Pins ‘n’ Needles

Some sports can kill you… or at least cause serious pain. For me, a hobby that started in grade school—with a light-blue plastic Whammo frisbee tossed around with a family friend—became an Ultimate frisbee career that consumed most of my high school years and all of my college years, and continued straight on through my twenties. I suffered a catalog of injuries over the years, but none as earth-shattering as having my lower back go out on me. Ten years later, when it seemed that the old injury was making a comeback, I got desperate enough to consider acupuncture.

Since I didn’t know any Chinese, and the doctor’s English was thickly accented, I found myself distilling my injury down to its basic components: “Back tight; feels weak. Pain when I turn like this. I first hurt it about eleven years ago,” and so it went. She made extensive notes in Chinese, checked the pulses of my wrists, and examined my tongue from across the desk. “Inside, very weak. Low energy,” she pronounced gravely.

She explained that she was going to prepare bags of tea for me. The bags of herbs turned out to be brown paper bags packed with what appeared to be exotic yard clippings; twigs, bark, fungi, and a fascinating assortment of what I would have expected to see lining the terrarium housing an exotic lizard at the zoo. As for the finished tea, I discovered that my understanding of the term “bitter” was uninformed and naïve. She had me schedule another appointment later in the week.

Lying face down on a paper-covered massage table (with a hole in the paper punched out where my face should go), I wasn’t sure what to expect. It sounded like she was tearing open a Band-Aid wrapper. I then felt the pressure of a finger on a point on my back.

As I braced myself for the needle, I only felt the pressure of another finger. Still waiting for the needle, it was only when she lightly tapped the top of the needle and I felt a light pressure inside my muscle—bypassing any feeling on the skin—that I realized I’d already been stuck. As she continued this way at several more spots down my back, I realized that I had been clenching my fists, and let them open and relax. She finished up with a couple more needles in my lower legs. I couldn’t feel the needles in me, but trusting that they were there, I decided I would not try to roll over.

“Okay.