Personal Services

          A painful shoulder, like the one I experience from time to time, is pretty tiresome (an appropriate word, I think, since the pain can be sleep-depriving). So, after a recent prolonged episode, I decided to seek medical help and asked around for a recommendation. A friend, who happens to be a doctor, gave me the name of an osteopath and I made an appointment two weeks hence. I was fortunate, in the meantime, to have had no more occurrences – especially as I was more than usually physically active, the fine weather having enticed us to take the campervan to Land’s End to walk sections of the SW Coast Path.

          By the time my appointment with the osteopath loomed, the urgency for treatment had waned considerably, but experience told me not to assume a spontaneous cure, so I duly turned up. The practice is situated in a quaint cottage in a sleepy, picture-book Devon village, some half an hour’s drive from home. I followed the sign on the front, which sent me through to the pretty little backyard, where an open door invited me in. Another sign said, ‘waiting room’, so I ventured in there, expecting to be met. There was no one around, nor was there any sound, except for the buzzing of a fly bashing against the window. Just as I was about to call for attention, a young woman came down the stairs, introduced herself as the practitioner and asked me to follow her back up the stairs. Still there was neither sight nor sound of anyone else in the small building and the intimacy of this arrangement began to strike me as unusual: it was somewhat awkward for me but potentially dangerous for the practitioner, who knew me only by name at this stage. But she was obviously more at ease with this informal encounter than I was. She betrayed no concerns.

          The formalities of recording my details completed, things began to get personal. I was asked to remove my shirt and stand facing a wall. Not that this was unexpected, but the intimacy of having my bared torso explored by the hands of a young woman I had met only minutes before re-booted my memory to more youthful days, when such things were known to happen – occasionally and under different circumstances. Of course, I kept my cool and she her professional sang froid, though I remembered a similar sort of awkwardness when, a couple of years ago, an attractive young optometrist inspecting my eyeballs got as close to my face as is possible without our noses actually touching. How she kept from giggling must be a professional secret.

          After her examination of my shoulder and interrogation of my symptoms, the osteopath talked me through a detailed diagnosis involving Latin descriptions of moving parts. She knew her subject, it seemed. As to treatment, however, I’m not so sure. After all, what can you do about a shoulder socket that is suffering from wear and tear and that sometimes causes the muscles and tendons to become inflamed? “Relax it,” she said. For the next forty minutes or so, I laid face-up on the treatment bed, while she gently placed her hands under various parts of my body: my calves; my lower back; my shoulders and neck. During this time, she said nothing and I kept my eyes closed in an attempt to relax as instructed. Thus blind, I could only guess where her eyes were directed, or her thoughts wandered. My guess is that she was bored but too professional to let it show. At the end of the session, I paid the fee, agreed to come back next week for a follow-up and left the cottage via the still-empty waiting room.

          That evening, at a board meeting, a fellow member commented on my constant grimacing and rubbing of my shoulder. “I went to the osteopath this afternoon and she’s made it worse”, I said. There was knowing laughter.