While I was walking to my tarot reading in Lloret de Mar, my head and shoulder were throbbing. I hoped this wasn’t going to ruin the experience for me. I still don’t know where the headache came from, but my shoulder and I have a history going way back. If you’ve read me long enough, you’re sure to have run across me whining a time or two about my dislocated collarbone and all the accompanying pain that it has caused. My collarbone first dislocated about three years ago as the result of reaching back to switch on the table lamp next to my bed… very strenuous activity.
That simple act immediately started causing continuous spasms of pain in my upper arm which put me in a really bad mood. However, not being one to run to the doctor for… well, for just about anything, I treated it by staying at home and reading and hoping it would go away. It seemed to do that after about a week, and then my guest from the States arrived… the fifteen year old daughter of an old friend… and we were off to explore Mexico, me toting the usual backpack.
Some time into our trip, my arm started hurting again. It got so bad at one point that it caused me excruciating pain just to lift the dress that I wanted to wear that day. My arm just kind of hung there, and I had to move it with the opposite hand. I ended up begging the woman whose house we were staying in to take me to a huesero, a local bone doctor, and she did. He noticed right away that my collarbone was dislocated and popped it back into place without so much as a how d’ya do. Then, he charged me the equivalent of $5 in pesos and advised the Señora to concoct a poultice of several different herbs and spices (I think one of them was cinnamon) and plaster it on my shoulder and arm to ease the pain. We stayed on at that woman’ home in Guanajuato a couple of days longer than intended and then headed home.
After we got home, my arm and shoulder started bothering me again, and Sara, my fifteen year old guest, asked if I wanted her to “push on” me. Her uncle was a chiropractor, and the whole family was really serious about chiropractic adjustments.
“My mom and I do it for each other all the time,” she said. I agreed to let her have a go, and she had me lie down on the floor, belly down, and take a deep breath. As I was letting my breath out, she pushed on my back, and all kinds of things went snap, crackle and pop. I sat up, feeling much better. Sara asked me if I wanted her to push some more spots, but I thought it would be best to leave well enough alone. She was, after all, only fifteen.
The next day, I accompanied Sara down to Veracruz to catch her plane back home. We spent one night in a hotel, and my arm started hurting again, but I kept it quiet. It did cross my mind to ask her to do another “adjustment,” but I thought that was too much responsibility for a child… something could easily go wrong.
After her plane left, I had an hour and a half bus ride back to Xalapa, and I was really in agony, so I got a referral to a local chiropractor from my neighbor. He treated me with one of those little doo-hickeys that looks like a pistol but really just taps you. I laughed at the treatment. I couldn’t see how this was going to do anything for me. But sure enough, my muscles started aching, and within a few days, they had done the work of pulling my bones back into place. Case closed. Or so I thought. Hell, even my trick ankle, which had been dislocating on a regular basis for the previous twenty years, finally stayed put.
I didn’t have problems again until I started backpacking around Europe a couple of years ago or so. A French guy, who was volunteering with me on an organic farm in Norway, pointed out to me that my backpack was unbalanced and showed me how to correct it, but by that time, the damage had already been done. Although I strengthened my arm muscles by carrying baby goats to the barn twice a day so their mothers’ udders would fill up with milk, the bone was still dislocated, and the tendons and ligaments in that arm were giving me hell.
In short, I went to “chiropractors” in Ireland, Germany and England, and none of them seemed to know what they were doing. None of them had the little pistol doo-hickey, and none of them made me feel better… some made me feel worse. They all charged me a hell of a lot more money than the guy in Mexico who actually fixed the problem, and one of them told me I might just have to live with this problem for the rest of my life.
After that, I gave up on chiropractors and gave up on organic farming as well (for reasons other than just my dislocated collarbone). After about two years had passed, just before last Christmas, I noticed that I was no longer living with that pain, and when I looked in the mirror, it looked like my collarbone was back in place. Time had done what no chiropractor on the continent could. Happily, I strapped on my backpack for a holiday foray to Olomouc. Big mistake.
By the time I got back from that trip, I was hurting again, and this time, the pain didn’t go away. No matter how much I rested it, it just seemed to get steadily worse. I mentioned it to my new flatmate, Fanny Farmer, in hopes that she might know a chiropractor in Prague, but she was pretty sure that there weren’t any chiropractors here. She promised to look around.
Enter Sheila, a new British friend from my acting class who also just happens to be an Osteopath. She offered to take a look at things for me, and gave me a couple of treatments. This was in May, so I’d been living with the pain for five months. After the first treatment, I noticed that I seemed to have more energy, bounding up the steps to my apartment rather than dragging my sorry ass up with leaden feet. Things still weren’t quite right, but they were improving. After the second treatment, Sheila headed off to India, and I was on my own again, but things seemed to be improving.
