Hyper-chondriac (18 page)

We looked at each other, equally disgusted. I was furious because he had hit my gag reflex, which I'm assuming wasn't supposed to happen. He was furious because I had ejected last night's chicken-pineapple curry onto his monogrammed dress shirt. I hadn't thrown up anything since I split a bottle of Smirnoff with Ronnie Lopez in eleventh grade. It didn't feel good.

“That wasn't supposed to happen, was it?” I queried.

“No, it wasn't.”

“Well, your hand must've slipped.”

“It didn't.”

We each conveyed an unusual mixture of embarrassment and rage. It was bad enough throwing up in a parking lot in the middle of the night as a teenager in front of other throwing-up teenagers, but to propel my favorite Thai meal all over a guy I'd met less than an hour ago under 100-watt fluorescents was really uncomfortable and awkward. But I did the right thing. Had my head remained flat, I could have easily choked on my vomit.

Whitehurst trudged over to his desk and began blotting his shirt with tissues, fragments of which stuck to his clothes and made it look as if he had pineapple-y dandruff. He was extra miffed because it was only eleven-thirty and he probably didn't have another shirt to change into and would smell pungent for the remainder of his patients. I thought of offering him my sweatshirt, since I had a T-shirt underneath, but decided against it. Doctors and sweatshirts don't really belong together, unless they're out playing ball with their sons in a commercial.

The silence became painful. I didn't pay $215 for tension. My breath was hounding me and I had just run out of Listermint strips. You know your breath is really bad when your mouth is shut and you can still smell it. It's like after a workout when Nancy can smell my armpits through the tops of my shoulders.

Then, just as our emotions were about to boil over, Whitehurst and I acted as if nothing had happened—as if we both had just had really bad sex.

“So,” he finally said, breaking the ice. “Let me give you your homework for next time.”

“Let me guess: Don't eat dinner the night before?”

He fake-smiled, then showed me an isometric exercise where I'd press my left hand against the left side of my head while trying to bend my neck to the left. This would help to balance out my neck muscles so they wouldn't be fighting with each other. But that's the only exercise he dispensed. I'm sure he had others but was rationing them out to maximize my visits and his earning potential.

“And we should set something up for next week. I think I just had a cancellation Tuesday.”

“Tuesday's great.”

I followed him to the front desk and confirmed my new appointment with Sheila as Whitehurst stood behind me. Despite being closer to the exit, things felt even more awkward. I wish I could've just scampered out, but Sheila was in the process of running my credit card through the machine.

“Oh, Sheila,” I bellowed. “Why don't you tack on a couple of Dr. Whitehurst's CDs.” Then as I grabbed a pair of the discs from the display I turned to Whitehurst and added, “I really like your music.” I don't know why I had to (a) bellow, (b) lie, or (c) buy more than one of his CDs, but I felt that two seemed more sincere and less patronizing, as if they were so entertaining that they'd make great gifts.

He seemed pleased.

I tossed the CDs into the trunk of my car and as soon as I got home I called Sheila and canceled my appointment. Then I brushed my teeth.

“Ayurveda is not a licensed health care practice.”

Those were the words at the top of the waiver form I was about to sign. I had driven several hours outside Los Angeles to get rid of some “ama.” According to Ayurveda, which has been around for 5,000 years, disease is an imbalance in one's natural doshas caused by improper diet, poor digestion, negative emotions and stress, which subsequently leads to a buildup of toxins in the body called ama. I had reason to believe I had a lot of ama.

I sat in a wooden folding chair across from a light blue couch as Gregorian chants (which blew away Whitehurst's tunes) seeped out from one of the other rooms. The walls had but one lone tapestry—an elephant with a human body and lots of arms. If I angled my head properly, I could see a taco stand across the street from the nondescript office building I was in. Above my head was an assortment of diplomas from The American University of Complementary Medicine, Samra Oriental Medicine College, and The Acupuncture Committee. Individually, all three seemed rather pointless; collectively they seemed even more absurd.

Nearby there were also several stalks of bamboo in a vase, which pissed me off. Bamboo is supposed to be both lucky and tranquil but has quite the opposite effect on me. Besides not cleaning up after their dog, our next-door neighbors are abominably loud. So Nancy and I decided we needed to block out some of the sound from their yard with tall plants against our shared fence. We hired a landscaper through a friend of Nancy's, and the plant guy, Brad, suggested bamboo. The only hitch was that Brad, this little five-foot-one, ninety-five-pound man with the voice of a linebacker, didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. I shelled out over $1,300, and despite standing outside with a hose and hand-watering the stalks like a jackass for forty-five minutes every day as I was told, everything died within a month. Apparently it was the wrong kind of bamboo for our climate. We were bamboozled. That one's for Tai Chi Steve.

