sensuous ultrasound (physio 1)

I know, you want to hear about the holy meatloaf. Sorry. I will get to it. But first: sensuous ultrasound.

I just had my last physio appointment of a series of seven. The physio is awesome. He's this skinny, ropy, fast-talking sports guy, who for the first few appointments tried in vain to engage me on the subject of the Game. I got around it by saying I didn't have cable, and eventually we settled on opera. He's been giving me traction on the theory that what was wrong with my leg was something compressed in my back.

He keeps adding new machines. First it was just the traction, wherein one lies in a harness on a narrow bed (ah, memories) and has the lower half gently stretched away from the upper half until, like Mike TeeVee, one is inhumanly tall and cheerful.

During the second appointment, I mentioned that I had some muscle soreness after the first session, so he added ultrasound. This entailed my turning over on one side while he spread petroleum jelly onto a palm-sized area of my back and then rubbed a small black device over the skin until it became slightly warm.

The first time he did this, there was a point at which our awkward attempts at chat faltered. We were silent for a moment, which gave me time to notice I was taking a quiet pleasure in the act. More than that, I thought I could tell that there was also pleasure in it for him.

Walking home, sunning myself amongst the bone-white concrete, I smirked a little, thinking something like "Ah, the sublimated homoerotics of the blah blah blah..." Smug, you know. Sports Guy knows himself not, etc.

This lid would not sit neatly on the jar, though. "That isn't quite right." I said to myself. "What we were enjoying wasn't a turn-on. Eros may have been there, but this was a different kind of arrow. It wasn't even really intimacy -- what does he know about me, or I of him? What was it, then?"

I think: tenderness. Not sexual, not even personal; yet not empty.

I think that this fast-talking sports guy, under his offhand talk, cares profoundly for the bodies he touches, and that this deep, physical, wordless love is transmitted even through a little black ultrasound device.

That's why he talks through the appointments, maybe, to disguise this tenderness he has for his patients, and to allow them to pretend to ignore their response to it, because what can either of us do with it?

I've had other health care treatments, acupuncture, massage, and found them useful. I don't think I've ever been touched that way by a man, not even a lover.

Maybe the impersonality of it is part of what works.

Next appointment, he added electric stim to relax the muscles. After that I guess we ran out of machines.

{rf}