

Still. Rather a sadistic but effective, free bastard than an extortionate and weak-fingered fool. Sorry, Naomi, but I feel rather let down if I’m honest.

Indeed, the first thing I did on returning home was to cancel my next appointment with the chiropractor.

So. On the whole, Friday was very satisfactory. I still have a pain in the stomach and I still have a bad back, but at least I’m doing something about them. The one thing I didn’t make any progress on was my increasingly distressing and frankly rather unpleasant anus. The fact is, I was embarrassed. Dr Lovely was simply too lovely, and clearly too much of a lady to even have to hear about such an abomination. Let alone potentially look at it, or give it a poke. I think I might hang on for a male doctor. It feels kind of cowardly, like someone refusing to buy condoms from a female pharmacist, but there it is. On the other hand though, coward? Or gentleman?

Yeah, OK, I'm a coward.

Bye for now. And here's wishing you a Happy Monday. I hope your anus is in better shape than mine.

Back and Forth

I went back to the chiropractor this afternoon having more or less decided that it would be my last session. I know I was told at the beginning of the first session that there were no quick-fix cures, but even so, after two full sessions, I was starting to lose faith. Plus, it’s really back-breakingly expensive.


Then, as I was waiting to be seen, I noticed a certificate on the wall of the reception. It belonged to another of the chiropractors at the same practice. It was a framed diploma. In aromatherapy. Now I don’t know about you – although I can guess, because you come across as pretty cynical on the whole – but whenever I hear the word ‘aromatherapy’, I smell a rat. A large, new age rat with chimes for teeth and a trail of crystals and 'healing stones' oozing out of its puckered rear end. For me, it’s a dirty great sham. The champagne of shams. Snake oil, essentially. Tangerine and lavender – no matter how pleasant on the olfactory neurons – will not cure cancer and will not bring about peace in the Middle East.

So that diploma put the nail in the coffin. I had decided. No more chiropractic. Next time I would try osteopathy.

But then I went into that little room with Naomi and I stripped down to my pants and lay on the table – Naomi asks me just to take my top off but I insist on stripping down to my pants – and by the end of half an hour of pummelling and manipulating, I had decided to go back.

I don’t know – no one knows – but... Naomi could be The One.

I know it sounds silly, but something in the way she tenderly holds my neck, just before she violently jerks it till it goes ‘click’; something in the way this afternoon her hand gently and quite unnecessarily brushed my calf; something in the way she offered me a piece of her underwear at the end of today’s session… Well, it might have been hers. A stocking, or a sheer sock of some kind. With a tennis ball in it…

I don’t know. No one knows. You know? But let’s face it, I am a giant lactic acidic knot of love and there is every possibility that she wants me.

Speaking of which, I must tell you about Morag. Tomorrow. If at all possible.

Hope you're well. Until soon.