Make the Noise!

The stresses and strains of the last few months have taken their toll. My shoulders felt like they'd been glued round my ears, my mid back was solid and my lower back ached everytime I got out of bed. Last week I thought a massage would be a great way to relax. Yeah right. The masseur on feeling my concrete knots did her absolute best to pummel them out. I hurt all the way through the massage and for 3 days after. That told me the issue wasn't muscular, it was skeletal.

So I went to see my very dishy osteopath yesterday. What can I say? He's gorgeous, gentle...and expecting the arrival of a little osteopath in February with his long-term partner. Sigh. Anyway, we have a 10 minute catch up and then he asks me to take my top off, which I do. Voila, pretty M&S bra. He asks me to take off my belt. I say to him I wore my big pants just in case. Relieved he invites me to take my jeans off. Voila, pretty M&S Big Pants.

All professions have their 'story'. A classic tale only other people in that profession will understand. When I worked with NHS Direct it was the sex-calls ('you're the only person I've ever told about my erectile disfunction', while their file shouts 'frequent flyer'), when I worked in fragrance it was find the fragrance with the most obscure description of bottle or scent. With osteopaths, it seems to be the teeny-tiny pants story. It turns out he used to treat dancers. They would turn up in teeny-tiny pants to be crunched. He said he had to ask a few of them to put their trousers back on the pants were so teeny-tiny. In fact, they were more like shoe-strings he said. Made my eyes water just thinking about it.

There is a difference in having an osteopathic treatment when everything is locked up tighter than a debutant's virginity, and having a treatment when your muscles have gone into spasm; death seems to be the only comfort to be had, as sitting, lying and standing is excruciating.

In order to loosen up the neck, the osteopath gently takes your head in his hands, lifts your neck, stretches very gently while probing the locked vertebra. Then he'll suddenly wrench it to the left. It's just like hearing a gun go off in your head. When the echos have died away, you have to smile because you can still feel your toes.

My step-father was a huge fan of war movies. Black and White, WWII, featuring death to the Nazis (who can only say 'schnell' and a bunch of gibberish which always had my mother, a German who survived the Blitz of Berlin, rolling her eyes). The heroic British soldier would creep into the enemy camp, sneak up to the nasty Kraut perimeter guard, grab him by the head and twist. Crack. An ex-perimeter guard. The perimeter guard is no more. He is pushing up daisies. You get the picture.

The first time I ever had that neck-wrench done, I was in agony. Real unabatable agony. That osteopath wrenched my neck without warning. I was rather fond of him. He was obnoxious, opinionated about everything, and I fancied him something rotten. Last I heard, he married a patient and was living in marital bliss in a barn conversion in South Norfolk. After he wrenched my neck, I was too scared to even squeak. It took me years to talk about that manoever without automatically wiggling my toes to check everything still worked.

Yesterday, when my dishy osteopath wrenched my neck. It was bliss. He dug his thumbs into the two inch knots hiding under the scallops of my shoulders, and I practically purred. Going to him before things got any worse was such a good idea.

By the way, can you spot the comic references I liberally sprinkled about?