I woke up in excruciating pain. My physical therapy exercises only seemed to make things worse. Despite the fact that I could see the demonic wound in my back, I knew that mundane medicine could help relieve the pain in the short term as I’ve had success in the past. A cure is the answer I’m looking for, one of the goals of this trip.
So after a night of pain and restless sleep, Robin and I caught a taxi to the traveler’s clinic in the tourist part of town. It is, in fact, a very highly-respected clinic, so I was hoping they’d be able to help me out. I did not expect the positively medieval treatment I ended up receiving.
The doctors talked to me as if I hadn’t heard it all before. Your pain isn’t really that bad… All you have to do is this one stretch and everything will be okay… Oh? Is it really that easy? Really?!? I nearly punched one of them. However, they agreed to give me a stronger anti-inflammatory and insisted I come back for my last 3 days in Nepal to receive physical therapy treatments. So I showed up later that afternoon for the first.
We walked out of the main building into an adjunct building that might have been a shed in a past life. Inside were a number of gadgets and gizmos pulled from an early 1900s mad-scientist laboratory: Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde. It was neither comforting nor homey. He had me lay down on the sterile aluminum table and started by massaging the tight muscles in my back. While doing so, he asked me if I’d ever had dry-needling. I had not. He started telling me about the benefits of it as he began cupping my back and using the cup to massage my agonizingly stiff muscles. His diagnosis was that the only problem was a single muscle that was too tight, despite the fact that my back, neck, lats, and chest were all in quite a bit of pain, as the trapped demonic energy seeped into all of those areas. It wouldn’t be any use, of course, to tell him this.
At this point I was pretty desperate for any pain relief, so I consented to the dry-needling. Now let me paint a picture for you. I lay on a metal table in a small, dimly lit shed filled with questionable medical technology in the middle of a foreign country with not-the-best public health standards. Needles emanated from my back and multiple sets of electrodes connected me to a machine. My needle-strewn back twitched from the shocks as an infrared light heated up the muscles under my skin. I was honestly surprised that he didn’t break out the razors and start bleeding me.
I then repeated this treatment two more times over the next two days. It did seem to successfully loosen that one muscle he was targeting. Unfortunately, that muscle was only part of a larger problem, I was still in a lot of pain, and what little relief the treatments had provided would prove to be short-lived as I boarded my plane for London.