A Cure For Cancer

When I was much younger, I could get really good and sick and not read a thing into it. That's all changed. For instance, a couple months ago I developed a little strain in my front ribcage. On the one to ten pain scale it rated about a .005. Merely by spending my waking hours thinking about it, I got the little strain to show up on the back of the ribcage too, and got the pain level all the way up to .006. I could only feel it when I inhaled deeply. Naturally, I concluded it was cancer. Let other people ignore symptoms until it's too late; I'm going to be proactive.

I got a chest x-ray (normal, but what do they know?) and made an appointment with a doctor, and in the meantime I went to my massage therapist, Maria McLaughlin. She's scary strong, but she uses her powers for good. Still, I almost didn't mention the whole ribcage thing, because I was pretty sure it was cancer, and not part of her terrain. She listened, and peered at my midsection for a moment, and then rolled up her sleeves and told me she'd fix it. She wasn't even wearing sleeves. That's how strong she is.

I've been to a number of massage therapists over the years, and there are as many styles and methods as there are practitioners. It always feels good, but some of them aren't really giving themselves what I'd call a workout. Some of them just tap on you as though their fingertips were petals, or blessings. Some of them just massage your aura. Some of them even leave the room, probably for a cigarette, after laying warm rocks on you, which is perfectly pleasant if you don't think of it as the beginning of being buried alive.

But Maria is determined to set you straight, or make you swear up and down that she did. First she oils up. (It smells great, but I'm pretty sure it's bear grease; I believe I saw the unfortunate grease donors stacked up outside in the alley after she strangles them. Could be cardboard boxes, but I think it's bears.) Then she starts moving parts of you around to see how far they'll go before they snap off. Basically it's the same thing you do to the chicken to see if it's done. She waggles your leg around counterclockwise: first to nine o'clock, then to six, and by the time she's gotten to three o'clock, you've briefly glimpsed parts of yourself you'd only heard described by others.

As far as I can tell, Maria's plan is to remove your muscle fibers, one by one, from their moorings, straighten out your skeleton, and then re-attach the muscles when everything is all plumb and square. She pulls your musculature away from the bones and hangs it up somewhere nearby so it doesn't wrinkle. I would have thought the little muscles along the ribcage would be tough to spring loose, but she didn't have a problem with it; just got a grip on the spleen, wedged her knee on the liver and pulled upward on the sternum. Then she tucked the unattached muscle fibers under the gallbladder and did a half-hitch with an intestine loop to get them out of the way until she was ready to stick them back on again.

From there, straightening out the skeleton was a breeze. She only needed to whack at about a third of it, and threaten the rest, which fell into line out of sheer terror.

It's been a week. My cancer is gone. I swear it, up and down.

The Cold Shoulder

The seeds of dissension had been sown in Dave's shoulder long ago. There had been murmurings of discontent. Yet still it came as something of a shock when the whole crew of muscles and ligaments on the upper right went on strike last year, sat down and refused to move. On the left side, everything was still laboring away, but on the right, there was a mass mutiny of operating musculature. Dave's shoulder was locked up.

A "frozen shoulder," according to the medical lights consulted, is a very common event. It is idiopathic in nature. This doesn't mean there's no cause; it just means the doctors don't know what the hell it is. But, they agreed, it is very painful and very stubborn and in most cases it just goes away by itself in about a year, also for no reason at all.

However, they pointed out cheerfully, if Dave didn't want to just hang out for a year waiting for the day the crew stood up and went back to work, there were a number of things he could occupy himself with in the meantime, none of which were promised to speed things up at all. My own inclination, upon hearing such a prognosis, would be to park my fanny in a recliner for a year and suck up unemployment compensation and potent narcotics until things improved, or I could no longer tell. That's just how I'm wired. I do not expect to get through life without some sort of medical complication, and if I can just manage to avoid the conditions that would knock beer off my diet, I will consider it a life well lived.

But Dave is more of a do-something kind of guy. So he signed up for the whole works, beginning with physical therapy presided over by one of the mandatory sturdy German women who seem to go in for that kind of work. He doubled down with an equally sturdy massage technician who was capable of taking him right to the floor any day of the week. She was freakishly strong and competent and furthermore was not at all troubled by shrieking or weeping. Then she tag-teamed with an acupuncturist, even though Dave had always been unusually leery of needles. He returned for several more sessions, and the shoulder began to grind around a bit. A penitent seeking mortification could not have been more faithful.

The next stop was our remarkable nephew Damon, who has several years of study in Chinese medicine and massage therapy and a dozen other things and a mental map to the body's energy flow and his own set of acupuncture needles and numerous other more mysterious paraphernalia. What he had his heart set on was "cupping." I'm not a jealous girl but this struck me as a most inappropriate activity for family members, and yet Dave submitted to it. It involved some odd equipment that we shall be calling "do-hickeys." And now he is emblazoned with giant polka-dots. It's festive, I must say. But we could do with some leeches, and something tells me Damon would know where to get some.

It's been nine months now; in another three, Dave should be all better.