Call Me Charlie

Issue 319

You guys,

I parked my car in front of a rickety old gate. Behind it was a long dirt road that curved out of sight, and on either side was land as far as the eyes could see. A weird location, I thought, for a sports medicine doctor. He’d messaged me on WhatsApp with instructions to make sure I closed the gate behind me.

Once back in my rental car I drove along the road, looking left and right at sheep and horses and donkeys grazing on either side of me. I kept driving and driving, wondering how long this dirt road went and if there was really a sports medicine office in the middle of a farm. If he hadn’t been recommended to me by one of the moms in Boundless I might have been a little freaked out. After two minutes of driving I saw a parked car, and behind it a little cottage, or a little shack more like it. When I slowed, Ben emerged and waved. I parked and got out of my car laughing. “Well this was not what I was expecting,” I said, and immediately regretted it when he said, “No? What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “like, a building?”

He turned and gestured to his office with a smile. “We have a building.”

He was of average height, strong, his gaze intense, with a shaved head, dark eyebrows and a dark goatee. His presence was warm and serious. What I most noticed about him was his accent. He was from Belgium and sounded British. If I ever engaged with ChatGPT with more than text, I would most certainly choose a man with a British accent.

Once inside, I sat down next to Ben on a low, wide couch and he asked me to tell him more about my neck pain. I had a stress fracture two years ago, at least that’s what my physical therapist in North Carolina assured me—I never had an X-ray taken because he told me there was nothing I could do except wait for it to heal. There was pain long before that, though, ever since college. I remember being in my early twenties, and one of my best friends from home commenting on this “thing I always did with my neck.” I was constantly twisting and turning it—these exaggerated motions to stretch it, I suppose, to relieve the pain. I was embarrassed when my friend pointed it out, that anyone noticed what I’d been doing.

The pain got worse when I was living in Greece. I went to a healer on the island and she referred me to Giorgio. He will heal you, she said, just as he had healed her. He will heal you, said Maria from the Boundless team—her husband was struck by lightning and Giorgio completely fixed his arm. He will heal you, said the Boundless cab driver—his mother went to him for back pain and now she didn’t have any back pain. At my first appointment Giorgio did acupuncture. It happened quickly—he put the needles in my body and left the room. I felt the familiar sense of panic that happens most times I’ve done acupuncture. I laid there on my stomach, trying to talk myself down. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic. And then, as though against my will I let out a strangled, “Help!”

No one heard me, and then I did talk myself down, mortified at my desperate yelp.

When I came back two days later everyone in the office seemed disappointed and surprised when I told them I didn’t feel better. I hadn’t even told them I felt worse. Then Giorgio turned on some kind of electrical device and moved it over my shoulders and it crackled and suddenly I thought I was going to throw up. He had me lay down on my back.

“What is wrong with you?” he said. “Why are you so stressed? You are in Syros. It is beautiful here, no?”

I went five more times, twenty minutes across the island, seventy dollars for each session, twenty dollars for the cab ride, and the pain never improved. I finally wondered about my mental health, and soon after began taking Lexapro because I could get it over the counter in Syros. After I got back to North Carolina, my doctor laughed when I shyly asked him if it was okay that I had started taking it without consulting with him first.

“Charlie, do you know how many prescriptions I’ve written for Lexapro?” he said. “Probably 10,000. Of course you should be taking it. Should Sam be on it? Heck, I should probably be on it.”

The drugs seemed to help momentarily but after a few weeks the pain came back. Not all the time but easily triggered—by bending over moving boxes and filling them for an hour, or a five minute game of indoor basketball with the kids, or pushing myself a touch too hard on an exercise during a workout with my trainer. I would feel the familiar tightening in my neck and know I’d be paying for it for the next week or two or month.

After I stood and Ben looked at me from front, back, and side, he explained that our rib cages are shaped like a barrel—or that they should be. The front side of the barrel—my chest—was good, but my back was concave. He gave me some breathing exercises to breathe more into my back to expand it, then he did some manual work on my neck, and then even more massage on my upper back.

Ninety minutes later Ben asked, “What was your pain level at when you came in today, on a scale of 1 to 10?”

I’ve recently wondered how anyone knows how high or low their pain tolerance really is. I assumed mine was high because I’m a former athlete and I gave birth to my son without an epidural, but last year my trainer held a theragun to the back of my knee and I was certain he was going to shatter it, that what he was doing back there—pressing the vibrating ball into the muscle behind my knee—was close to inhumane. I cried out and gripped the sides of the flat bed, immediately sweating at my forehead. He finally stopped, as calm as if he were giving me a soothing massage, and when I asked if the pain was normal he nodded and said, “You’re a little sensitive.”

“A six,” I told Ben definitively (which was realistically what, a three??).

“Wow,” he said, and I wished I’d said something lower. “What’s it at now?”

“A two,” I said, knowing I felt better but having no confidence in this numbers game.

The next time I saw Ben I mentioned that I’d just started working with a breathing coach and he asked why. I told him that initially it was to help with my sleep, but now I was hoping it would help with my neck pain.

“What’s wrong with your sleep?”

“I toss and turn because I can’t get comfortable, and because I have bad dreams.”

Ben was curious about the dreams. “I’m not a dream expert so we won’t get into it, but it’s worth analyzing, because our dreams are our subconscious sending us important messages.”

When I got home I told Sam.

“So what are you supposed to do with that?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I need to look up a dream expert.”

“So you had a healer in Greece, a sports medicine doctor in Urugugay… maybe you’ll find a dream expert in Japan.”

—

Until next week,

Charlie