THE ACUPUNCTURIST
A Taste of His Own Medicine
"Go to hell; see if I care," said the director of the Taiwan
Lung Association. How could Emerson have known that the Taiwanese doctor
understood English? The doctor had heard Emerson say to his wife that he wanted
a second opinion. This doctor wanted to cut his lung out.
"I am the
head of the Taiwan Lung Association!" he said angrily pointing towards the
door of his office. "If you need a second opinion, go, but don't come
back. I'm not helping you anymore!"
"With that
attitude, I don't need your help," shouted back Emerson as he took his
jacket briskly and headed out. "
"Do you
realize what you just did?" said his wife in the taxi on the way back to
their home. "You just gave up the last chance for you to get well. Go
ahead; die, see if I care." Emerson knew she really didn't care as
much about his health as she did about his money and her own saving face.
"They can cut your lung out, sweetheart, but they
aren't touching mine!" Mr. and Mrs. Davis didn't talk the rest of the way
home. Occasionally Emerson hacked a cough, opened the taxi window, and spit out
phlegm onto the street.
"You're
disgusting!" his wife scowled, her long upper teeth glimmering in the
oncoming headlights.
"But it's
okay for the driver to open the door at every red light and spit bloody
betel-nut juice on the street. That’s okay. Right?"
"It's not
blood; it's cinnamon they put in the nut." Being correct was most
important to her under any circumstance.
After they got
home, Emerson took out a fold of paper with powder he had gotten from the dispensary
of an ear, nose, and throat clinic; a doctor there with a reflector light on
his forehead, twelve inch Q-Tips, and a row of humidifiers lined up in his
clinic like hairdryers in beauty salons had prescribed it for him.
The virus he had caught from one of his adult English
class students. Students didn't have the habit of covering their mouths when
they coughed or sneezed in class. If they were on the street, they merely
covered one nostril with a pointer finger and blew the snot out of the other. If
there was a waste basket nearby, they blew it in there. Sometimes, they didn't have
a waste basket; a handkerchief would do. Occasionally they would go to a W.C.
and find a toilet or urinal to spit into.
One sleepless
night, on his way back to bed from the bathroom, he spoke to his wife.
"Let's go to that
acupuncturist your sister was telling you about. Maybe he'll know what to do.
My back is killing me."
“You mean Dr. Lam?”
“Yeah, that one.”
Emerson
had been coughing so violently the previous two weeks that he threw his back
out. Maybe they'd have to cut his spine out, too, in addition to his lung and
kidney.
"Maybe he
can help you; he's not a Western doctor, though. You said you only trusted
American-trained doctors"
"I don't,
ker-choo, care if he comes from the moon. Your sister said, (hack-hack-spit) he
was good, right?" Emerson had heard convincing testimonials about
acupuncture. In China, women had childbirth with no sedative other than
acupuncture and experienced no pain.
The next
morning, they got in a taxi and went to the Chinese Herbal Clinic of Dr. Lam
Chat-Hom; no appointment necessary. The clinic was a non-descript storefront on
a busy Taipei two-way road, three or four cycles haphazardly parked on the sidewalk
outside the clinic entrance, unlit with soot coating metal grate over glass, a
weather-damaged hand-painted sign printed on yellowing plastic mold near plant
pots that were watered by rainfall alone, exposed electric wiring on the pole
near a side ally, a step down and two steps up unevenly walked under the
building overhang. The clinic, the front rooms of his residence, entered down a
harsh florescent hallway, a dozen mismatched chairs of different sizes and
shapes along both sides. One stepped over the outstretched shoeless legs of a
motley crew of elderly patients occupying. Emerson was the only foreigner. The
air, smelling like vinegar with incense-smoke and medicinal plants thrown in;
it was the smell of medicinal gao-liang liquor that shot up the nostrils.
