published 9/10/08, updated 9/15/08

At the Baths

A massage therapist’s observations at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
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Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre is an aging community swimming pool in downtown Vancouver. I live nearby, and I have been visiting frequently for eight years now. I go mostly because they have the strongest hot tub jets I’ve ever encountered. These jets could peel a pineapple. Floating a foot away from them they can still bruise. They can pound life back into stiff and tired muscles in a way that makes ordinary hot tub jets seem like a joke.

I love those jets!

And so do many other people. Both the hot tub and the large sauna at the VAC are extremely busy. At nearly any time of day, this dingy spa in the basement of a windowless old behemoth of 70s architecture is so densely populated that you often can’t get a spot at one of the jets, and it’s standing room only in the sauna. The place seethes with character: thick Russian accents, the shop talk of serious competitive swimmers, the shrill giggling of Chinese girls. A futile sign on the wall says, “No loud talking!” The demographics are about as cosmopolitan as you can imagine, and heavily slanted towards of immigrants, the elderly, athletes, and gays (the VAC is in the West End, Vancouver’s gay neighbourhood). It is, in short, a lively and fascinating place.

Discussions about aches and pains are probably the single most common topic of conversation — in English anyway.

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre

It’s a bizarre, windowless, brown geometric lump of a building — very 1975 — but the setting is beautiful, on Vancouver’s famous sea wall.

The VAC hot tub and sauna are clearly a vital community resource for the injured and disabled. People with severe physical disabilities — amputations, muscular dystrophy, paralysis and palsies — can often be seen easing themselves into the water, obviously grateful for the penetrating heat, the relief from gravity, the thundering of the jets in their back. Their gratitude for the hot tub epitomizes the experience that all of us are having to a lesser degree. I can hardly imagine the collective community disappointment, the genuine reduction in quality of life for hundreds of hurting people, if this place were to close.

The place seethes with character: thick Russian accents, the shop talk of serious competitive swimmers, the shrill giggling of Chinese girls.

As a massage therapist, I have had countless interesting opportunities to observe people engaged in self-treatment of their pain problems “in the wild” at the VAC — I have overheard their beliefs and theories, their hopes, and their despair. Sometimes I have chimed in. Usually I stay out of it and just watch carefully, and listen. It’s been more educational than my education. I’ve learned as much about people and pain from people-watching at the VAC as I have from my own clients.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Copper bullshit!

When I arrived at the hot tub today, three leathery old queens had the jets. The tattooed one was telling a loud story in an effiminate voice. One old gent sat still in front of his jet, looking down, his huge beard dangling just above the surface of the water, nodding and muttering occasionally in response to the story. The third, bald and muscled, twisted and rolled silently in the water like a seal, clearly exploiting the jet as much as possible. Somehow it seemed clear that they were all together, that these three old gays were on an social expedition to the VAC hot tub together.

A pudgy old Chinese guy sat far off to one side, apparently listening attentively, but uninvolved. Passing the time.

(Four of them, plus one of me, is definitely a quiet time at the hot tub. As is often the case, I was deliberately there at a time when it’s a little less busy.)

The storyteller — Mr. Tattoo — seemed to be self-involved. Perhaps he was one of these all-too-common motormouths who have absolutely no concept of whether or not their audience is listening. (What exactly is the nature of that social dysfunction, anyway? How do so many people fail to regonize that they have lost their audience? This is a common type at the VAC, I’ve noticed, or perhaps they just stand out.) He was telling stories about his many experiences hitchhiking around Canada, with liberal doses of his philosophies of life thrown in for good measure, segueing from one profundity to the next so quickly and smoothly that I could hardly keep up, and his friends seemed to have no chance to get a word in edgewise. But he was impossible to ignore — his voice was compelling, charismatic, confident, and so distinctive and intensely effiminate that he would have stood out clearly even if there had been five other conversations going on. He reminded me of the flamboyant gay owner of The Elbow Room, an Vancouver restaurant where you can count on abusive, bawdy and comedic service — would you like gay sexual innuendo with that? It’s always fun to have a few one-liners about butt-sex with your flapjacks.

Mr. Tattoo’s voice so distinctive and intensely effiminate that he would have stood out clearly even if there had been five other conversations going on.

This guy pretty clearly had the sensibilities of a hippy. Nearly everything he said was so far to the political left that he was barely even on the spectrum. So, it was a great surprise to me when he turned out to be a died-in-the-wool skeptic — not a common combination.

Eventually his monologue died down and turned out that his audience had actually been interested, and he had just been telling an unusually long story, and they began conversing in roughly equal doses, although Mr. Tattoo remained the flamboyant one, while Mr. Beard was so quiet I could hardly hear him.

“I’m going to try copper on my bursitis,” Mr. Beard says through his beard, apropos of nothing.

“Copper?” Mr. Bald says.

“Yeah. Those copper bracelets. On my ankles. For my foot pain.”

There is no common bursitis in the feet, I’m thinking. I try to remember the anatomy, and I can’t think of a bursa that can even get inflamed. But the way he’s talking, I get the impression that “bursitis” is an extremely imprecise term, a vaguely clinical-sounding word for “pain.”