“Any treatments are not ment to replace prescribed medical treatments that the patient is undergoing.”

“Ment”? Don't their computers have spell-check? Bad spelling has always irritated me but at least when using a Smith-Corona typewriter in the early '80s there was a shred of an excuse. There might not have been a dictionary nearby, or if there was, getting up to grab it was too much of a hassle. And that doesn't even address the laborious world of correction cartridges. But there's no longer a reason for bad spelling. Even the lamest computers in the world come with spell-check. In fact, when I spelled “spellcheck” without a hyphen, my computer magically added a red line under the word. What did these people think the red line under the word “ment” meant? That the word was resting on a tiny carpet? If they were this sloppy with their spelling, it didn't bode well for their being meticulous Ayurvedists.

“On a scale of 1–10, what is your energy today?”

It was probably a seven when I walked in but it had quickly escalated after being exposed to bamboo and the anti–spelling bee exhibit. I put 8.5 on the form.

“Clearly state three main health concerns.”

I immediately wrote “Calm down” then stared into space, thinking of additional concerns. Although it seemed as if I had a lot of problems, I really only had one. After five minutes I couldn't think of anything else so I just wrote “Calm down” two more times.

“Is your elimination on the loose side or the hard side?”

Based on what? Compared with metamorphic rock it's kind of loose but compared with the stuff inside a lava lamp—I'd be lying if I said it wasn't hard. I stopped overanalyzing and just put down “Normal.” Which was more polite than “None of your business.”

“Is your elimination feel complete?”

First of all, it's DOES!
Does
your elimination feel complete!!! Is your education feel complete? I felt like working out a deal with this place; I'd proof all of their literature and they'd Ayurveda me for free.

“Do you have any emotional, mental or psychological stress?”

Funny you should ask. And your collection of bad grammar and poor syntax has added to the pile.

After I'd answered another handful of questions, a bearded guy in his late thirties with wire-rimmed glasses introduced himself as Todd and told me to sit down next to him on the couch.

“We'll go over your questionnaire sheet later. First we're gonna take your pulse.”

Todd propped my right arm up on a pillow and pressed his thumb down onto a vein on the inside of my right forearm, a few inches below my wrist. I'd had my pulse taken hundreds of times and was accustomed to this taking a minute, two minutes tops. Instead, we sat there in silence for much longer than that as he occasionally scribbled something on his clipboard with his free hand. He wasn't really writing anything, just scribbling. I glanced over at his clipboard and saw that there were three rows of nine figures of preprinted shapes that looked like orange wedges. I had no idea what the hell he was doing. He could have been bored and doodling for all I knew.

About ten minutes later, Todd still hadn't removed his thumb from my arm. I was getting antsy. I wondered if he had just spaced out and was thinking about the hole in his moccasins. Another few minutes passed. I couldn't wait until this was over. Then after six or seven more minutes, Todd released his hitchhiking finger and I thought it was.

“All right.” He seemed even more exasperated and bored than me. “Let's get the other side now.”

Todd and I switched places and he did the exact same thing on my left arm. This was tedious. I wanted a taco.

Another twenty minutes later, Todd's pad was completely covered in blue swirls and scrawls and his thumb was no longer glued to my body.

“All right.” He seemed to have a favorite phrase for starting sentences. “Let's see what's going on inside of you.” I thought he was going to look down my throat, in my ears or up my ass, but instead he just consulted his scribbles.

“All right, I bet that you never get headaches.”

I didn't.

“I don't.”

“And that you have a lot of neck and shoulder pain and quite a bit of joint pain.”

That was dead-on! How the hell did he know that?

“Yeah!”

“And most of your stress is from the neck up.”

“Absolutely! And you can tell all this stuff just from my pulse?”

“It's actually seven different pulses.”

“I thought we only had one pulse.”

“You do. I'm getting seven different readings by going to deeper and deeper levels.”

“How do you go to different levels?”

“I press down a little harder each time.”

This was magic. It was like holding down the “3” button in a department store elevator and knowing every item that would be at that floor. I still didn't understand, though. And he probably couldn't share his secret, unlike that table magic guy in Orlando telling me how he made the Queen of Hearts come out of Nancy's bra.

“All right.” He went back to his notes. “You also have really dry skin.”

That was true as well. In fact, when I was seventeen, my hands became so dry from washing dishes at the Scupper that Dr. Torino told me I'd have to avoid using any water on my palms for a month. I wore rubber gloves at work and in the shower and used a waterless oatmeal paste to wash. This was starting to get weird.

