Chinese Doctor

     “I detect gas on your stomach.”

     Several replies raced to mind. “Well, Sherlock”?  “I’m still alive!”  “Happens every time I eat.”  Discretion stifled all before any reached my mouth.

      Such impertinence would be out of order.  I was sitting in this rather shabby office with my right arm on the desk.  The speaker, an older gentleman, had his three middle fingers of his right hand barely touching, if touching at all, the vein (or is it an artery?) in the joint of my elbow, right where the vampire (also known as a phlebotomist) jams the needle to take a blood sample.

      He had hovered there for maybe fifteen seconds, feeling God-knows-what in the pulse of my elbow joint. The first step on the journey to the seat beside this man’s desk and in close proximity with him began long ago.  At the time, I was in my mid-twenties, so it couldn’t have been that long ago, maybe.

     Perhaps it began in Oklahoma before I reached the age of twenty.  An unsanitary shower floor in a cheap motel might have been the beginning.  A good case of athlete’s foot contracted from the shower floor turned into jock itch by a thoughtless incidence of improper scratching.

     Various home remedies and patented salves and powders had failed to quell the rash, though I continued to try to find a cure.  Absorbine Junior promised to cure athlete’s foot but failed miserably, though it did light a fire that rivaled an ox-acetylene torch when applied to jock itch.

     The best thing was an anti-itch salve prescribed by a physician for a completely different, though yet unsolved, problem totally separate from the fungal infection.  That began with a friendly wrestling match with the landlord on his living room rug.  I had never wrestled as a sport, so even though I was twenty-five years younger than the landlord, former wrestler that he was, he easily got the best of me. 

     The only lasting result of my defeat was a rug burn on my right elbow.  As far as I knew, the only connection between that rash and the fungus infection was the refusal to heal.  The prescribed salve made the itch bearable, but the skin simply would not heal.  When the skin got to looking almost normal, it would start flaking off like a bad case of dandruff or potato flakes coming out of a box. 

     The next step towards me sitting by the old guy’s desk was a trip to Hawaii with the Goodwife to visit her mother.  Obviously, a lot of water passed under the bridge since that fateful day I stepped into the shower in Oklahoma.  I got married, I took a job teaching school in Kansas (not in that order), we had saved enough money to afford a trip to Hawaii.

    The Mother-in-law saw the rash on my elbow and determined I should visit the Chinese Doctor.  About three or four days before we were to depart for home, we made the trip.  At that time, Mother-in-law lived in Aiea in a three-bedroom house overlooking Pearl Harbor.  The automobile trip into Honolulu was about a thirty or forty minute ordeal with traffic.

    The Chinese Doctor’s office, if not in Hotel Street (I think it was) was in the near vicinity.  If you are unfamiliar with Honolulu’s Hotel Street, suffice it to say that Hotel Street made old time Larimer Street in Denver, not today’s version, the 1950’s version, look like Paradise.  Soldiers, sailors, and airmen stationed in Hawaii go there to spend their spare time and their money in the time-honored way military personnel have always spent their spare time and money.

     Hotel Street was safe during the daytime, I was told.  I felt totally safe sandwiched between my wife and my mother-in-law.

     The doctor’s office was an old storefront complete with big display window.  In the window hung a bat wing, snakeskin (I think), bird’s nest and other suchlike things that apparently advertised that the proprietor practiced herbal medicine.

     Mother-in-law and the doctor exchanged pleasantries.  She introduced me to the doctor, and the consultation began.  I told him about the unhealable rashes and showed him my elbow.  He wasn’t particularly interested in looking at the rash. Instead, he had me sit by the end of his desk while he sat on his side of the desk near me.  He carefully positioned my right arm on the desk with my palm face up.  Then he put his wrist on the desk beside my elbow joint.  Carefully he lowered the tips of his three middle fingers down to the blood vessel on the fleshy side of my elbow joint. 

     There his fingers hovered for some time until he removed them and made the pronouncement that I had gas on my stomach.  I certainly couldn’t disagree with that.  I didn’t ask aloud, but I wondered what that had to do with my skin problems.  I thought about the séance phonies who have their subordinates pump the would-be communicator with the dead for all the information they can get to guide the medium in what message he should be receiving from the beyond.

     I kept my doubts to myself.  He announced his recommendation:  no citrus for me.  That was rather an unwelcome dictum to follow.  I love grapefruit and oranges.  If I wanted to be healed, I would have to refrain from citrus, too much acid, he said. 

     I mentioned to the good doctor that my mother once had to take acid.  “What!  LSD?!” he asked in shock.

    No, no, no.  HCL, like in the stomach, at mealtimes.  He sniffed at that, as if to say how foolish. 

