Not sure when it began, but I started experiencing pain in the right shoulder, around the ball and socket connect, early in the mornings. It was not a shooting pain nor was it intolerable, but it annoyingly perked up, travelling down to my elbow, to the forearm, but mercifully not to the wrist or fingers.
My diabetologist, when consulted, repeatedly asked if there was pain on my left shoulder. I said no. Nevertheless, since diabetes mellitus is riding piggyback on me for 20 years, a pain in the left shoulder could be cardiac-centric. Ergo, an ECG and echocardiogram were ordered. The results were negative.
Since the pain did not abate with tablets, I was referred to a neurologist. Standing well away from me, he made me do what he bade. I loaded up my right hand vigorously like Ravichandran Ashwin before starting his first delivery.
I raised my right hand, a gesture resembling a Nazi salute, of course without shouting “Heil Hitler!” Coming closer, he asked me to crush his right palm with mine. I did. I also waved my hands, the way a traffic cop would do at a busy traffic junction. Understandably browbeaten, he sent me to physiotherapy. This facility was in a gleaming hall with contraptions that at first sight looked like the ones seen in James Bond thrillers.
Before long, the therapist subjected my hands to different tasks, like pulling up and down two ropes hanging from the top from pulleys the way loaders do in a dockyard. I swung a bamboo staff over and around my head, like a silambam player, without hitting myself or the therapist or his woman assistant. The one I liked was turning the wheel fixed on the wall, clockwise and anti-clockwise, like a skipper of a ship, but with no sailor to say ‘aye, aye, sir’.
Since none of these alleviated the pain, it was decided to try electrical shocks. A lady assistant attached electrodes on my right hand at the seats of pain and administered electrical shocks, for a fixed duration for days. But even electricity failed.
Like Archimedes finding out the law of flotation and Newton the reason for the apple that fell down, I remembered my grandma’s injunction during my boyhood that if I avoided milk, my bones would become weak, creak and break. Leaving alone the tablets, exercises and electric shocks, I started drinking a glass of hot, unsweetened milk every night. Wonder of wonders, the pain reduced and vanished without a trace in a fortnight. I offer special worship to gomatha now, who had saved me from being ‘cow’ed down by enervating and costly treatment.