Acupuncture and a Budgie
I was riding my bicycle down Scotts Road in Singapore, on my way back from the East Coast when some dickwit uncle taxi-driver decided he needed to turn left urgently, and did so, like they usually do. Unfortunately I was in the way.
The impact was concentrated precisely on my right elbow; one tonne of Nissan Cedric versus a bit of bone and gristle. My arm unsurprisingly felt a bit sore after I’d picked myself up and abused the driver, who insisted on taking my details for some reason. I could still ride though, so I wobbled home and applied some liniment. Later I went to a barbecue on Sentosa, to drink beer with Soren and dull the pain.
But it didn’t work. Next morning my elbow still hurt like stink; it was time to go to the Emergency Department.
I walked (didn’t risk a taxi) to the monolithic Tan Tok Seng Hospital and explained the situation at the Emergency Dept desk. A nurse gently but competently assessed me, gave me a tag for my wrist, entered my details into the computer and sat me on a chair, telling me soothingly that the doctor shouldn’t be long.
After about five minutes, several policemen came in escorting (that’s a bit polite: manhandling is more like it) a dishevelled looking man with blood all over his clothes and his wrists handcuffed behind his back. One of the policemen was carrying a bloody kitchen knife in a plastic bag.
The smiling, efficient atmosphere vanished, nurses backed off and a doctor approached warily. After lots of shouting and cursing from the bloody man and little apparent progress towards a medical intervention, he was handcuffed to a trolley and wheeled away struggling violently. Although entertaining, this excitement extended the queue of Emergency customers considerably; damaged humans were backed up almost to the door.
But only a few minutes later a nurse called my name, walked me into a cubicle and swished the curtains closed behind me. A doctor looked professionally at my arm, and told me I would need an X-ray. He also apologised for the bloodied maniac that had disrupted the queue and extended my wait; I guess it would have been about half an hour maximum.
I told him I’d laid groaning for about five hours on a trolley at an Australian hospital as I waited for treatment after a paragliding accident; thirty minutes was pretty good in my opinion— and certainly no cause for apologies.
The doctor gave my arm another brief once over, and said he thought it most likely wasn’t broken, just badly bruised. He wrapped it in an antiseptic-smelling compression bandage.
Then I had the X-ray, and oops — yes, it was broken. The swerving taxi had cracked the cup part of the ball-and-cup joint in my elbow.
So off came the bandage, and I was ushered into the plastering department where another kind and gentle nurse smothered my arm in plaster from above the elbow almost to the wrist. Then I was sent to the pharmacy for medications including anti-itch for the plaster, painkillers for the break, and cream for any rawness.
All up cost for the consultation-times-two, bandage, X-ray, plaster, pills and incidental entertainment? $70, thanks very much. I nearly fell over backwards on my good arm; you can’t beat Singapore for fast, competent, top value medical treatment.
Anyway, after a few weeks, the plaster was cut away from my by now pallid, smelly and rather weedy-looking arm. The experts said the crack had healed, but not that well. I couldn’t straighten my arm properly, and the joint was still very sore.
Multiple other experts arrived and prodded and poked and looked at more X-rays and came up with opinions that varied from ‘break it again and reset it’ to ‘the only thing is to operate and pin it’ to ‘it will always be dodgy so physio is the only answer’. None of these diagnoses were particularly welcome.
Reluctant to go under the knife or take out a gym membership, I battled with exercises and weight-strengthening for a few weeks, with paltry results. My arm was still stick-like and painful. I really didn’t want a weak and crooked arm for the rest of my life, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it.
Then a friend, Betty, suggested I go and see her favourite Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) man, Leong. Leong operated out of a cupboard-sized back room behind a hairdresser-spa parlour in Ang Moh Kio. He spoke very little English and wore nylon chinos, but Betty assured me he was the best. And he only charged $35 for an hour, so there wasn’t much to lose, as long as he didn’t make things worse.
I made an appointment, found his place, and lay down on his narrow towel-covered trolley on wheels. He spent several minutes carefully selecting his favourite Mandarin soap opera DVD to distract himself while he worked on my presenting problem. Then he gave me his full attention.
“Pain?” he asked, eyebrows raised. I thought privately that was pretty obviously the reason most people visited a TCM practitioner, but didn’t say anything clever. I nodded, and pointed to the elbow.
He closed his eyes, ran his hands over my arm, my neck, my wrist, probing gently. He gave my elbow a bit of a squeeze, nothing heavy.
He stepped back from the table, looking at me speculatively. “Can you take needle?” he asked. I said yes; Betty had warned me he was keen on acupuncture, but needles don’t bother me anyhow.
“Do you mind big needle?” he asked again as he reached into a drawer and pulled out a 15cm long stainless steel rapier in a sterile wrapper the size of a small umbrella. I gulped.
“Yes, it’s no problem. I did a knee before,” he reassured me, tapping the blunt end of the acupuncture needle on his bench in anticipation. “OK?”
Watching a man you have never met before push a knitting needle-sized piece of metal in one side of your arm and out the other, with no blood, no bone contact, no pain and seemingly no fleshy resistance is unnerving. Leong’s budgie seemed OK with it though, as it sat on my knee, watching the procedure.
The only sensation was something like the twanging of a wire inside my arm as Leong sawed gently back and forward with the needle, one eye on the raping and stabbing and shouting from his Mandarin soap opera DVD.
He left the needle there for a while, poking jauntily out each side of my arm, and then attached a couple of electrodes to it that pulsed an electric current through the very core of my damaged limb.
After a while he notched up the current and the twanging sensation increased. Apparently, my chi was being realigned.
And what do you know, it worked.
The pain miraculously went away, and I regained almost full articulation in that elbow the hospital doctors had said was a lost cause.
It occurred to me later that maybe it was the budgie that also helped fix my chi. I’ll never know, because Leong has moved and I don’t know where he’s gone to to ask him if his pet had anything to do with the miracle.
I’m very careful riding near taxis now.
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