About a week ago, I was shoveling some slush out in the driveway and when I flung a
shovelful of it into the woods, I felt something in my back twist just below my
left shoulder blade. The shooting pain that ensued in my neck and shoulder felt as if
someone had just tried to skewer me for shish-kebab. Even taking a deep breath hurt. I whined for a little while, then convinced myself it would be
fine the next day.
It
wasn’t. In fact, the next morning I
couldn’t even move my arm high enough to comb my hair or zip the back of my
shirt. I whined some more.
“Why
don’t you go to the doctor and have it checked out?” one of my friends
suggested. “You don’t want to lose the use of your arm, do you?”
“It’s been only one day,” I said. “I’ll wait
and see how it feels.”
The
truth was that even if the pain increased to point where I’d have to go out and
buy a box of bullets just so I could bite down on one, I still wouldn’t see a
doctor. Why not? Two words:
physical therapy.
Back
when I was in my late 20s, I took a modern-dance class and ended up with a very
sore hip. In fact, the hip became so
painful, I had to use a cane to get around.
Finally, after I’d nearly depleted the local pharmacy's total inventory of ibuprofen, I
decided I’d better have a doctor take a look at my hip. He gave me a series of cortisone injections
directly into the hip joint, but they didn’t have any effect (other than to
make me beg for mercy), so he decided to send me to physical therapy.
I'll admit I felt uneasy about going because I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I had visions of being twisted into a pretzel or being stretched on a torture device like "the rack."
My therapist was a young guy named Phil, who told me he’d been on the job for less than a week. The fact that he was a rookie did little to ease my apprehension, but even worse, he looked even more nervous than I did. His trembling hands and the little beads of perspiration lining his top lip pretty much were a dead giveaway.
Phil avoided touching me at all costs, which
I thought was pretty weird for a physical therapist. If his hand accidentally brushed against me while he was showing
me how to do an exercise, he would yank it away so fast, you’d think I had just
delivered 100,000 volts to it. Somehow
I wasn’t all that surprised when three days into my therapy, Phil mysteriously
disappeared and was replaced by Joanne.
I’m
pretty sure Joanne had been an army drill-sergeant in a previous life. Unlike Phil, she was a take-charge kind of
person who was determined to have me doing kicks worthy of the Rockettes in no
time flat. Five sessions later, however,
when I still came limping in with my cane, Joanne began to lose her optimism.
“I’m
going to send you to hydrotherapy,” she announced. “Basically, that’s where you
sit in a big whirlpool tub and have jets of water spray onto your sore
spots. So be sure to bring your bathing
suit next time.”
The
whirlpool tub sounded like a great idea to me, but not the swimsuit. I didn’t
even own one, and with my bad hip, I certainly didn’t feel like going out
shopping for one. I decided I’d bring a
pair of old shorts and a halter-top and use those instead.
The
night before my first hydrotherapy session, I was feeling a little nervous, so I decided to do something to take my mind off it. Did I do something normal, like bake
brownies or watch a comedy show on TV? Heck,
no. I dyed my long, reddish-brown hair
jet black! Thank goodness I used a
semi-permanent dye instead of a permanent one, because I ended up looking like
a cross between an out-of-shape Cher and Morticia Addams.
The
next day at therapy, I was led to a big stainless-steel tub, churning with
bubbles. Unfortunately, I’d remembered to bring my shorts, but not a top. The only top I had with me was the one I was wearing, and I wasn’t
about to use that…not unless I wanted to leave looking like a contestant
in a wet T-shirt contest. The therapist
gave me a hospital johnny to wear over my shorts.
Believe me, I wasn’t a pretty sight.
I
started to climb into the tub and was straddling the edge when the
hydrotherapist came dashing over. “What on earth are you doing?” she gasped.
Even
though I thought it was pretty obvious, I shrugged and said, “Getting into the
tub.”
“You
can’t do that!” she said, shaking her head. “WE have to put you into the tub!”
Before
I knew it, I was hanging from a crane-like mechanism directly above the
tub. All I could think about as they
lowered me into the water was how much I must have looked like a cow in one of
those contraptions helicopters used when they hoisted large animals off the
ground.
The
warm water felt heavenly. I closed my
eyes and completely relaxed as the pulsating water hit all of my achy
parts. But the soak didn’t last nearly
long enough. Too soon, I was lifted out
of the water, my dripping johnny nearly transparent and feeling as if it
weighed about 10 pounds.
The
therapist handed a fluffy white towel to me.
I dried my face and the ends of my hair with it, and then heard her
gasp. I followed her eyes, which were
staring at the white towel. To my horror, it was covered with big streaks of
black hair dye…and, I soon discovered, so was the johnny.
I
was so embarrassed, I never showed my face in that place again.
You
know, now that I’m sitting here reminiscing about my physical therapy
experience, my shoulder and back miraculously are feeling much better.
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