New Chiropractor

July 21, 2008

I’ve never been Rolfed. But I understand it’s quite unpleasant. Something about digging deeply into tissue. Something Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, would dole out as a pleasant past time treat. “You Vill Tell Me Ewvreting I vant to know!”

No, that never appealed to my idea of alleviating pain. But currently I’m being Grastonated. Not merely satisfied with using one’s hands to do a deep massage, some skier who'd hurt himself, named David Graston, came up with state of the art stainless steel torture devices. The object is to break down scar tissue - which is bad for you because it inhibits movement and causes pain. But nothing like the pain of going through this process. Imaging someone taking the backside of a strong steel hunting knife - the EDGE, not the flat part - and rubbing it fast and as hard as they can at a 45 degree angle over various portions of your body. Which are already sore, because that's why you're going to get treated, right? Sound like fun to YOU?

The chiropractor, a sweetheart of a guy named Daniel Becker (828) 817-5524 (if you live in NC), told me that the pain level should be kept at 7 or under. Now I can take a lot of pain. We women have much higher pain thresholds then you men (generally speaking). After all, you faint when a needle goes in your arm. We open our pelvises and human beings pop out. But pain like this I have never experienced. Then again, I’ve never given birth, but I think I might prefer it.

He told me I might bruise from his work. That when tissue has been in a trauma state for a long while, capillaries pool around it. (I also have heard blood tend to pool around certain areas of a dead body - but what of that.) And when you press on this scar tissue those pooled capillaries tend to come to the surface. Well, yeaaaaah. If you press hard enough on your skin tissue, it’s gonna bruise. I looked like I should go to the battered woman shelter down the block when I got out of there. Thank goodness he wasn’t working on my face. I can imagine attempting to audition looking like my husband clobbered me with a baseball bat.

Buy hey, this guy was recommended (as was this technique) by two people I know. I’d call them “friends,” but now I’m beginning to question that. And they were helped by him. So it must work. Right?

He wants to see me two days later. TWO DAYS LATER? Oooookay. I am so sore when I walk into his office that I tell him he is not laying hands on those bruised areas. Oh he has no intention of doing that. Today he’s going to do manipulations. Ah. Good. I’ve had that done before. Doesn’t hurt at all. YES IT DOES. I’m not sure what he did to my neck, but it felt fine before I went in. Maybe after the Ibuprofen kicks in I’ll be able to sleep tonight. He took the shoulder that was bothering me (with the bruises now all over it) and manipulated my arm in ways that only a contortionist should know.
Let’s see if we can slowly rip it out of it’s socket! Ilsa, She Wolf, has NOTHING on this guy. This, apparently is known as Active Release.

He finally finishes and I’m not sure where my body went. I try to grin. It’s a bit lopsided. “Well, I guess you’ll want to see me again next week,” I say. “Friday,” he replies. “THIS FRIDAY???” “Yes.” Shouldn’t there be some healing time here? The bruises probably won’t even be gone by then. “It’s better to do it all up front. Otherwise it’s maintenance, and this is not maintenance.” He’s a sadist. Right? Gotta be. I must be mad, but I say okay. Well, this is as it should be. He’s the sadist, and I’m the masochist. Can’t have one without the other.

I ask him if I can play tennis after, assuming that I can’t. I mean every other chiropractor that has ever worked on me has told me to take it easy for the rest of the day. Not Herr Mengele. “Yes, go, it’s good to keep working muscles and tendons.” I almost cried.

Am SO looking forward to my next visit. What new and wonderful torture will he have in store? Read it all in the next chapter!

Chapter II

As you might imagine I was not particularly looking forward to my third visit. What new torture was going to be perpetrated by Dr. Mengele this day? I figured there wasn’t much left that could be considered new. WRONG!

He was running a bit behind by a fellow masochist and so told me to lie on what I call the Tsunami. Looks like one of those typical chiropractic manipulation beds where they do their adjustments. (Actually called an Intersegmental Traction Table



He told me to lie on my back and then kindly put a pillow under my head. Most people who put a pillow under your head do so in attempt to make you feel better. Not Dr. Mengele. Showed me where the adjustment dial was, which in order to reach I had to bend my arm out of it’s socket. “This will open the joints of your spine,” said he gleefully. Oh? Uh huh! Can’t wait! “Each time you press this switch up, it will increase the wave. (not his term). If you want to decrease it (why on earth WOULD you I could hear him thinking) press the switch down. If you start to hear a grinding noise you know it’s at it’s upper limit.” Or I am, I thought. And he’s gone.

