I think I can almost start taking the elevator

Pretty much for the past 3 weeks, the main exercise I'd get would be going to and from work (an hour of walking with a super heavy backpack), standing on the subway, speedwalking in the subway station to transfer lines, walking to the grocery store to buy popsicles, and taking the stairs up and down to get to my uncle's apartment on the 6^th floor. With all the popsicles I've been eating, and no bball, I decided that I would only take the stairs. [Although lately, I've decided that I can take the elevator from the floor that it's on. (So there's also no electricity used to get the elevator down from the 4^th floor to the 1^st =D. ) So if it's on the 4^th floor, I can only go up starting from the 4^th, but usually by the time I get to the 4^th floor, I just decide to walk up the last two floors. I mean how pathetic would it be to take the elevator up two floors after I just went up four? Usually though, I still have to walk up tho b/c by the time I get home, everybody else in the building has come home and going upstairs instead of down.) Thankfully, the furthest I've gotten before I realize I've forgotten something is the 4^th floor.

Anyways, I've never been so excited to be able to take the elevator because it means I can start playing basketball again. I think I've played basketball only five or six times in the last five weeks. Part of that is because I get back from work at 6:30, finish eating at 715, and don't feel like walking 20 minutes to go to the court to play crappy half court basketball, but the main reason is because of my SI joint, which I feel like is finally almost healed (and by healed I mean I can play bball haha) after hours of stretching, doing rehab exercises, and not playing basketball.

Last week, I even went to the hospital to get a massage therapy session, because with so many people in China looking to make money, you never know who to trust…The day before my uncle took me to the hospital, we (jiuma, xiaojiu, doudou, and me) went to check out the massage places near our neighborhood. The first one was called something blind massage…which didn't really make me feel at ease. It seemed like a mom and pop massage parlor (if there is such a thing), and probly would have been good enough, but my uncle and aunt didn't really want to risk anything sense it was my back…it was pretty cheap too! 38 yuan for half an hour, I think 65 for an hour, 350 for 6 hours.

The next place we went to was actually an apartment complex in our neighborhood that somebody had turned into a massage/acupuncture/Chinese med place. It looked way more professional. They had flip flops for you when you walked in (that they also didn't reuse somehow) and the place looked so sterile haha. So white and clean (looking back, that just made me trust their opinion more). Then their boss came in to take a look at me after we told them my back hurt. He poked and prodded around and found where my back hurt and said that you could clearly see that the joint was not normal, which I believed and made me find them more credible, until he made me lie on the massage bed and told me that my legs were clearly of unequal lengths. And a significant difference in them too. He was so convinced too. He was asking xiaojiu if he could see it (who said no) and the doc was like it's so obvious! Look!

The second he said this, I had a flashback to all the times my dad scolded me for walking with one shoulder higher than the other. It made perfect sense. All those years of walking with one shoulder higher than the other no matter how many times my dad pressed on the higher one was because my legs weren't the same length!

Before we left, xiaojiu wanted to know how many sessions I would need. They said they were unsure, it was different for everyone…regardless, I'd need to see them to get my si joint straightened and worked on…at a cost of 200 yuan a session!! WHAATTT you gotta be kidding me. Where do these people think they are? America?

I walked out feeling unbalanced. I could feel the unevenness of my shoulders for the first few minutes after I left.

Then I walked some more and wondered why after all those years of sprints, running, soccer, bball, etc I never had a problem with my IT band until now and realized that he was pulling bullshit out of his ass. I had directed him to the sore spot on my lower back AND you can pull your leg up and down without bending your knee or really moving your hip (actually a strengthening exercise for your piriformis muscle. See.)

I got to hand it to him, what a pro at conning people. The place looked really professional and the guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

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Saturday morning, my uncle took me to the hospital, where they aren't trying to make buck off you and they are def certified.

I was planning on getting a massage therapy session that focused on my lower back, hip flexor, piriformis, quad, IT band, etc. but of course it was nothing like I had imagined because this is China.

First off, when we get there, we have to wait in line. There was only one middle aged lady working and wow, she was amazing. She was massaging people's sore/tight spots and didn't even get a 5 min rest break in between. There were three people ahead of us, but all I remember was the old lady who had just been seen and she was sitting in a chair resting because of this HUGE dark red almost black sore looking thing on the back of her neck. Omggg it looked so painful. (I later realized that it was from the Chinese fire cupping thing, which I seriously doubt is effective).

The other guy was the guy right before me, who I remember vividly because I felt like I was watching some guy get tortured. Aside from movies and athletes on TV crying (shoutout to JJ Redick and Adam Morrison!), I think it was the first time id ever seen a grown man come so close to crying. Who knows if he was actually going to cry, but this guy (who was rather cheerful before hand, cracking jokes now and then before she started) was getting the fire cupping treatment done on his shoulder area. [Side note—Chinese use this cupping treatment, best summarized by google: "Fire Cupping is a method of treatment that involves heating the air inside a special glass cup and placing the inverted cup on part of the body. A vacuum is created, which anchors the cup to the skin and pulls the skin upward into the cup causing tissues to release toxin". This doctor heated the air by lighting a cotton swab and dropping it on the cup. I'm sure its on Wikipedia if you want to learn more.] anyways, the doctor was putting the glass jar on his shoulder and moved it all around his back and shoulder, which made it really really red. Soon after she started, he was like AHHH 疼！很疼！（PAIN!）IT HURTS SO MUCH！ STOP！ And so the doctor stopped. I thought she was gonna just stop. Nope, she just waited and started again without warning him, and he started screaming again. 哎呀！ 疼死了！绝对受不了！哎呀！which in English is pretty much OMG! OMG THIS HURTS LIKE HELL. I CAN'T TOLERATE THE PAIN. OMG OWWWW OWWW. Course to make this all worse while im watching, this guy is rolling around on the massage bed thing and is like halfway off the bed (his toros was already off the bed completely) trying to roll away from this lady who was using a lot of strength to move this cup thing that was stuck to him.

When she finally finished, he got up and had 3-4 circular red marks on his shoulder like this, his whole back was red, and he had a couple of red lines going up and down his back. he walked out kind of slowly.

Finally it was my turn…xiaojiu was like, don't worry. You def won't be needing that. Nothing to be scared about….

Omg I broke out into a sweat getting "massaged"...一脸都是汗。 I had sweat dripping down my face by the end of it, and it was only like 20 minutes long. At most. She barely even worked on my lower half. When she did, for the most part, I didn't understand what the purpose of what she was doing was for. I felt like she was trying to yank my legs out of their sockets. (She almost pulled me off the bed thing even though I was holding on for dear life). Instead she pushed really hard on my spine on my upper back and I swear she had to have cracked it. At one point, she had me lie on my side and she grabbed both my leg and arm and pulled them back and then yanked on them to make my lower back crack and I felt like if I hadn't been trying to resist her as hard as I could while being sneaky about it, she would have snapped me in half. It was at this moment that I felt like a fish flopping around on the ground, with a human grabbing it however it wants and snapping its spine in half.

When I walked out, I did feel taller (b/c it felt like she had stretched my spine when she straightened by back) and my upper back did feel better though afterwards…my lower back not so much. Immediately afterwards, my lower back felt sore, and kind of in pain/really tired feeling by 10 pm. I woke up with it in pain, and the next day, I couldn't sit or stand until late into the night, which was unfortunate because I went to visit Popo and had to ride the subway/bus/walk/do things that didn't require lying down for hours at a time.

I don't know if it helped, but whatever, I think I can finally play basketball. Yay! =D