ABSTRACT
During our first months together, my future wife, Tina, had shown her mettle, in more ways than one. As a skilled surgical nurse (eye, ear, nose and throat) she took on my long-time health problems as her own, as a typical health-care caregiver might do. But for her it truly was personal. Troubled by my ongoing back problems (going back 26 years) she took me to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. Traditional, in this case, meaning old-fashioned acupuncture, massage and structural manipulation. All of which were the precursors of modern massage, chiropractic, Westernized acupuncture, and all their various related medical art forms, New Age and otherwise. There was a major medical university in Harbin dedicated to these time-honored practices, and it was to the outpatient clinic of this university that Tina, who herself worked at the modern-medicine Harbin Medical University Hospital (where I taught Cindy and the other nurses), guided me. She’d been there herself for a neck injury and the old professor, who had worked three years teaching this art to Chinese-American students in California (and learned virtually no English in the process) was still there, still keeping hours at the clinic for his regular patients, and providing internship opportunities for his medical students. So, I was once again in a privileged position. I was being placed directly into the care of The Master, who appeared ageless, smiled constantly (like Tina herself) and whose amiable visage, voice and manner went a long way towards assuaging the pain he was about to inflict.