OK. Imagine a ball, the size of a big man’s fist, rolling under your spine from your lower back to your neck. A hard ball. A very HARD ball. And each time you press the up button the ball gets bigger and thrusts your spine in more of a convex wave. I began to feel like I was on my back in a small dingy in a Force 7 Gale with a cannon ball running under my back. I thought, well, gee, then if this opens my spine I guess he won’t need to do any more adjustments. WRONG.

At this point I don’t remember the order to the torture. But I still got to kneel on the “beheading chair” in the guillotine position. That’s the only way to describe it. It might be considered a praying position but your butt’s sticking out too much for that. At least I don’t tend to pray with my butt sticking out, although your back is kept in a flat position. At least I think it was flat, before he mashed it into submission.

I kept trying to relax, but after my previous visit my neck was none too happy and an actor’s sense memory is very keen. So I was awaiting the disintegration of every vertabra in my back and that, yeah, kinda tensed me up. Snap Crackle Pop rice crispies!

I made the mistake of telling him my elbow was hurting. Stupid. I now have a new bruise going the entire length of the underside of my arm (that’s the soft part) to my elbow. I think that occurred AFTER he tried to manipulate my ulnar by bending my elbow BACKWARD. Great if one were double jointed. Perhaps now I shall be?



I didn’t really think he’d re-work any of the areas he’d already Grastonated because they were still bruised. HA. WRONG. The thing that really puzzles me is that I LET him???!!!!! Obviously I have a deep need for abuse somewhere in my psyche. I must feel guilty about having a happy childhood.

So now I’m sitting on the “bednch” (well it’s not really a bed, seems more like a bench don’t it) and he’s digging into my right ankle and it’s HURTING LIKE HELL. And I’m trying to distract myself. So I start singing. LOUDLY. I think he was rather surprised. His eyes looked rather bright. Was that surprise or glee? I’m sure mine were too. Bright with pain.

But there was more fun to come. He puts me on a wobble board. No, not one of those manual disks with a ball underneath that YOU can control. Are you kidding. That’s child’s play to this guy. No, this is an electronic cutie known as the I Joy Board . I’m telling you, all these devices were thought up by people who are into whips, chains and blindfolds. At least they had the decency not to name it the I Enjoy Board.

He asks me if I have a sense of balance. Stupidly I say yes. (I think I’m just beginning to learn that you want to lie to this guy whenever possible.) How can I even begin to describe this machine. Thank God I did have a sense of balance, is all I can say, else I’d be on my ass on the floor and he’d be manipulating THAT next. It’s your basic two foot long teeter totter that sits eight inches off the floor. You know, you put your feet hip distant apart and lean right and left and.... Only in this case you don’t do anything. Except hang on for dear life. He hands me the remote (not dissimilar to a car lock remote) and says, “This button controls the wobble, and this one is the emergency shut of. Make sure you point it down toward the ground if you want to shut it off.” Oh. Ok.

Yowza and we’re OFF! Holy Cow. Give me a hula hoop and I wouldn’t have had any trouble keeping it up on my hips. I mean I’m being WOBBLED. Well, big deal, you might say. Yeah, well, Dr. Mengele has only just begun. WHILE I’m being wobbled, he’s got his happy stainless steel hunting knife and he’s rubbing it as hard as he can on my ankle - I think it was. At this point all I remember is pain. AND then he asks me to do slow squats DURING the process. “If I want.” IF I WANT???? I’m not kidding here. Honest to God. I wonder if he’s as demanding on the octagenerians? I don’t even what to imagine what he does to folks thirty years of age and younger.

Well of course, being the patsy masochist I am, I do nice slow squats while he's scraping on my wobbling ankle tissue with all his might. I’m not sure I actually fully grasp the concept here, but I think it has to do with the wobble board and the squats making your muscles work in certain ways that he can only torture with his device that couldn’t be reached else.

