Adventures of the Body

"Misfortune comes from having a body.
Without a body, how could there be misfortune?"
- The Tao Te Ching

The Thumb
I was biking up Riverside, a long, winding road that follows the French Broad. I have passed over the railroad tracks many a time without misfortune. This time, it was raining. My front tire slipped on the steel and wedged in the crack. I flew, grouchy before I even hit the ground, but somehow I landed more or less on my feet with a mysterious combination of injuries. These things always amaze me. There was a single spot of blood on my right thumb, and the top of my right shoe was ripped open, as well as the sock underneath, as well as the skin underneath that. I pried my bike out and went on, pissed as a wet cat about the biker-unfriendliness of non-perpendicular RR tracks. Strangely, the worst part of it all is my thumb, which has developed a nail hernia. Over the past few days a bubble of meat has squished out the side of the nail, and it torments me terribly. It torments me as I type this. It tormented me for seven hours yesterday as I bashed it into things at the shop and pressed it hundreds of times onto the paper I was feeding.

The Heat
As soon as I got my paycheck, I took a chunk of it to a doctor of Chinese medicine. I have had very good luck with this kind of thing, and I want to be quite, quite well at this point in my life. The man I saw had grown up in Mexico City; his family lived in San Antonio, so we had a bit to talk about. He looked at my tongue, checked my pulse, asked me if I am frequently thirsty, etc. He said, "You are a robust person with an excess of energy that is not being moved through your body. So the energy is stagnating as heat, mostly in your liver and your uterus, but also in your lymphatic system." Which is a fairly remarkable diagnosis to make from looking at a tongue, so remarkable it sounds like palmistry, if it hadn't so exactly divined my problems. We talked for an hour about the strange constellation of physical difficulties that have settled on me like blackbirds on a telephone pole. He said the problem was complicated, but there is a root cause. There is something that derailed my health, perhaps a parasite, definitely the EB virus, and definitely compounded by a certain "excess of heat," emotionally speaking. This is why I see non-Western doctors. They are not reductionists nor materialists. They respect the body as a thing compounded of spirit and matter, and as a thing which belongs to someone, a fact which quite escapes the average practitioner.