Shock Therapy

Take the silver elevators and follow the sign to Neurology. Wrong. What they should have said is that Neurology is right around the corner from the silver elevators. Never mind. I find it despite the bad directions. The office is small and crowded. People in wheelchairs sit scattered about waiting to be called. The check-in desk is so close to the entrance door that you can't make a proper queue.

I finally manage to fill out the required forms and find a seat seconds before my name is called. I follow a bubbly woman down a maze of hallways to a small room with a table bed and a machine in close quarters. She instructs me how to put on the gown, returning to glue little wires and sprockets to my legs as she warns me about the "little flashes of electricity" that she will be zapping me with.

She taps my leg with the probe and Zing! a bolt of lightning shoots down my leg, making my muscles jump and seize up. This wonderful exercise is repeated numerous times both in the same spot and elsewhere on my leg - front, back, knee, ankle, foot. Brother! I am sure the hair on my wig is standing on end and that anyone I touch for the rest of the day is likely to share in my energetic good fortune.

But that is not the end of this barbaric torture (really, it doesn't hurt - much. Why does the word "rack" keep coming to mind?) No indeed. The real doctor now enters and proceeds to stab my leg with sharp wire probes while telling me to flex my muscles. I get to "hear" my muscles complain - airy whiffly sounds and deep rumblings come floating from the beeping machine next to my head.

I do not have an appointment to hear the results, just the test time that someone else abandoned. But I hear her tell the technician that I have mild neuropathy. She doesn't seem very concerned. And I see that based on the mobility issues of the rest of the patients in the waiting room, a bit of numbness in my legs is no big deal. I take my bleeding legs home, once again fully exhausted, and sit in the comfy blue chair, swilling ice tea and watching mind numbing episodes of Psyche.

My legs, just to be spiteful, have stopped the numbness and burning. Maybe the shock therapy worked after all.