     He tore off three pieces of heavy-duty parchment paper or butcher paper from a tan or light brown roll.  He laid the paper out on the counter.  Then with some kind of hand held scale made of something like bamboo, he grabbed a can of this, a jar of that.  Some of the stuff looked like peppercorns, some like green tea powder, maybe something like gunpowder.  Carefully he weighed out each ingredient three times and dumped the contents of the scale onto each of the three papers. He topped off each of the three with what looked like twigs or straw from a bird’s nest.

    Carefully he folded the three papers into a rectangular packet one at a time.  He tied the packets up with twine so that they would neither unfold nor leak.  He said to put the contents of each packet into a pot with three glasses of water.  Boil it until there was only one glass of liquid left.  After the liquid cooled, pour the liquid off the residue and drink it.  I should do that on three successive days.

      He wanted me to come back in a week after I had done as instructed.  He wasn’t very happy to find out I was leaving in less than a week.  Did I expect him to heal me with only one visit?

     Having watched what went into the prescription, I wasn’t anxious to try the medicine.  The three packets went into my suitcase and went home with me.  It would be three months or more before I would take the twine off of one of the packets.  School had started when I spied the three packets, stowed away after our return to Kansas.  I took an idea from the kids in To Kill a Mockingbird.  If the stuff killed me now, I would miss school, not summer vacation.

    I poured a glass of water into a pan and eyeballed the level so I would know when to take it off the fire.  Two more glasses of water and the contents of the first packet went into the pan.  It took maybe two hours to get it distilled down to the one glass.  In my guess as to the level of the liquid in the pan to equal one third of the total liquid, I had neglected to allow for the volume displaced by the ingredients.

     I drained the stuff off, but I only had about two thirds of a glass.  It was pretty thick.  It tasted pretty bad, a faint licorice-like taste contributing significantly to that judgment.  “You going to drink that?” queried the Goodwife.  “I held my nose, I closed my eyes,” I chugged it down, to paraphrase “Love Potion Number 9.“

     I didn’t die.  If anything, I felt better.  So I followed up the next two days with the remaining two packets.  I stopped the boiling process sooner so I had closer to one glass of liquid, which was not quite as thick, nor as flavorful, as the first batch.  It was easier to ingest, though still not exactly a crème soda.

      From day one, my rashes did improve.  The one on  my elbow got much better.  With the use of the anti-itch cream, it nearly healed.  I had the feeling that if I had called on the Chinese doctor a second and maybe a third time, he would have healed my elbow completely.

     For sure, he had better results than the dermatologist I consulted had had.  The Goodwife insisted, so I went to the dermatologist.  He took skin samples from all three infected areas  About two weeks later, I got a letter from him saying all three samples proved negative for any kind of bacteria or other infestation, meaning fungus I presumed.  He didn’t invite me to call again, and I didn’t.

       I don’t think the Chinese doctor’s herbs could have cured the fungus rashes.  I eventually called on a local doctor who had been commandant of doctors in Korea, a sort of MASH guy.  I told him my problem.  Like the Chinese doctor, he didn’t care to examine the site.  When I told him my reason for calling on him, he instantly diagnosed fungus.  He launched into tales of his own experience with fungus. 

     He warned me I would always be susceptible to fungal infection (he was right).  He told of having an old pair of shoes in his closet, put there before he went to the army.  After he was discharged a few years later, he saw them and thought they would make great gardening shoes.  He didn’t have them on for more than an hour before his toes began itching and burning.  The fungus remained dormant in the old shoes for years and came to life when an appropriate host showed up.     

      He also mentioned a Catholic priest he had doctored.  His fellow clergymen recommended he consult the doctor.  They thought there was something wrong with the guy because he was always scratching inappropriately, like a baseball player adjusting his jock on television.

      The doctor had me take something that sounded like fulvicin for six weeks.  The jock itch completely disappeared and most of the athlete’s foot.  The medicine wasn’t good for the liver.  He suggested rather than endangering my liver by continuing the oral stuff, I should treat the toes with Clorox at shower time, and use something like Desenex foot powder when I dressed for the day.  

    I followed instructions, and eliminated the problem entirely after a few months.  The battle with the foot fungus is ongoing.  Rarely do I put on my socks without a fungicide powder, especially in the sweaty summertime.

      I have had to resort to an oral fungicide once since then.  The doctor who gave me my physical said that  “topical” treatment wouldn’t do the trick.  He prescribed a newer product, but it was still hard on the liver.

     Since my visit with the Chinese doctor, I have discovered my lactose intolerance.  Today, the sight of a nice juicy grapefruit starts heartburn without me even tasting it.  I still indulge in an orange or tangerine, but they too can cause me stomach problems.  Too much vitamin C gives me canker sores in my mouth.

     I often wonder what the good old Chinese Doctor would find  if he analyzed my arm joint today.  For sure, I’d lay off the citrus for a week or two before I called on him.