The agony and the osteopathy
Lloyd Evans was left a whimpering wreck when his back seized up. Then an alternative therapist got her hands on him...
Iwas attacked last November. It happened without warning as I was crossing a car park. My back seized up and I collapsed to the ground in agony, unable to move. My lower spine had been grumbling at me all summer, needling me, pinching me, and I’d ignored it. This was its revenge. After three hours in casualty I was told by a doctor in an Andy Pandy suit that I had the symptoms of sciatica but he couldn’t be sure. The prognosis was equally vague. Weeks or months, maybe. Years? He didn’t know.
Back at home, I was reduced to the state of a whimpering invalid. I couldn’t walk or even sit up. Climbing out of bed was agony, dressing was torture. But the instant I lay flat the pains vanished. Supine on my Sleepeezee, I was multi-talented. Eat, talk, read, make phonecalls. Easy. I could type with a laptop on my stomach. I could imbibe (brandy, fewer trips to the loo) and the hard stuff seemed to soften the pain, which intensified towards evening. The trouble was that this bed-lubbing state seemed compatible with a quite different diagnosis: paralytic sloth. As I rolled and thrashed on the laundered sheets it was hard to convince visitors I hadn’t pulled off a beautiful scam and induced my girlfriend to ply me with sweetbreads and toddies while I languished on my mound, ordering cakes, rattling out copy and getting hammered all day long. Like Churchill. But this was no scam. My life had taken a strange and alarming turn. I couldn’t even blow my nose without pain. And sneezing! Uh! I was caught by surprise one day. ‘Atishoo!’ The sudden locking of the muscle-system was like a hot knife through a raw nerve. I’ll remember that sneeze as long as I live.
With backache there are horrible complications known as ‘advice’. Everyone has the answer but the answer is always different. This sounded familiar. This sounded like religion. Spinal injury provides a perfect microclimate in which science wilts and mysticism thrives: widespread ignorance, a loud clamour for answers, no clear facts being ascertainable. So enter the spivs, the theologians, the quacks, the acupuncturists, the necromancers, the levitation-therapists. I flipped through the phonebook and found its sickly yellow pages ripe with experts touting for my credulity. ‘Osteopath’ was the word I’d heard most frequently. I called a bone-monger at random and was offered an appointment the next day! Hairdressers are busier than that. Still. The following afternoon a cab came to my door and I arranged myself flat along its rear seats. We set off at seven miles an hour across the tank-traps of London’s speed-calmed roads. ‘Damn humps,’ said the driver, ‘gonna bust my suspension.’ ‘Yeah,’ I winced. ‘Snap.’ At the clinic, my lovely skeletologist, Nicci, welcomed me into a fragrant pine nook and invited me to slip into a towel robe and remove my clothes. Which I did. It all seemed oddly suggestive: the seclusion, the couch, the burning joss-stick, the bottles of handcream on a low table, the severe brunette in a nurse’s costume. She looked at me. ‘So, what’s the problem?’ ‘She just doesn’t understand me, Matron.’ We went through a rigorous questionnaire, then she gave me a few tests. I had to stand up, raise my arms, crook my neck, touch my knees and perform various other I’m-a-daffodil-swaying-in-the-wind type theatricals. Finally she delivered her verdict. Lumbo-sacral junction disc herniation. I fell on these words greedily and repeated them aloud several times. My enthusiasm prompted her to write the phrase down. What magical syllables. A Rumpelstiltskin moment. My enemy’s name had been disclosed to me. Its secret self was within my power.
Fifty quid seemed a bargain for this nugget of science and I was ready to limp off home, but she wanted her money’s worth. ‘Lie down. We’ve got time for some treatment.’ Right. I arranged myself on the padded couch and she spent the next ten minutes beating me up. When she’d finished, I rolled weakly off the bed and stood as straight as I could. She suggested I come back on Saturday morning to be beaten up again. I meekly agreed since to decline would have implied that I hadn’t enjoyed being beaten up first time round. I made an appointment at reception and hobbled outside on to the pavement. I started walking, as she’d advised. Within yards I was in agony. My shins and calves were racked with cramps, like electric shocks. I crouched on the ground, panting and gasping out the pain, as power-lifters do at the limits of their strength. I managed to stand. There was a cab firm nearby and I dragged myself to its threshold. Moments later I was loosely arranged across the back seat of another reeking car. I was borne home across London’s self-inflicted craters, leaping and bouncing like a can of Dulux in a mix-and-tint machine.
I reached my kitchen, handling myself like a priceless china doll and eased my limbs on to the floor, breathing slowly and relaxing my muscles. Elbows out behind me, I slid gently backwards, descending at last into the horizontal. Relief. I felt the bone-necklace of my spine returning clickclick-click into painless realignment. I promptly fell asleep. Later I phoned the clinic to extricate myself from my cowardly appointment. ‘I’ll call again when I’m well enough to take another major setback.’ That’s alternative therapy for you. They can’t make you better so they make you worse. Still, it gets you out of the house. And it gives you something to talk about. When you’re ill this can be quite helpful.
My debility made me fractious. I took it out on my computer’s know-all spellcheck facility and subjected it to a quiz about the leaders of the free world. It hadn’t a clue who they were but it thought it did. Rumsfeld? ‘Rumour’ or ‘rumpus’. Cheney came out as ‘cheerless’ and ‘cheque’. It thought Dubya might be ‘dubious’ or ‘duck’. A hatful of ideas popped up for Hoon including ‘hoot’ and ‘hooked tool’, and Blair emerged as ‘blameable’ or ‘blackguard’. I was amazed. My meek little Chinese lappie turned out to be quite a gifted political satirist. But ‘spellcheck’ had it completely stumped. It thought I meant ‘speedspanner’.
One day, as I skimmed through an astrology chart, it occurred to me that everyone can name their star sign and no one can name their MEP. Perhaps we have more faith in the zodiac than in the European parliament.
Eventually nature decided I’d suffered enough. She packed away her instruments of torture and moved on to the next victim. Her accomplice, the fair Nicci, called me. She was the only person in two months who didn’t ask me about my back. ‘Are you going to pay this bill or what?’
Previous page
