Today was my second session of physical therapy. I feel like it’s a weird sadomasochistic hooker scenario. I basically paid $50 to be prodded, shoved, bullied, and shocked. Is this physical therapy or an S&M club?
I don’t know if it’s helping. My shoulder aches, more than it did before I started this regimen of stretches and pulls and motions. Is that a sign things are healing? Or that I’m doing it wrong? Or is that the guilt of paying for the privilege of being manipulated?
The PT yogi… guru… practitioner? What do you call a PT expert? Therapist? Whatever the proper term, the man who poked me said I have good range of motion, the joints seem okay, and the real issue seems to be muscular, specifically a deltoid something or other. He showed me a skeletal and muscular diagram that was I suppose a variation on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It may as well have been a foreign language because words and acronyms were industrial strength sprinkled around like powder sugar at Cafe Du Monde. The short, short version is that he modified one of the stretches he thought was EMGing the floozbat and that should engage the coordinates from the navicomputer to power up the ludicrous speed flux capacitor.
He asked me if I could come in next week to follow up. I told him I was going to be in Antarctica. He thought I was joking. I was not.
So the really, really short version is that he added in a stretch or two, swapped out the one he suspected was causing my shoulder to hurt more, not less, as a result of the stretching, and then had me wind a crank that presumably was powering some emergency generator on a mystical island with stranded castaways. Following that, he hooked up electrodes to my shoulder and ran current through my deltoid for 15 minutes. I suppose that’s shock therapy.
And I paid money to be treated so. There were poles and pulleys and the air smelled of sweat and cigarettes. Come to think of it, maybe by day it’s a health club/PT facilty and by night it’s an S&M club. That’s one way to maximize the profits.
Still, when you charge $50 to hand me a pink dumbbell, have me roll my arms to generate electricity, then use that electricity to shock my shoulder, I gotta think there’s a decent profit margin as it is.
But who am I to judge? I have no idea what a hooker costs either so much like my stroll through a Canal St Walgreens in New Orleans, I have no idea what’s a good price or a bad price.
As I’m wont to do, I’m going to go for a run to try and clear my head and wash this taste out of my mouth. Is that regret or healing? Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.