The doctor came
out of one of three exam rooms wearing a white smock, grinned at the different Caucasian
face of Emerson, walked past to a smudged gray-steel desk, bent low to say
something to a dour middle-aged woman wearing an ancient nurse’s cape taken from
a Hemingway novel and returned to the exam room. The nurse turned in her
squeaky swivel-chair to a cluttered sliding glass-door cabinet, to a shelf holding
curled papers wrapped in rubber-bands and removed a pumpkin-sized white ceramic
bottle with darkened cracks. On it, an etching of a bald blue Chinese sage sat holding
a peach in one hand and a long staff in the other. She removed the ceramic cap,
poured some liquid into a little soda glass, stood and went over toward Emerson
and his wife and spoke with her in Taiwanese.
"Drink
this. It is good for you," Mrs. Davis told her husband. The slightly bent nurse
smiled, kowtowed, and went back behind her desk. Emerson drank up. His nose
wasn't stuffed any more now that his virus had left his system but his back
still ached whenever he bent over. He could smell the kaoliang liquor with some
herbal additives thrown into the mix, clearly.
Dr. Lam had made a good point about the medicinal
cocktail. It warmed Emerson to the point that he forgot he was sitting in a
drafty waiting room of an herbal doctor's clinic. He had almost forgotten his
bad back, too, that is until he tried to stand up to return the empty glass to
the nurse. That's when it hit him; either this Dr. Lam was the real deal with
the acupuncture needles or the rest of his life would be regulated to drinking
tainted kaoliang and other alcoholic brews, not to mention a few Perkasets and
oxymorphines.
On his way to
the nurse’s desk, her telephone rang; the doctor would like Emerson to enter
his examination room on the left. His wife stood up, thanked the nurse
profusely, and helped Emerson the twenty or so steps down the pebbled cement-slab
hall, wearing slimy artificial leather slippers, with forty-seven oriental eyes
upon him; three elderly patients had one eye each to match their missing rotted
feet.
When Emerson
seated himself on the aluminum bed cushioned with fitted-linen tatami pads,
another full glass of medicinal kaoliang was placed in his hand by the nurse
who told his wife standing nearby to wait a moment until the doctor would be
with him, but to have Emerson take off his shirt and unbuckle his pants in the
meantime. Patients, on their way to the restroom, passed Emerson's exam room
and paused to stop, look in, and give the thumbs up to this foreign believer of
Chinese voodoo.
Dr. Lam
entered, white doctors garb buttoned to the top, a white plastic Wyeth pen
shield lining his upper left pocket. "How long have you been in
pain?" he asked Emerson in halting but understandable English.
"Over a
month now," Emerson's wife answered in Taiwanese.
"Really,"
Dr. Lam replied surprised, even though, from the look of his patients in the
waiting room, a month of minor pain would have been an endurable interlude for
their hunched backs of chronic backaches. Emerson was lucky, and he knew
it.
"Cigarette?"
"We can
smoke in here?"
"Sure"
"Isn't it
bad for you?"
"As long
as you live in Taipei you should not stop to smoke." He took out a yellow
pack of Long Life cigarettes with the same picture of the large-headed sage
with a peach and staff, just like on the jar of medicinal kaoliang.
"You mean
I shouldn't stop smoking?"
"No. You
should continue," Dr. Lam said as he turned to an aluminum table to take
hold of a deep jar filled with blue fluid. The acupuncture needles sat in the
jar like combs used to sit in the jar of barber shops back in Brooklyn, to
anesthetize the items before they swept through the next customers hair, only
these antiseptic needles would soon be pierced through Emerson's skin,
somewhere.
"There is
lot of oxygen pollution in Taiwan air, no?" Dr. Lam explained add he took
a drag on how cigarette and handed Emerson an ashtray to catch his falling ash.
"It's very
bad the air," Emerson blew out his smoke and tapped his cigarette ash into
the tray. “The tar in the cigarette covers your lungs and prohibits pollution
from attacking you."