Then he proceeded to work on certain of the areas that he’d previously worked on that were already bruised. I could easily now walk into the local battered women’s shelter and have my husband arrested should I so desire.

I hope I don’t have an audition soon. Because I’d have to wear pants and a long sleeved shirt. Really.

I asked him, (because he’d made the comment when I’d told him I’d had physical therapy elsewhere and they’d used sonar on me and it had hurt like Hell....actually burned, and he'd said if it were done properly it shouldn’t hurt) I asked what I thought was a very logical question given his previous response: "Why should one turn black and blue and suffer enormously during your technique then? Hmmm?

That was when he handed me the butcher’s knife and said, “Here, feel for yourself. The instrument will tell you. Scrape along here.” And he placed it against the lower part of my wrist. And I scraped. Then he moved it up eight inches to my forearm and said, “Now do it here.” And I did. “Do you feel the grittiness?” Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I did. And he said, and proved it by rubbing against the lower part, “if the tissue is well, it will not bruise. It is only when there’s scarring underneath that you’ll find the capillaries coming up.”

I asked him if HE knew what this all felt like. He said indeed he did, because when they were learning and practicing the technique they did it on each other. He was not looking forward to the arm pit area. I didn’t want to go there so I didn’t inquire about that. I just pray I don’t have any symptoms that lead me to that area.

The bottom line for all of this crazy agony is....it seems to really work. I may only feel this way at present because the pain of the techniques he’s using oer’pass the pain of my original complaints. Sort of like if you have an ache and you hit yourself in the head with a hammer you no longer feel the original ache. But I don’t think that’s the case. I may have discomfort because of the bruising but the interior parts of my body that were bothering me actually feel better.

Time will tell. And you can be sure I’ll relate it. I expect to end up with the ability to be able to do this. Well, at least pain free. Which one wonders if these contortionists are, eh?

Making a Hanging Decorative Cage in 42 Hard Steps

............
Do not attempt this if you are Bi-Polar, suffer from ADHD, AADD, have quit smoking or drinking recently or are contemplating a divorce.

Tools:

Tape measure
Marking pen
Jig Saw
Extension cord
Drill
Small nails
Hammer
22 small sticks
Patience.

1. Go to the woods and find eight small sticks as straight and equal in 2" circumference as you can.
2 Get a marking pen
3. Get a jig saw.
4. Get a tape measure.
5. Measure the sticks 6" long each
6. Cut them.
7. Go back to the woods to get more sticks because you didn’t put them in a vice while cutting them but simply held them in your left hand off the end of the front porch steps which made them very wobbly and uneven.
8. Cut them again.
9. Starting at one end of the sticks, with the marking pen mark four equidistant points along the length of one side. Don’t put the mark too close to the end or you will split the wood when putting in the nails.
10. Get the hammer
11. Attempt to start a small nail through each mark. When that doesn’t work...
12. Get the extension cord and the electric drill.
13. Remove the bent nails from the pieces of wood
14. Drill small holes through each mark
15. Hammer the nails through so that just a little bit of their tips are showing.
16. Go back to the woods and get 12 longer sticks (same 2" circumference)
17. Cut these to a 12" length
18. Mark the center point of each end
19. With the smaller stick as a base, held so that the nail points are facing up, hammer one long stick at a time onto each nail point. When the longer sticks fall off...
20. Go back and hammer the nails further through the base unit
21. Now try again to hammer the long sticks onto each nail point. Once accomplished,
you should have 4 short pieces with 12 long pieces sticking straight up from them
22. Because you forgot to drill a hole in the center of each end of the smaller sticks, do so now. When the longer sticks fall off,
23. Pound the longer sticks back onto their nail posts
24. Because you forgot to drill a hole through the sides of four of the smaller sticks perpendicular to the hole that holds the longer stick, but rather drilled into the end of all of them, go back to the woods and get four new pieces.
25. Follow steps 2-7
26. Follow Steps 10 & 15
27. Drill a hole perpendicular to the ones at the ends of four of the smaller sticks. Make sure they won’t interfere with a nail going through the other hole.
28. Follow Step 16
29. Follow Step 20
30. Now you are going to make two squares with the eight small pieces, hammering nails through the perpendicular holes.
31. Place the top square onto the vertical bars of the base unit and hammer the nails through the pre-made holes. When it won’t lie flush..
32. Go back to the woods and get another piece of wood to replace the one that is slightly warped.
33. Follow steps 2-7.
34. Follow steps 10, 15 &
35. Go to the medicine chest and gets some drugs to calm yourself down

Later:

You’ve finally completed the bottom part of the cage. Now it’s time to work on the top.