And then, to my amazement, instead of agreeing and going off on a rant about “mainstream medicine,” Mr. Tattoo actually warns Mr. Beard!

“Don’t waste your money,” he says. “I’ve tried that before, doesn’t do anything. Just wishful thinking. Copper is bullshit.”

“Yeah?” Mr. Beard says, looking up for the first time. He seems to take Mr. Tattoo seriously.

“Yeah, everyone’s looking for a magical cure, hoping for one. Anytime anyone’s trying to sell you something, watch out — doesn’t matter who it is, what it is. I’ve tried a lot of alternative medicine and nine times out of ten, nothing. It’s just a cure for your money — all you get out of it is a lighter wallet.”

“Yeah, I guess,” says, Mr. Beard. He pulls a foot out of the water and looks at it meditatively.

“He’s right,” says Mr. Bald, and then puts his whole head underwater to get the jet on the back of his neck, as if to indicate that no more needs to be said.

Mr. Tattoo isn’t done though! Suddenly he’s off again on a full lecture, demonstrating some superb critical thinking skills and a quality bullshit detector. I’m amazed, and suddenly I like him, as I am inclined to like all people who don’t believe everything they are told.

This kind of turn in the conversation, by the way, is extremely rare. The vast majority of the time that I overhear conversations about remedies in the hot tub or sauna, it goes precisely the other way. It’s such a relief to hear a little skepticism! It’s almost as good as the jets. I walk home that day feeling a little uplifted.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Injured here, and here, here, here, and here …

Today I met “Joe” at the VAC hot tub when he struck up a conversation about foot fungus. Joe was on the far side of middle-aged and a bit grizzled: his beard was short but thick and gray, and his skin was weathered — enough he might have been homeless, but it’s hard to judge that in a person wearing only bathing trunks.

“I always try to be real careful with my feet around here,” he said to me, apropos of almost nothing, perhaps explaining his previous conversation with a fellow who’d just walked away. “I got a fungus here last year. I’ve got to get some of those flip flops.”

I’m not a particularly shy person, but I usually don’t address total strangers with a new topic of conversation. A greeting, sure, or the smallest of small talk openers — but foot fungus? No, I would never do that, and I wonder why anyone would. But Joe did.

Like so many people I meet at the VAC, Joe was clearly prepared to talk regardless of whether or not I was prepared to listen. This was apparent within moments. He was definitely a rambler. But he was also a pleasant rambler, so I humoured him, and even encouraged him.

Like so many people I meet at the VAC, Joe was clearly prepared to talk regardless of whether or not I was prepared to listen.

“I’ve always wondered,” I said, “what’s in the water here. On the one hand, it’s heavily chlorinated. On the other hand, there’s hundreds of people in and out of here all day long!”

“Oh, I think it’s fine in the water,” Joe said confidently. “it’s so heavily treated, nothing’s going to survive in there. They check it four times per day. But all the surfaces around here, that’s another matter. You’ve got to be careful not to touch your face after touching anything around here.”

That’s probably quite true.

And his subject matter revolved around matters of health, and for the second time recently (see previous entry), I was surprised at how rational and skeptical Joe was, how well-informed he was about bacterial infection and modes of transmission. Apparently he’d worked in professional kitchens. He talked about volunteering at a church kitchen, and he mentioned how hard it was to keep the other volunteers from messing with the sanitation.

“A volunteer walks into the kitchen, puts down his coffee mug on your counter — bam, that’s it, right there, contaminated, where’s that coffee mug been?”

Shudder.

Without any prompting, the conversation inevitably turned to musculoskeletal health. There’s just something about being in a hot tub! Joe started telling me about his philosophy of moderation in exercise, which was well-developed and quite sensible — more or less exactly what I teach people all the time.

“I can’t do too much. I have to be careful. If I don’t do enough, I’m in trouble. But if I do too much, I’m in the trouble. I’m injured here,” he said, and touch himself on the shoulder. “And here. And here, and here, here, here …”

There was an episode of The West Wing in which the secret service guy is showing the president where security will be positioned for an event, and he points to a bunch of locations saying, “and here, and here, here, and here” until it becomes funny. Joe was doing exactly the same thing: with a completely straight face, he pointed to virtually every location on his body, all his injuries. This was the defining moment of the encounter. I knew I’d be writing about him as he did this.

With a completely straight face, Joe pointed to virtually every location on his body — all his injuries.

“Wow,” I said, when he finally finished. “That’s a lot of injuries. What happened to you?”

“I was a rent-a-kid. A government ward, an orphan. I was on farms for my whole childhood. I don’t like to complain, but it was … well, I got hurt a few times. It was hard. I was low on the totem pole, you know?”

I didn’t know, actually. I can barely imagine. I was from the suburbs. What he was describing was straight out of Dickens. If Dickens had written about farms.

We talked for quite a while after that.

Joe wasn’t the worst rambler. I could get a word in edgewise. True, he was a motormouth and prone to give free, unsolicited advice. But he was earnest, curious, friendly and smart. And he quickly became real to me, instead of just some guy who interrupted my soak by talking about his fungus — yet another intriguing character in the VAC cast.