I lie on my back on the table, with my butt in a hole and my head canted awkwardly on an uncomfortable leather pillow. I hold my arm straight up in the air while Dr. Tony pushes on it and mumbles to himself. I can tell when he's found something. He gets excited and makes a-ha! noises. Then he laughs maniacally.
He consults his book of Chinese medicine. I can just imagine what it says: “For female round-eye with constipation: give snake spit!” He sends the student out to the other room for some lachesis. Sure enough, it's snake venom! A few granules on the tongue, and I'm good as new. Right. Well, a few more tests, just to be sure. Wait, what's this? My emotions are causing my digestion problems? Abandonment? Crying? (I couldn't figure out who I felt abandoned by and I said so, but I didn't have the guts to tell him I wept over Davy Jones.) I fall back on my usual MO: I don't need no stinking emotions! Just give me an extra dose of snake spit, Doc!
After some acupuncture and an admonition to drink more water, I stagger out of the place a half hour later, a hundred bucks poorer with an appointment to do it again in two months. When I get to my car, I check my hat to make sure no one has surreptitiously slapped a sucker sticker on it when I was having my out-of body-experience. I wouldn't put it past a guy who wears a bright pink shirt. Then I go home and go to bed.
Actually, in all honestly, I believe I'm alive today because of Dr. Tony and his hocus pocus muscle testing. Three years ago he told me with a kind smile, “Eat meat or die.” I didn't want to eat meat, but I didn't feel ready to die quite yet. So I finally started eating chicken. Then some salmon. And occasionally some juicy red free-range grass fed beef! (Yech.) I can't eat soy or rice or beans, and it would have taken a truckload of broccoli to get enough protein to rebuild my saggy atrophied muscles. If I want to live, I have to eat real food. That means protein. Three years later, my muscles have returned, I've lost a lot of extra weight around my middle, and I have the luxury of worrying about repairing my digestion through emotion management. How cool is that!
I owe Dr. Tony my life. Maybe that is why I lie passively while he experiments on me. Maybe that is why I don't care about being oggled by geeky naturopaths-in-training. I don't care if he somehow managed to magically have the word sucker tattooed on my butt. It may be mumbo jumbo, but it worked for me.