36. Get a pruner
37. Go to the woods and find some vines - watching out for the poison ivy and snakes. Bring back a healthy handful. (You’ve learned by now that you can never have too much of what you need from the woods.)
38. Cut two vines to about an 11" length
39. Wrap one vine around one corner of the top then draw it across the diagonal to the other corner and tie it allowing a good deal of slack. Do the same with the other vine.
40. Go back to the woods and cut another vine because you still didn’t have enough.
41. Make a small 2" loop around the top of the criss-crossed four corner vines.
42. As an added artistic touch, trail some of the left over vine around the cage

Voila!

And because you’re not too stupid - get a thin piece of green wire and wrap it around the vines. Because if the vines holding the cage should break, the 5,000 man hours you’ve spent trying to create the damn thing would all be for nought and then you’d have to hang yourself with the vines.

You might wonder why I took it upon myself to attempt such a task. Well because I had a decorative cage for years that I’d found at a tag sale or thrift shop (don’t remember which). But it eventually rotted and I thought, “Well, I can make one of those! Looks real easy! Just a bunch of sticks from the woods.” HA!

Live and learn I say.

Acting and Computers

Now here’s a typical actor story. Or perhaps it is only typical for us.

Around 2 pm the other day I get an e-mail for Rand from one of our agents (we have one in each of three states) saying he has an audition for the series Army Wives in Atlanta.

"HEY FOLKS,
AUDITIONS ARE THIS AFTERNOON AND TOMORROW MORNING ONLY! THE SOONER YOUR AUDITION GETS TO THE CASTING DIRECTOR THE BETTER. THIS EPISODE BEGINS SHOOTING NEXT WEDNESDAY 5/21/08 AND GOES THRU FRIDAY 5/30/008. PLEASE CALL ASAP FOR AN AUDITION TIME. PLEASE LET US KNOW BY REPLYING TO THIS EMAIL IF YOU ARE NOT GOING TO AUDITION FOR ANY REASON.

THANKS,
ALI (the name has been changed to protect the innocent)

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO LIVE OUT OF TOWN PLEASE CALL USE (sic) TO DISCUSS HOW TO GET YOUR AUDITIONS TO US."

He has asked them time and time again NOT to send audition notices via e-mail but to call. And to ensure such, he never gave them his e-mail address. That’s why they sent it to MY e-mail address, so I get to deal with it. We do not spend all day at our computers. We have a life. And sometimes, golly gee, the computer or the internet is down for a period of time and you can’t access your e-mail, so we feel it’s important to call your client. Especially when time is of the essence.

Why they insist on doing business this way and not picking up the telephone is....well, it’s apparently the way they do business here in the South. Or, to give the South a break, let us say - smaller markets. Never did we experience this with our NY agents when we lived there. Nor did they send out mass mailings saying HEY FOLKS. Nor did our NY agents tell us to remember to bring a picture and resume to the audition, “dress the part,” and try to memorize our lines. If you’re a professional, you know that - you don’t need a nanny. But I guess the FOLKS down here need nannying and live attached to their computers. The level of professionalism here is - well it’s...just a step above community theatre. (And I mean no offense to the community theatre world when I say that, but professionals know what I mean.) It’s a whole ‘nother world. The majority of the "talent" down is is non-union.

So, where was I? Oh yes. “AUDITIONS ARE THIS AFTERNOON” - well that lets US out. It’s 2:00 and it’s a three hour drive to Atlanta. But then there’s also...”TOMORROW MORNING ONLY!” Well of course he had a 10 am doctor’s appointment in Spartanburg. “FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO LIVE OUT OF TOWN PLEASE CALL USE TO DISCUSS HOW TO GET YOUR AUDITIONS TO US.”




That’s when the trouble began. We call. Normally in situations such as this you can put yourself on tape at home and then send it to the casting director. Neither of us, nor no one of our acquaintance, has EVER gotten a job this way, but hey, we’re actors, we ever live in hope and...ya never know!

