Sylvia's Journal

This morning I went for my first physical therapy session after a month of essential stagnation. Here appointments aren’t made in 30 minute slots. You can come anytime you want as long as it is between 8 and 3 and from Saturday to Wednesday. There is only one room for female patients and we are all treated in the one open space with 6 therapy tables and a few hospital beds.

The place is otherwise minimally equipped. There is one large dirty yellow exercise ball, a slanted plank for exercises, an apparatus with a pulley to exercise arm muscles, a skeleton that hangs together with tape here and there, an old exercise bicycle and one old narrow hospital gurney , the white paint chipped of, with an enormous crank to lower or raise it.

The electrical equipment is the most frightening. An infra-red lamp has half of its plastic shade melted and burned; an electric heater is plugged into a power strip, one wire in one hole, the other in the other hole without the help of a plug. There is a small handheld E-stim gadget to stimulate the nerves to get the muscles to contract. The pads are worn from over-use but it did the trick.

I was first greeted with three kisses by my PT who then diagnosed my condition as impingement syndrome. One of my shoulder muscles had weakened to the point that it can no longer produce the shoulder rotation that is needed when I lift my arm, hence the impingement. She demonstrated on the skeleton what had gone wrong.

I am glad I had not given up on her. It seems now that Fahima may have gotten me to do an exercise that was too advanced for my condition but I probably also did it wrong. Luckily it is a muscle condition and not, as I had feared at first, a rip someplace in the reconstructed shoulder.

The female PT room was ice cold when I entered because someone had forgotten to put wood in the small woodstove. I come from a place where heat is usually an automatic thing; it’s there when you need it unless your furnace is broken or you forgot to pay a bill. Here I see what happens when it is not automatic. All over Afghanistan people have been taking small stoves out of their summer storage places for the last month or so. Winterizing is a huge job: plastic on the widows, if you can, cleaning the stoves, putting them on a tray in the room to be heated, reconnect the pipes to the vent hole and fill it with fuel (wood or diesel) – and then keep filling them.

A burqa-ed women came in with an armful of wood and relit the stove. We all crouched around it while Fahima worked my shoulder. A fellow patient had her upper back and shoulder treated under the scary infrared lamp, followed by a heat pack treatment under a heavy wool blanket and then a massage.

She had brought a Chinese gadget that looked like a computer game console which the therapists were trying to understand. It was an electronic acu-pressure point thing that claimed to treat anything from overweight to insomnia. My PT decided, after trying it on herself, that it was exactly what we thought it was, a Chinese gadget. We had a long conversation about acupuncture which she finds scary and mysterious (mostly because there the needles don’t make you bleed). An animated conversation about a popular Chinese soap opera ensued in which, supposedly, acupuncture was done with embroidery needles. It was clear that the PTs had no confidence in acupuncture.