#2. Acupuncture
In which I let a stranger jam needles into my body
‘It won’t go in your face, will it?’
My wife’s words echoed as I stepped out of the door and towards my first ever acupuncture session. It’s good to know her priorities. I was more anxious about nerve damage or blood poisoning.
In fairness, I’d heard great things: a couple of friends had sworn by it for sports injuries and back pain. Arriving at the specialist’s clinic, I was not so convinced – because when I say ‘specialist’ I mean some bloke called Larry, and when I say ‘clinic’ I mean the back of some bloke called Larry’s house. Still, he’d had lots of good reviews on Google, and I’d clearly felt that was sufficient to let this stranger (bloke called Larry) jam needles into my trembling and timorous corpus.
This is the free version of this article. Paying members get a better version. Find out more about Larry and why he made me nervous - and get two BONUS jokes.
Having the needles pushed into my body was a strange sensation. Sometimes it was painless, and sometimes it felt like having needles pushed into my body. My muscles twitched involuntarily. I felt a heaviness setting in, and a warmth spreading up from my solar plexus – though that may have been the electric blanket.
Larry put on some spa music and the sound of running water and left the room. With the needles in my body, I was unable to move, as if I had been pinned to the table itself, like a rare butterfly. The effect was meditative. I lay staring out of the window at the crystal January sky, the sun’s rays blanketing my face. I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. I thought of being a child on school holidays, going for lunch at the big Tesco with my mum, back before she died. I don’t know why.
It was supremely relaxing. Or, it would have been, if I couldn’t hear the bloke called Larry shuffling and clanging about making a sandwich next door. Sixty-five pounds an hour, this cost. Sixty-five pounds, and he’s just left me lying on a table the whole time. I could have done that at home. Or could I? I mean, I never have. Perhaps, I wondered, things like acupuncture relieve anxiety just because they’re a break from the routine.
When the session was over, I did feel refreshed.
He finished by asking me about my health. I’d explained that I was having phantom mouth pains now and then; my tongue and palette would feel tingly and numb. I’d been to several NHS GPs over the months, who were useless. When I eventually went privately to an oral specialist (I mean a doctor) and told him about the funny feeling in my mouth, he’d tautologically informed me it was a condition called oral dysesthesia, which means ‘funny feeling in the mouth’. Three hundred pounds well spent.
The bloke called Larry, however, said I had too much ‘fire energy’. I needed to drink more water, he told me.
Since then, I have been drinking more water, and it’s helped. Not just with my mouth, but with my mood and energy. It might seem obvious that my body needs hydration, but I wasn’t hearing it anywhere else, not from the NHS nor Harley Street.
Thanks, Larry.