OK. So we’re told that the way to GET YOUR AUDITIONS TO US is to send it through the computer. Oh? And how, exactly, does one do THAT pray tell. We’re not in our teens, nor are we Geeks. My husband is more or less computer illiterate, although he DOES know how to work in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. I am literate - to an extent. I more or less at least understand the language of today’s technology. And I can send my computer back in time by doing a reset and know how to troubleshoot my high speed internet connection. But fire wires are new to me.



I’m told that it’s very easy. But apparently I need QuickTime Pro in order to make it all work. So I purchase QuickTime Pro over the internet for thirty bucks. Download that, go to plug in my fire wire (which is still in it’s package from when I bought my digital movie camera last year, which the sales rep assured me I’d need for $25) and realize I have no fire wire port on my computer.

Time is rapidly running out here for the submission of this audition. Rand says NUTS to it and decides he wants me to put him on tape anyway and he’ll just mail the thing in to the casting director directly. So I tape him and it looks good. We then call our agent and say we’re sending it directly to the casting office ourselves and to please let them know. We’re told they will do so. They encourage me to get a fire wire port. I tell them I will.

CUT TO: several days later I’m on the phone with Bombay. And even though I was told at Office Depot that my computer did NOT have the capacity for an external fire wire port, I am assured by Dell that that is not the case and so I purchase what I assume will be a device that will enable me to use my fire wire. For $47.97.

It arrives a few hours before I am leaving for a ten day trip to Florida. Swell. I take a quick look at it and come to the conclusion that it is NOT what I was told it would be, and will NOT enable fire wire connection. And I do not at this moment have 45 minutes of extra time to talk to Bombay again to see about getting my money back.

CUT TO: I return from Florida and look at the Dell return policy. It says I have 21 days to return it. So I know I don’t have to rush. I received it May 23, so I’ve got until June 13th. I call customer service in Bombay on the 6th of June. They say their system is down and to call back in two hours. I then decide to call their tech dept. to make sure that I am indeed correct and was sent the wrong thing. Yes, it’s true. They informed me that they had misinformed me. The only way to get a fire wire connection on my three year young computer is to have my internal modem removed and to put in a fire wire card (or whatever the heck it’s called). And of course I could do this by myself...my friends in Bombay are quite happy to help walk me through the process. But first I would need to hire a translator.

By this point I really didn’t want to talk to Bombay again, so I had some Tandoori chicken for dindin and went to sleep.

NEXT DAY: I call customer service which is back up and running. I’m told that my 21 days elapsed YESTERDAY. That the period is based upon the day the item was shipped, not from the day of receipt. It doesn’t matter that I received it the day I went away to Florida and wasn’t here to discover that it was the WRONG hardware piece. I pointed out to them that I did attempt to call them yesterday. “Yes, but you see there is no record of your call.” I KNOW THERE’S NO RECORD OF MY CALL, BECAUSE YOUR COMPUTERS WERE DOWN! “I’m sorry but that’s the policy.” “OH. SO YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT BECAUSE YOU GAVE ME MISINFORMATION TO BEGIN WITH AND SHIPPED THE WRONG ITEM, AND BECAUSE YOUR COMPUTERS WERE DOWN, I'M GOING TO LOSE MY FIFTY BUCKS??!!!! I did make a call to the tech department about it yesterday, PERHAPS THEY HAVE A RECORD OF MY CALL!.” “I will speak to my supervisor, just one moment please.”

I’ve given Dell about $6,000 over the years. And they’re about to lose me as a customer.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting. My supervisor says they will make an exception this one time....” And I feel happy now. Why do we allow our lives to be run by machines and foreigners.....

They sent me a UPS label so I could return it for free. Only - not really, because they deducted the original shipping fee from my rebate.

So for a five dollar fee I got to talk to strangers in a strange land, learn that my computer does not have fire wire capacity and thus I am not able to send auditions to my agents via computer.

Which means, I suppose, I will soon have to buy a new computer with VISTA (an operating system with which I am unfamiliar and have not heard good things about) and transfer all of my files to IT.

Life was a lot simpler and more pleasant in the old days. And my office was a lot neater because computers take much more time than good old file cabinets and now I must deal with both.