Saved by the bear in the Tatras

I’ll be honest, the signs weren’t promising. I hate massages at the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times. As I have probably mentioned a dozen times, I’ve been having significant issues with my back, which, thanks to the miracles of magnetic resonance imaging, have been revealed as possibly degenerative, possible muscular (thanks, I could have told you that), and this has been affecting my sleep. I’m due for a hip replacement soon, which might relieve the pressure on my lower back and shoulders, but, living in Ontario, have no idea when that might be. I needed help. I would try anything. Even massage.
 
Mrs. Ottawacker, whose feelings for massage are diametrically opposed to mine, spends her life in the quest for a good masseur or masseuse. She recommended IV. “She’s a bit different,” she said. “You might not like her.”
 
My response was somewhat short. “Of course I won’t like her,” I said. “She’ll be pummeling my back, ripping out various hairs with her knobbly hands, and generally making my life a misery. What is there to like?”
 
“You’ll feel better when she has finished,” said the all-knowing fount of wisdom that I married.
 
So, I booked the appointment and, after a couple of re-bookings (one on each side, I had forgotten that Liverpool’s game was yesterday when I initially booked and then she had a course to give for the second time) I found myself face down on a bench, with my head wedged into a small hole. And, as I mentioned, the signs weren’t promising. For one thing, IV. is Czech: and the Czechs are not internationally renowned for their subtlety.
 
“What’s your problem?” she asked when I first lay down, having completed all the relevant forms on my arrival. I told her about my back and my hips, the arthritis, the soccer injuries. More significantly, my joint pain made it very hard to exercise.
 
“Well, you’re too fat,” she said in her opening gambit, cutting to the chase, not to mention the quick. “How much you weigh?” I told her, carefully subtracting 10lb from the answer. “You need to lose your belly,” she said. “Let me tell you how.” And off she went.
 
“First, exercise is not very important, you need the morning sun. Morning sun is the best. It resets your chi. The first rays of the sun bring stimulus to your circadian rhythm. It makes you happy. You should walk barefoot in the grass, feel the earth between your feet. Drink distilled water, with added minerals. Add lemon juice and salts. No coffee until your body has woken. Caffeine attaches to receptors and makes your food harder to digest.”
 
As I said, it wasn’t looking promising. On and on she went, seemingly touching on every new age theory I had ever heard of (and living with Mrs. Ottawacker I get to hear a fair few of her enthusiasms), including forest breathing, mushroom picking, intermittent fasting, bath bombs, hydrogen water, … on and on it went. And all the time she was pounding my back, moving suction cups, stabbing me with acupuncture needles, cracking joints…
 
My second mistake was booking a 90-minute slot. “First time, is better,” she had said when I booked, and I figured if I was in for a penny, I might as well go the whole hog. But now, having been slapped around and beaten for 45 minutes like a tough piece of beef, I was regretting my decision. It wasn’t so much the pain as the constant barrage of noise about things I found less than inspiring. That was when I decided to take control, which is easier said than done when you are lying in shorts on a table and have a muscular Czech woman stabbing you with needles.
 
“So, is that a Czech accent” I asked, “or a Slovakian one? Where are you from?”
“You won’t have heard of it,” she said, “is small town in Moravia.”
“Try me,” I said. “I used to go to Czechoslovakia quite a lot in the 80s and 90s.”
 
So, she did, and quite by chance I recognised the name. I’d passed through the region when I had first visited my friend Jiří in Nosislav, near Břeclav. I’d travelled with a girlfriend up to Telč in the Vysočina region, and got very drunk on some of the local wine. I mentioned this before I realised who I was talking to – and what the consequences might be. But, strangely, I received no rebuke, and IV waxed lyrical about the mountains and the forests, and how she could pick numerous mushrooms and feed her family. I went on to tell her about the time I had eaten pickled mushrooms as an accompaniment to the “slivovice” I had been force fed by Jiří’s dad, Oldrich, and how I’d not felt the slightest ill effect, even after getting up from the table and falling over. Then we talked about the mountains of Slovakia, and I told her about the time I had spent the new year in a cabin near to Martin, in the Tatras mountains, and how I had been briefly chased by a bear while I was letting in the new year.
 
Before I knew it, the time was up, the cups were off and the needles were out, and she was performing her final crack of my toes. I sat up and felt very light headed. “Is to be expected,” she said. So, I sat alone on the bench for five minutes until I felt better, then got dressed and went out.
 
“You still too fat,” she said. “Is easy to lose weight. Look to morning sun.”
 
“That’s right,” I smiled, as I closed the door behind me, pretty sure I’d never be darkening her doorstep again. But then I started walking and realised I wasn’t in any pain. I climbed into the car, if not like a spring chicken, then at least not like an arthritic tortoise. When I moved my neck from side to side there was no clicking. My wrist hurt a lot, but she’d said to expect that and that it would improve (which it has). Most importantly, I could now touch my shins, with only several false movements beforehand and without falling over. The toes, I thought, might be a step too far.
 
As I write this, the day afterwards, I am bruised from the cupping but significantly more flexible and in significantly less pain. I slept last night. I didn’t make it up for the morning sun, but am revising my opinion of IV’s massage techniques. I may well go back next week, we’ll see.