Hickory Smoked, Please

Let's pretend just for a moment that I'm not on a blog "hiatus" (aka: snowboarding and kinky tantric sex with Jon Gosselin in Utah while Kate celebrates their 11th wedding anniversary with a pint of Starbucks ice cream and a vibrator) so I can tell you about my physical therapy appointment yesterday.

First of all, the receptionist? Is a total bitch. But that is neither here nor there.

The therapist guy sat patiently, feigning interest whilst I regaled him with the details of my malady: sudden flares, stabbing pain that wraps around my ribs all the way to my breast bone, difficulty breathing, loss of ability to wipe myself. He nodded politely and wrote everything down in my chart.

Then he had me look at the ceiling, slowly, three times. Apparently, I am a dexterous prodigy because I passed the "ceiling looking" test with FLYING colors. Then I had do a series of equally boring maneuvers before he told me to lay on the table on my stomach. NAP TIME!

It was at this point that I said, "Gosh, I kind of hoped the pain would be acting up when I came to see you today so it would be easier to figure out what is going on."

That's when he told me, basically, that he's a terrorist who plans to torture me until we caused the pain to flare up, that it was sort of the POINT of the session, so I realize that not only is my back totally fucked, but I also have the pleasure of paying someone to make it hurt more. Call me crazy, but I generally prefer leather or latex involvement in this type of situation.

After much poking, rib and vertebrae counting, head turning and arm lifting, at which point I was beginning to worry we wouldn't find anything at all and I'd be sent away from yet another doctor's office, he pushed down in a certain spot and I nearly screamed from the pain, which would have been embarrassing because my pain noises sound like sex noises.

The offender? A lower rib, which he thinks may have been jammed at some time in the past which "set it up for the possibility of pain", which as I understand it means that I had a ticking time bomb RIGHT BESIDE MY LUNGS, and suddenly the idea of a rib exploding through my chest and impaling my eyeball is not so out of line. How's that for chilling?

He also said that all the muscles in the area of my wayward rib are inflamed, including the vertical back muscle that runs sort of over the top of it (I'm picturing pork ribs as he's describing my very own ribs, and am horrified to find my stomach churning in hunger.)((I swear to fucking god, that movie Fried Green Tomatoes turned me into a cannibal. Or at the very least, "set up the possibility for cannibalism."))

The next twenty minutes of my session were spent with me laying face down on the table while he. pushed. on. my. rib. Apparently the cure for dislocated ribs is BREAKING THEM OFF ALL TOGETHER. The worst part was that at some point I developed a need to fart, and his face was basically at butt-level, so I knew I absolutely COULD NOT fart, but he was pushing and pushing and it was all I could do to relax my upper body while my lower regions were clenched for dear life. When I left, I realized I no longer needed to fart, so there's no telling what actually happened - if I totally reversed the direction of the advancing gas bubble, or if it escaped in the tiny therapy room, aimed at the poor man's face.

I have to go back on Friday for another rib-pushing session because there's no exercise I can really do on my own at home to help fix this "rare" type of problem. Usually ribs don't move, he says, because everything in there is "packed together and bound tightly", so I think what he was trying to tell me is that my ribs are "loose" but even if it's true that they get around, at least they're not HIV positive because then NOBODY would be able to eat them and that would be a total waste.