"You mean
it acts as a shield coating my lungs?"
"Exactly,"
said Dr. Lam, taking a swig of his one supply of medicinal kaoliang from a
personal flask in his lower left pocket.
"That's
the first time I've heard that. I like that idea," said Emerson, a
lifetime pack-a-day cigarette smoker.
"Show me
where it hurts." Emerson pointed to his lower back. The doctor gave a
look.
By that point,
Emerson's back pain was the last thing on Emerson's mind. He was feeling the effects
of his third glass of kaoliang and enjoying his cigarette. His wife excused
herself and returned to the waiting room to let the boys inside have their fun.
She heard laughter and loud talking coming through the doorway. Dr. Feel-good
was making Emerson feel good and he hadn't pricked one needle into him.
In the next
fifteen minutes, twenty needles were twisted and snapped into Emerson's
prostrated body: in his ear lobe, shoulder blades, neck, leg, and even the back
where the pain originated. Then, the doctor rolled over a silver machine on
wheels and flipped on a few switches. Next, he took twenty wire attachments
from the side of the machine and, with alligator clips, clamped them to the
open ends of the twenty acupuncture needles. Emerson felt no pain.
Dr. Lam offered
him another cigarette and held out a match so Emerson could light it from his
reclining position, an ashtray placed on a chair to the right of his exam
table. Through the hole in the exam
table Emerson put his head and down through it smoked his cigarette. Then it
happened;
The machine was turned on. A trilling vibration shot
through there needles into his body followed by pulsing ticks of electric
stimulant. Trrrrrrril tick tick tick tick tick tick tick, trrrrrrrril tick tick
tick tick tick tick…The doctor asked if Emerson could feel it under his skin.
Emerson nodded into the hole in the table.
"Stay here
for thirty minutes. You will fewer better." He left a pack of cigarettes
on the chair in front of Emerson and left the room, turning off the light for
shade.
After thirty
minutes, Dr. Lam returned, put on the light, removed the alligator clamps from
the needles, and told Emerson to sit up on the exam table. Emerson did so with
a back that felt better already. It was a miracle! The doctor offered him
another glass of a kaoliang and a cigarette and told him to return the
following week for another treatment.
"You will
need four treatments because your back is so stiff. You should come here
directly next time you have pain. I help you good."
Emerson followed his wife to the
nurse’s desk as she paid. Another patient was called by the doctor into the
exam room behind him.
It was 8:00pm by the time they got home. They'd been at the doctor's
office seven hours but it was worth it. Emerson could actually dry himself
after he showered. The pain was mostly gone. Only a ghost of it prevailed
reminding him of where the pain had once been.
A few weeks after his last treatment from
Dr. Lam, Emerson and his wife went to eat at a restaurant a friend had
suggested to them. It happened to be a few block from Dr. Lam’s Chinese Herbal
Medicine Clinic. It was in a dark night club atmosphere with Taiwanese music
playing on a CD jukebox. There was a smoky bar counter with a dozen liquor
bottles lined up on a shelf over a frosted black gala mirror. The food was
Hakka style. The tables had cloth covers with glass over them so the waitress
wouldn’t have to keep changing them when they got soiled.
As
they sat and looked over the menu, they heard the intermittent sound of a hard
object hitting the counter followed by a tumble of beads. Each time it
happened, there was a roar from the crowd of men who gathered around the sound
at the bar.
“What
is that noise?” Emerson asked craning his neck to look over at the disturbance.
“They’re
drinking,” said his wife without taking her eyes off the menu. “We’re ready,”
she called out to a waiter who came by with a pad and pen.
“But
why are they making so much noise?” Emerson asked again, this time standing to
get a better look.
“They’re
playing a game,” she said slightly disturbed that her husband was more
distracted by them than by her. “They’re playing a drinking game. Now would you
pay more attention to what I’m saying?”
“One
second, one second. I think I see someone I know over there.”