“Each level is connected to different energy levels of the body. Some levels are connected to fat tissue, others to bone or nerves. We get all these readings and tabulate a Pitta-Vata reading.”

“What's mine?”

“Your Pitta is three and your Vata is three.”

“So that's pretty low.”

“No, it's on a scale of one to three, not one to ten. Your Pitta-Vata is as high as it can go.”

“Is that bad?”

“It's not good. All right, stick out your tongue.”

As I did so, Todd leaned forward to get a closer look and I practically poked him in the eye with my giant mouth muscle. He then rapidly sketched something on another sheet on his clipboard, this one with a series of preprinted tongue shapes on it.

“All right, you have a series of red dots on the tip of your tongue…”

“Which I'm assuming isn't good. I mean, because of my bad Pitta-Vata scores.”

“You're right. The red dots indicate fire and heat in your muscles. You don't need quite as much as you're carrying around.”

“So now what?”

“We're gonna try to fix you.”

“Good.”

“A large portion of your stress is in your physiology, not just in your emotions. You're lucky. It's a self-feeding cycle, but we can deal with it.”

“You mean that the stress in my brain is creating stress in my body, which then sends more stress up into my brain and then back down to my body again?”

“Something like that. Yeah.”

I followed Todd down a long hallway into a kitchen with shelves filled with jars, spices and a bunch of yellow stuff. A white tapestry dangled from the ceiling. There were pots and pans scattered about and it looked as if a mad hippie scientist had been residing there.

Todd handed me a sheet of paper.

“All right, here's your new diet.”

Diet? I hadn't come here to lose weight. And if this was so specialized, how did he spend forty minutes on my pulse and all of nine seconds putting together an indefinite meal plan?

“You can eat anything you want off this sheet whenever you want,” he continued. “Stuff with an asterisk you can have once in a while, stuff with two asterisks you should only have in very small amounts.”

“So anything without an asterisk I can eat a lot of?”

“Yep.”

I looked at the list, which was broken up into fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, beans, nuts, seeds, sweeteners, spices, condiments, dairy, beverages and herb teas. After I read it for a second, Todd grabbed it back from me.

“All right, I want you to have half a glass a day of aloe vera juice, too,” he said while circling that under the beverage category, then handing me back the sheet.

“And nothing cold.
Never
drink anything cold.”

“Why not?”

“It's bad for your organs. Room-temperature or hot drinks only.”

“What about wine?” I trembled.

“Only sulfite-free.”

I looked under the beverage heading and began to get nauseated. Everything I liked to drink wasn't on the list. Everything I hated was. Apricot juice. Hated apricots. Cherry juice. Hated cherries. Grape juice. No thank you. Peach nectar. Pass. Orange juice and carrot juice, which I liked, each had two asterisks, which meant I could rarely have any. Cranberry juice, which I needed to drink for my prostate, wasn't even listed. The only thing I could even stomach was mango juice, and I doubt it would be as appealing un-cold. I had no idea what aloe vera juice tasted like but it couldn't be worse than prune juice (two asterisks, thankfully!).

I scanned the fruits and vegetables and was just as surprised. Lettuce had two asterisks, as did broccoli, carrots and kiwi. Any foods not listed—such as apples, pineapples and cucumbers—were forbidden. Even tomatoes weren't on the sheet, which meant I could never have them, even though, like cranberries, they were supposed to be essential for good prostate care. This diet was already turning into a
Sophie's Choice,
pitting one part of my body against another.

Todd grabbed the sheet back from me again.

“Let's work on your breakfast now. You like figs?” he asked.

“No. Hate 'em.”

“Plums?”

“Nope.”

“Prunes?”

“Won't touch 'em.”

“Apricots?”

“No.”

“Raisins? You must like raisins?”

“I'd rather die.”

I started to get queasy. I was on the verge of another panic attack based solely on looking at a sheet of paper that contained words for things that I preferred not to eat. It was ironic that I had such an adverse reaction to so many of the foods on the list that were supposed to calm me down. In order to exorcise my demons I would be forced to eat stuff that frightened me.

“Okay, um…” Todd muttered as he developed a contingency plan on the fly. I'm sure he hadn't run into someone who hated so many foods. “You like berries?”

“Blue. No. Boysen. Uh-uh. Raspberries, yes. Blackberries, yes.” I realized that none of these patterns even made sense, but whose food aversions do?

“Then I want you to mix a cup of blueberries…”

“I don't like blueberries.”

“I meant blackberries.”

“Okay.”

“…with some raspberries and a mango. That's your breakfast. But I don't want you to just cut everything up. I want you to mash it into a paste so it's like applesauce or baby food.”