The Cure

Two days of Sudafed didn’t cure my vertigo.

My regular doctor had no opening for me this morning and I hate emergency rooms so I agreed to go to Mary’s doctor, who (how can I say this nicely?) I consider a bit of a flake. You know. “Holistic medicine.” At Duke University, no less. But I had to stop the world from wobbling and if it took crystals and magnets to get it done, so be it. I'd try anything.

I can hear the medical insurance claims processor laughing now.

The examination started out normally enough (as long as you discount the spinning of the room) with the asking of a few questions regarding the dizzying symptoms, the taking of blood pressures, and the shining of little lights into my nose, mouth, and ears. But as she pulled the otoscope from my right ear canal, she began to poke and pull on the lobe and outer ear.

“How’d you get that?” she asked, referring to the fresh puncture wound on the upper part of my ear.

-- o --

I guess I need to break away from the story, here, to make an embarrassing confession. With an upcoming fishing trip to Mexico, a friend suggested it would be a good idea to get some practice casting with big wind. We’ll be fishing the east coast of the Baja peninsula, into Bay of California surf, and when the fishing is good the wind comes out of the south/southeast, pushing a right-hander’s cast into his body. I needed to be ready for that.

So, last week, on a cool, blustery day, I carried the 9wt, an intermediate sink line, and a big chartreuse and pink clouser down to the pond, put my right shoulder into the wind, and practiced. I threw for about fifteen minutes before a perfectly timed gust imploded a lengthy backcast and stuck the heavy tuti-fruti streamer squarely into my right ear.

Thank God for barbless.

Stop laughing.

-- o --

“Interesting,” said the doctor, who then turned and pulled from a drawer a small case that, when opened, revealed a set of varying sized needles; wire thin to the size of a fat toothpick.

“How big was the hook?” she asked.

“Ummm… A 1/0, so, pretty big,” I responded uncertainly.

She nodded and pulled from the case the biggest, nastiest looking needle. She examined it closely. “About this diameter?”

“I guess so.”

She looked at me earnestly. “You see, the ears are chi crossroads and are the polar focal points on one of the body's prime energy meridians. They’re a pivotal tipping place and I believe that when you stuck that fly in your ear you blocked and interrupted the even flow of chi across that meridian, which, of course, includes your inner ear and brain. What you did with that errant fly was to apply some inadvertent acupuncture. To fix things we simply need to restore balance.”

And before I could fully grasp what that meant she grabbed my head and jammed that big honkin’ needle into my left ear at the same precise point at which the fly had skewered my right.

“What the HELL!” I screamed...

...and the room stopped spinning.