Still on the hunt for a miracle cure for my back pain, one that will have me leaping off the examination table rather than rolling, pushing and gnashing my teeth off of it, I decided to give the one thing I had yet to try a shot--acupuncture. One look at my crooked hips and Frankenstein hobble and people were eager to share the names of all the acupuncturists they worshipped throughout the city. I was grateful for all the advice, but having already spent a good amount of time and money on this problem without relief--a moist heating pad, a back brace, three visits to the doctor, prescriptions, and countless cab rides--I decided to go with the cheapest acupuncturist who also worked on Saturday and did not require an appointment. I went deep into Chinatown to Linsister.
Linsister is on the Bowery on the south side of the Manhattan Bridge. The street is crowded with shoppers and vendors--there's a line at a food stall for something that smells fried and sweet, a man ladles dried herbs into a plastic container, street stalls are packed with chirping electronics, and toys tied to awnings bob and whirl above moving heads of the crowd. At number four Bowery, the door is marked with a reflexology chart, and inside is a Chinese medicine and herbs shop. A plump woman sits behind the counter drinking from a tall ceramic cup with wet leaves stuck to the rim.
The woman smiles and nods and I ask her for acupuncture. "You have pain?" she asks. I answer with an anxious and emphatic, Yes! As if she's just understood my whole life in that one question, though it is not hard to tell I'm in pain by looking at me. She tells me to go to the back of the store and up the stairs to the second floor, which I do, trying to manage the hobble and pain simultaneously.
At the top of the stairs and through a hollow, wood-paneled door, a man in a white lab coat greets me. After I sign in and we work out some mix-up about me having to use the bathroom (I did not have to go), he leaves the examination room so I can remove my pants and lay down on the table under a blanket. There's a clean white sheet of tissue paper on the examination table and though the room looks shopworn, what my dentist's office from the seventies might look like if he never renovated, it is clean and tidy. I lay on my stomach and wait.
The man I presume is a doctor comes back into the room. He is friendly with square, gold-rimmed glasses, a discreet smile and his lab coat makes him look rectangular. Soon he will be poking me with needles and hopefully he will be removing the lump of pain I've been carrying around with me for a week. One can pray. Once I am able to move myself to lay on my side (grunt, pant, grunt, tissue paper ripping, gasp), I hear the needles come out.
I am poked. It actually hurts a little. Or hurt is too strong a word. It's a prick and a punch, like he's hammering the needle into my skin. Indeed, I think he's actually hammering needles into me. How long are these needles? Is there a chance of him losing one or hammering too hard? It's exciting and terrifying. I stare at the blue slanted stripe painted on the wall. It's a thin layer of blue paint and a little dirty. Prick, drive. He asks me if it's okay, and I say it's okay. He's got at least five or six needles in me, mostly on my side and my back and then he starts driving a few into the sides of my thigh, one in the back of my calf. This is definitely cool. Somewhere else a bell sounds, a timer going off, and once the needle is in my calf, I sense he's done. My doctor leaves the room and I hear the buzz ticking of a timer behind my head, what must be my timer. Except I have no idea how long I'm supposed to lay here. I figure it's going to be about twenty minutes and go with it. At one point, my hand falls asleep.
Laying in this position, there is a definite pain in my back. As I lay there, I think about this pain, I feel my muscles twitch and relax and move. At one point, I think the pain is gone and then it's there again. And then I think I feel the pain moving, getting lower into my but and hip. I feel a warm line or flow through the needles. When someone was recommending acupuncture to me, she explained it as a release and redirection of trapped energy, like untwisting a garden hose. I think about that garden hose and the energy trapped in the painful area of my back. I can't tell if this is working. I can hear a rustling of tissue paper and a karate chop massage going on in another room. The walls are thin, made of single sheets of sheet rock. People in the hall say hello and goodbye and thank you. A woman speaks Chinese and a man responds in Chinese and they both laugh.
My timer sounds after about twenty minutes and I've managed not to twitch any of the needles out of place, though my phone has rang loud and clear while I am laying on the table. The karate chopping in the other room has stopped. My doctor comes back in. Or I assume it's my doctor because I can't move to look. The wrong turn of my head may mean a jolting pain in my back. Pluse, I'm still full of needles.
The needles come out in tiny pinches. I wonder if there's blood involved. The doctor changed his gloves during the driving of the needles into my skin. There must be blood. My karate chop massage begins. He knows exactly where my painful spots are and he digs into them, deeply. Clearly this man knows what he's doing and what he's dealing with. My back muscles must be frightened. They may have met their match. I manage to not yelp when he digs very hard into a very painful spot. He must be getting at something and maybe then I can leap off the table. Right before I'm about to scream out in pain, he stops digging into my back, claps his hands together and says, "Okay!" Which means I have to get dressed again.
It's funny what a chore things like getting dressed and undressed, putting your shoes on or taking them off, getting up or sitting down become when your back is useless. And how many more times a day I have been required to dress and undress since my back has been useless. But I do it one more time, and getting off the table, I sense something has changed. This has possibly worked. I can still feel the old pain descending onto the bones again, the knots reforming, but I'm lighter and the numbness at the top of my thigh is tender. This doctor has clearly done something. Will it be enough?
By the time I'm back downstairs, I'm halfway to my old hobble. And lowering myself into the seat of the cab is similarly difficult and painful and traumatic, though maybe slightly less so? It's very hard to say. And although I don't think this session has cured me or done much for my immediate problem, I have to say I'm a fan and I'll probably return to Linsister another day.
