For about 10 months I’ve been suffering from sciatica.  It’s when a disc in the spine is bulging out of its normal confines and coming in contact with the sciatic nerve.  The sciatic nerve is a major one, running from the spine, through the hip, down the leg to end up at the toes.  And it’s like some horrid piano.  Press on the nerve at the location of the L4/L5 disc as in my case, and you get pain in the hip, calf and ankle.  Press on the nerve at another location, and you get pain in, say, the thigh, the shin and the toes.  Each contact with the nerve is precisely tuned to result in a particular pattern of pain.

For as long as I’ve had the sciatica, I’ve also been seeing people who promise to cure it.  First, there was the Chinese medicine doctor who said he could do it provided I drink half a litre each day of a disgusting concoction scraped off the forest floor.  The twigs, lichens and roots came wrapped in large parcels of newspaper and I had to boil down the parcels, strain them and re-boil them several times a day.  What with the constant tending of the cauldron and the stomach-churning odour that filled my flat and penetrated my pillows, the pain of sciatica seemed a smaller price to pay.  Then there was the chiropractor with the “flexion distraction” machine who was a little too eager to strap me in and lay his hand on the back of my neck.  And the various physiotherapists who uniformly charge $90 in exchange for giving me exercises to do at home (reminding me of the old guy I heard announce to the various under-occupied checkout staff at Safeway just after they installed the self-service checkouts, “Any time you need my help, just call”), or issuing increasingly stupid prohibitions like “whatever you do, do not stand or sit during the day”. 

The best treatment I’ve received by far, and the only one who has offered any real hope, is a kind and caring osteopath located at Newport.  It was her suggestion to also try some hydrotherapy as a way of strengthening my wasting muscles and beginning some more vigorous exercise.  Which is how I come to be spending two or three evenings a week in the hydrotherapy pool at the prosaically-named MSAC, at Albert Park. 

I’ve been to the pool at various times of the day, and on a fine noon with the sun pouring in through the high, glass-panelled ceiling it is a lovely place to be.  However, it is the evenings that are extra special.  Around 8pm, the sliding entrance door rolls back and I enter the glass box of the pool deck holding my breath hoping I have the milky opalescence all to myself.  But any disappointments in this regard are short-lived anyway, because it’s the fellow inhabitants, not just the sensuousness of the warm pool, that make this place interesting.

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There are roughly three types of people using the pool: those in rehab after an operation or injury, those with chronic back pain and those – not to put too fine a point on it — who are close to carking it.  Camus said it was a universal trait that whenever we meet a new person we instantly speculate about their age and that someone’s age was of indisputable interest to all human beings.  And indeed, at the pool, his hypothesis, at least a cruder version thereof, is borne out.  For every new person wading in, those already immersed perform an instantaneous, subconscious calculation: rehab? pain? carking it?  And believe me, in one’s swimmers, there’s no hiding from the truth.

By now I recognise several regulars if usually only from the neck up, hydrotherapy being a pastime that happens out of sight under the water and involving, to the onlooker, simply a bit of bobbing around.  There’s the 40-something woman who moves very slowly back and forth across the deep end of the pool while wearing a flotation belt and rotating her legs.  With the dramatic foreshortening created by the depth, she appears like a giant-headed insect pedalling a microscopic unicycle.  When she hauls herself out of the pool — one of the rare “conditioning” cases — she’s revealed to have the body of a marathon athlete. 

There’s the late 50s Sri Lankan man with a slight palsy who moves, very stately, back and forth across the middle of the pool and, like an earnest brown ballerina at her barre, performs minute exercises at the far side.  There’s the late 40s woman, a “rehab” after a hip replacement, who manages never to catch anyone’s eye and whose husband sprawls — without a book, without a word, bored out of his brain — on the pool deck bench night after night. 

There was also once a mid 40s man, another “rehab” after a work accident, who could not stop talking and, in his loneliness, insisted on telling me he’d bought new sheets to sleep on the day before, and a late 20s specimen who parted the seas with his beauty and left the rest of us not knowing where to look.  Have you ever noticed that?  How extreme beauty makes us look away?  As if we’ll be burnt, or something?

*****

As for the sciatica, I like to believe the hydrotherapy is helping.  At least my stomach muscles are stronger and I no longer fall over (what a shock!) when doing simple exercises with a kickboard and the resistance of the water.  But even if it’s not directly helping, going to the hydrotherapy pool, especially at night, has turned out to be a very enjoyable thing.