“You
know someone here?”
“Yeah.
That man in the white doctor’s jacket looks familiar.” Emerson stood up
gingerly to as to not reinjure his bad back and walked slowly over to the bar.
There was someone there who he recognized; he just wasn’t sure because that person
seemed do out of place. It was clear now to him; Dr. Lam was sitting there on a
stool, cigarette hanging from his lip, with a thick black plastic cup in one
hand and a glass of whisky on the rocks in the other, surrounded by
well-dressed businessmen who yelled with delight at him slamming the
over-turned cup down onto the bar counter. He caught a glimpse of Emerson out
of the corner of his blood-shot eyes.
“Hey
Davis, how did you know I was here?” Dr. Lim called out as the others followed
his eyes and looked over at the foreigner in their mitts.”
“You
look like you’re having fun, doctor,” said Emerson ironically.
“I
am, I am!” Dr. Lim said loudly through the din of the crowd and jukebox music. “Here,
sit down,” he said as he stood up from his stool. “Come join us. Cigarette?”
“I’m
here with my wife.”
“Oh!”
He stood up to where Emerson was pointing and walked toward Mrs. Davis.”
“Davis
tai-tai. Ni hao? Ni ze-ma jr-dao wo zai ji-lee?” That means, “Mrs. David. How
are you? How did you know I was here?” Mrs. Davis didn’t know what to say. Dr.
Lam wasn’t drunk but too happy.
“I’m
going to have dinner now. Thanks for the invitation. Enjoy yourself,” Emerson
said in a loud voice with a big smile, winking one eye, and sitting down
gingerly to join his wife for dinner.
“Hao.
See-you.”
As
he walked back to the bar, Mrs. Davis seemed angry as Emerson shook his head in
mock disbelief and took a sip of his sofa.
“You
think that’s funny? Bu hao yi-se.” Embarrassing.
“Noooo.
It’s crazy.”
They
sat quietly and listened to the music, Emerson happy but pretending to be
disturbed so his wife wouldn’t be upset by him again. He got up gingerly,
holding the back of the seat for support, and went to the restroom. On his way
back he noticed a smell of smoke; not cigarette smoke, but smoke from a fire.
“Do
you smell something?” he said as he slowly sat down in his chair.
“Smell something?” his wife repeated.
“Yes,
I smell smoke. Don’t you?” said Emerson as he glanced around the club for the
source of the odor.
“It’s
prayer money. They’re burning prayer money outside for the holiday.” Emerson
knew that the Taiwanese were always throwing drab slips of construction paper
they referred to as ‘money’ into round metallic containers.
“No.
It’s not that smell. I know what that smell smells like; it’s not that burning
smell,” said Emerson now more alarmed and getting no sympathy from his wife.
He
glanced around the club again and toward the windows on each side of the corner
entrance door. He thought he might see someone lighting something outside.
Then, he caught a glace of what it was; he looked up from the windows bottom to
the top where a store awning outside had flames billowing from it dropping
melted plastic sparks onto the sidewalk below.
“Call
the fire department! There’s a fire outside!”
“What?”
“There’s
a fire outside! Someone call the fire department!”
Mrs. Davis turned in her chair and saw what
Emerson had seen. She stood up immediately, went to the entrance, and stormed
outside to the street. There she stood for a good minute or two transfixed as
the awning fire exploded raining molten plastic onto the street below.
She stormed back inside and told the cashier
who was oblivious to anything until she alarmed her. Dr. Lim and his
businessmen friends remained as they were before, playing games, drinking, and
smoking at the bar counter. One man, perhaps two, turned around to see what the
commotion was at the front of the club. No one moved out of their seats or left
the club except for Emerson whose wife stood him up and took him outside.
Five
minutes later, those outside of the club could hear the quiet fire alarms on
the tiny red trucks coming up the street. Dr. Lam remainedinside and had a
taste of his own medicine.
