My physical therapist and I have a certain weekly routine, where he puts electrodes on my back and I lift weights and watch Harry Potter on my iPhone and try to ignore 120V of direct current that’s making my muscles tense into iron rods. Then he does ultrasound, which is like having a mostly relaxing massage with a warm curling iron. Next, he does manual massage, including a technique where he grabs my skull and attempts to pop it upwards off my spinal column like the head of a dandelion. Usually, that’s about the worst point; after that, I stand in front of a machine with a big crank and do six repetitions with each arm, and he slowly turns the resistance higher. The result is a slightly sore but satisfying ache in the muscle that usually leads to fitful sleep and an increase in mobility.

Last night the other therapist put the electrodes in the usual place and I made it to the end of the quiddich match in Half-Blood Prince, and then everything went to hell. She is a quiet lady with a thick European accent, and her timid demeanor hides a frightening ability to inflict pain for extended periods of time. She started with massage around my neck, and when she found the knot in my left shoulder, she said, “aha!’ in a quiet voice, just before she attempted to push it through the other side of my body and out the front of my chest using only the tip of her finger. After about five grueling minutes of deep-tissue torture, I was ready to confess to anything Dick Cheney could dream up in his worst paranoid fantasies. Then, she used a pair of iron-hard knuckles and about thirty foot pounds of pressure applied directly to the screaming muscle mass and told me to turn my head to the side five times, slowly. Once I’d gotten through that and fought off the urge to puke, she had me do it facing the other way.

After that, it was back to the old routine, but my enthusiasm for turning the big crank was gone. Especially after the front desk guy changed the music from classical to the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which made me feel even more foolish than I normally do. This afternoon, I’m sore and creaky and tired from tossing and turning all night, which hasn’t happened in a week or so. I know that often things have to get worse before they get better, but I think I want to go back to my original therapist next week, because I don’t know what I did to his partner to make her dislike me so much.