Until I went to see myself in a movie. They were showing all the graduation films from the film school at a theater in the center… an all-day affair. Of course, I had to go down and see the films I’d acted in, as well as the ones my classmates from acting class had been in.
As I was sitting in the theater, waiting for things to start, I spotted the Ice Man and waved him over. Now, the Ice Man is not in my acting class, but as I had learned the previous day, he has appeared in quite a few film school films, and this time, he had his first speaking part. He sat next to me, and we watched the films together, which was great fun until they showed a comedy. Old Ice Man was laughing so hard and nudging me with his elbow… he must have planted that bony thing right into my inflamed ligament, and it was really howling, now. This was a day or two after my last treatment with Sheila, when things were still settling, and she had already left the country, so there was no help for me now.
I figured the pain would eventually go away, but it seemed to get worse instead of better. Oh, it would get better for a while, alright. But then, I would do something strenuous, like twisting a doorknob, and the pain would flare up again.
So, it got to be time for my summer vacation, and there was no doubt about it. This time, I would not be taking a backpack. I’d finally learned my lesson. Wheeled suitcase, here we come.
The only problem with a wheeled suitcase is that you have to lift it to go up and down stairs. And although I live just one floor above ground level, there’s no elevator to get me down… and then, there’s the staircase going down into the metro… so by the time I got to the airport, I’d already done quite a number on my arm. It was throbbing. And it continued to throb.
And so that is why my arm, shoulder and collarbone were throbbing on my way to my tarot reading. In fact, that morning, it seemed worse than it had been in a long time. I almost wished I could just sleep in, but this, after all, was what I had come for.
The reading took place in the home of Lolita’s “in-laws” above their downtown, high-end gift shop… a beautifully restored old mansion of a place. I rang the bell of the shop door and was greeted by a smiling Lorenzo, the medium who would be doing my reading. We walked up the stairs to the attic level, to a small, cozy room with its own wing off to one side, filled with books and antique furniture, far eastern carpets, and low light that made the space seem even more intimate. A space was set up for the reading… two comfy armchairs facing each other with a round coffee table between. On the table rested a deck of laminated tarot cards and some white votive candles.
Lorenzo lit the candles, shuffled the cards and had me cut the deck in two places, using my left hand. Then, he placed a shitload of cards on that table. I’d never had an official reading done before, just playing around with friends, and I’d never seen so many cards laid out for one reading. The whole table was covered. This was going to be in-depth, for sure.
Then, Lorenzo looked up at me and said,
“You have a pain in your back, just at the top of the shoulder blade.” I explained to him, more precisely, where the pain was. I wasn’t all that impressed with his ability to perceive this pain, because he’d undoubtedly seen me at the talk the previous night, massaging my shoulder. He asked if I wanted the pain to go away. I did, indeed.
He was working with a pendulum which he hung over the cards, muttering under his breath until the pendulum started swinging. He asked me,
“Do you have a Muslim man in your past?” The Spanish word for Muslim is Musulman, which always brings up a visual of a cartoon character in a striped muscle shirt, flexing his biceps in my mind. After that brief foray into Kruuland, I returned to the question.
“Muslim? No, I’ve never really known any Muslims.” Was this going to be a repeat of that hokey psychic fair I went to in Florida yeons ago? Then I brightened.
“I am going to Turkey in a few weeks…”
“No, no, somebody from your past.”
I thought. The only Muslims I could think of were some passing acquaintances or classmates in college, but…
“There was one man,” I told him, “about twenty years ago. I didn’t know him very well, but we both rented rooms in the same boarding house while I was in graduate school on Long Island…”
I had just run into him a few times in the kitchen, which had suddenly become more of a social gathering place since the landlady went to take care of her mother in Florida. We used to talk to each other while we were preparing our separate meals, and he told me his name was Iftikhar, Ifty for short. He was from Pakistan, and was an Imam, which is the Muslim, equivalent of a priest or minister. I think he used the word ‘minister’ with me. Ifty was also a medical doctor and was doing medical research at the university hospital. I met a few of the other tenants as well, and we all talked about preparing a meal together one day in the future.
Then, one day, I was walking home from the supermarket… I didn’t have a car… and Ifty came driving by and offered me a lift home, as he often did, which I accepted. As he was driving, he complained about a pain in his neck which didn’t seem to want to go away. It sounded a bit like flu symptoms, and I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t see him around for about a week after that, and then I heard, from one of the other boarders, that Ifty was in the hospital. There was a Syrian man and his American girlfriend living in the house at the time, and they were going to visit him. Now, I’ve always kept my distance from hospitals, so I just told myself that I would see Ifty when he came back home.
