What a prick

Yesterday was my first "intense" therapy. I started going a new Doctor/Chiropractor/Women's specialist/pain management/holistic therapist. Long story short, he thought the pain in my arm was from small movement, such as typing or using a mouse. Once he started examining me, he couldn't find a source in my arm, but instead found a spot in my rotator cuff that was so tender, it brought tears to my eyes and shot pain down my arm. Yay, tears to my eyes and pain! Why am I so excited? This means we (most likely) found the source. Nobody has been able to find it. If the source is truly in my back, it's much more treatable than had it been from my arm. He also found extremely tender spots in my pec muscles that I didn't even know were sore.

Basically he thinks it's all muscular and that I don't need to be afraid that I have some crazy disease. He was using more pressure on my muscles than anyone else has so far. It's not that he's into hurting people, but as he said, nothing has worked so far and we really need to work harder at getting my muscles unknotted. I don't even know if unknotted is a word and considering I used it, not him, I'm going to assume it's not. Anyways, I will now be seeing him twice a week for deep tissue therapy and acupuncture.

I've never done acupuncture before and am really not a fan of needles. Not that anyone really is... unless they have some weird fetish or are in their gothic, teenage angst stage. It's not a full-on phobia, but they really do make me nervous. At this point, I don't care anymore. I just want to get better.

So, I'm laying on the table with my bare back exposed. The Dr. started feeling around for the most tender spots on my back and rotator cuff and suddenly BAM! "there's the first needle." No warning or anything. With cat-like reflexes... wait I hate cats, they're assholes.... With Superman speed (not great, but moving on...), he just started sticking needles in me. He put 2 near my armpit, four in my upper back along the original pain spot and 2 in each upper shoulder. It didn't hurt at all. It was weird, but it didn't hurt. Then to help eliminate my headaches, he put 2 needles in the back of each side of MY HEAD. Oh My God, there are needle in my HEAD!!!! Again it didn't hurt, but man it skigged me out. There were just needles stickin' out of My Head. And the last two went in my ears. Again, weird but apparently it's a good place to release endorphines. Then he left the room.

At first I lay there, thinking to myself how weird is all was. I was writing this blog in my head... that's how dedicated I am to you people. Next thing I know, about 20 minutes later, the Dr. was waking me up. It's pretty relaxing overall.

Then came the torture. He worked with the deepest muscles and even used what felt like a metal tool along my back. It felt like it was something that you'd use to tenderize meat. I now have two bright red lines of broken capularies on either side of my spine. It's really weird, but apparently that's also a Chinese treatment. They use it to detoxify you. In Western medicine, it's believed to make the muscles or tissues of some kind deep below get more blood flow and cause inflammation which is actually a healing processes. I don't remember exactly what he said to explain it, I was too busy being in a strange place of pain and total relaxation. I felt pretty good when I left his office, but flared up a few hours later. It's expected that I'll be sore for a couple of days, but then we'll see if it helps and supposedly I'll get progressively better and eventually be able to be more active.

- Mo