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The Doctor's Office

...Years of high impact aerobics and fashionably high heels have turned my upper back into a spasming tangle of muscles. I am in daily pain.
I try stretching every morning. I try lying on my floor with a large wooden ball under my back, pressing my muscles into it until they release. I soak in hot baths filled with Epsom salts. No change. I stop lifting weights. I take to lying in bed with a hot water bottle under my back. I do this even in the summer. My vertebrae are chunks of rock candy, grinding against each other as I try to arch backwards. I can make my whole spine crackle in a series of small interior explosions merely by lifting my arms over my head.

I decide to take my back to the hospital. Western medicine for me, please. White coats and years of training, sterile gloves and plaques on the wall. Maybe I can get some painkillers.

My doctor, a balding man with stubby, strong hands, has a terrier who is dying. His wife calls while I'm sitting on his table, and he talks to her for ten minutes about whether to put the dog down or keep it alive when it is suffering so. They don't come to a decision. Hanging up the phone, he is visibly upset, and returns to the examination table unsure of what I've come to see him about. I am a little embarrassed to recall him to my aches and pains when a faithful terrier is so near extinction, but I tell him about my back again. He presses my shoulders here and there. They've had the dog for almost thirteen years. Name of Manilow. Does it hurt when he presses? Yes, it does.

"You have trigger points," he tells me. "Would you like some therapy for that?"

"Yes, please," I answer. What are trigger points? I never get to ask. I am hustled out so the doctor can devote his attention to the terrier.

The physical therapist is a tiny French woman named Jeanne Marie. To get to her I follow a green line of tape through the hospital corridors until I reach the right elevator. The waiting room is full of wheelchairs, each containing a hospital inpatient who appears to be in staggering pain.

Jeanne Marie takes me back to a curtained cubicle with a padded table in it, leaves while I put on a hospital gown, and then does what she calls "MAssage." I like her; she is nervous and kind. But she will not press hard during the MAssage and she will not do anything in particular to the part of my back that hurts. She says its all related anyway and that she's got to relax all the spinal muscles. I am not certain she thinks it matters at all which part hurts, but I tell her every time anyway. "Yes, yes," she says, "But when I do my MAssage I have to go all over." She also vibrates my shoulders with electrical current. Her primary technique, however, is to put moist hot packs on my back and leave me to breathe in the hospital smell and listen to the screams and moans of the patients in the adjoining cells. An old man with a whisky voice is there on disability leave. He's been lifting heavy objects and suddenly can't move his right arm. People are being given perceptual tests that measure a kind of dyslexia where they can't distinguish shapes and colors. "Which is the circle?" the nurse keeps asking. "Which is the square?" The therapist on my right has a loud, ringing voice. "I'm Sandy," she says brightly to each patient. "Remember me? We're working together on your joint mobility." I fall into a doze here behind the mint-colored curtains, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

After three months of this, Jeanne Marie pronounces me cured and won't treat me anymore. "You are much better," she says.

"But I'm still in pain," I answer, feeling a little abandoned. "I'm don't feel better."

"You are much better," she repeats.

In the doctor's office -- in the physical therapy cell of the hospital, the dentist's chair, or the gynecologist's stirrups -- there is a tacit assumption that corporeal and emotional states are unconnected. I don't mean that Western medicine has never considered the body/mind connection, nor that certain practitioners don't communicate with and listen to their patients. What I do mean is that the Manilow doctor is interested in me only for my trigger points. The dentist only for my teeth. The gynecologist only for the cells in my pap smear. They don't care about my mind....