Time went by, and still, Ifty didn’t return to the boarding house. We had a mutual friend in my Oceanography department at school, another Pakistani guy. Whenever I would run into him in the hall, I would ask him how Ifty was doing, and he would say that he wasn’t doing well at all. He always encouraged me to go visit, but my skittishness around hospitals prevailed.
At one point, this mutual friend mentioned that Ifty’s family, his brothers, had come over from Pakistan to take care of him. They were going to take him home to Pakistan. I brightened at the prospect.
“So, he’s getting better, then?”
“No, I think they are taking him home to die.”
As obvious as it should have been, this was a shock to me. He’d been hospitalized for three months, now. I resolved that I would, indeed, pay Ifty a visit.
I still remember how nervous I was. Not only about the hospital environment itself (the last time I had visited someone in the hospital, I had almost fainted), but what do you say to someone you hardly know who is so sick that he’s been hospitalized for three months and is, in all likelihood, going to die soon… and knows it?
When I got onto the elevator in the hospital, a middle-eastern looking guy with a turban on his head got on at the same time. He asked which floor I wanted, I told him, and he punched it for me. Then he asked which room I was going to. I thought that was an odd question, but I answered.
His face broadened into a big smile.
“Ah, you are going to visit my brother,” he said.
I must have looked confused, because he spoke my friend’s name, and I finally put together what you, dear reader, already put together in the previous paragraph. This was Ifty’s brother. (But I didn’t have to tell you that, did I? You clever thing, you).
Ifty’s brother led me to his hospital room, and I almost didn’t recognize him. Ifty was half sitting, half reclining in his hospital bed, with his hands on top of the sheets… his fingers moving as if surprised that they could still do so. And he looked like a skeleton… completely wasted away to nothing but skin and bones.
He greeted me with a smile of recognition, but I couldn’t contain my shock.
“Ifty, what happened to you?”
“I was researching a disease in the medical lab, and I caught the disease.”
Ifty never named the disease, but I knew that the university had an AIDS research laboratory, so I have always assumed that is what happened to him. We talked about nothing in particular… life. His brother thanked me profusely for coming to visit Ifty. I paid him one more visit, and after that, I heard that they had taken him back to Pakistan where he had probably died. And that was twenty years ago.
After I finished telling Lorenzo the story, he asked me the man’s name.
“Iftikhar.”
Lorenzo consulted with his pendulum, muttering again. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then,
“Yes, it’s him. Do you want me to send him to the light?”
“Yes, of course.”
Lorenzo consulted with his pendulum some more and said,
“Yes, he is willing to accept our help.”
He muttered a few more incomprehensible things and then looked up at me.
“How is your arm?”
The pain was gone! All that throbbing and aching and inflammation that I’d suffered for the past six months was gone in the blink of an eye!
“Are you sure?” asked Lorenzo.
I stood up and moved my arm around in gigantic circles in both directions.
“Yep, it’s gone. There’s still a little stiffness, but the pain and inflammation is completely gone.”
“A!” Lorenzo ejaculated that staccato sound that was his trademark.
“You’ll still need to do some healing work with it, but the cause is gone.”
I sat there in utter amazement, not quite able to believe what I had just experienced, but not at all able to disbelieve it, because I had lived with constant pain for six months, and now, I had no pain. And that was more than six weeks ago, and the pain and inflammation hasn’t come back, and even the stiffness is getting to be quite a bit less.
Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but that night, I got to thinking,
“Why on earth would Ifty want to hurt me? What did I ever do to him? If anything, you’d think he’d have fond memories of me.”
I scheduled an appointment with Lorenzo to ask him that and other questions that I had. Lorenzo explained that it wasn’t that Ifty wanted to hurt me. He just needed help. Sometimes, when people die, he said, they go immediately to the place where they are supposed to go, but others get lost or confused, may not even know that they’re dead. They’re stuck in a kind of limbo, and don’t know what to do. When they find a living being that has some light, they get attached to it, and the damage they do is incidental. But if the spirit is willing to be helped, these situations can be taken care of by sending them to the light, which is always up and to the right, in case you ever find yourself needing these directions yourself (we all do sooner or later).
That still doesn’t explain why someone who died twenty years ago just started plaguing my shoulder two or three years ago, but I was still pretty impressed with the experience… and quite disillusioned to think that we could hang around in limbo for so long after death. I’d always heard that reincarnation happened rather quickly, like a matter of a couple of weeks… but this seems to refute that.
What are you thinking?
