Cupping

Woke up with a terrible pain running from my left collarbone down about six inches. It was so bad Tan put a special plaster on and I went back to bed for a couple of hours. When I got up it was still excruciating and I couldn’t even hold Leilei (or twist my head to see him calling). Everyone said it must have been because I slept in a bad position. Xiao Li kindly gave me a massage on the right place, then, without telling me, yanked my left arm in an amateur attempt to crack my bones. Not only was it painful, nothing cracked, and I felt worse than before. Then Xiao Wei suggested I go to hospital to have it cracked. Well I didn’t want anything cracking. The last time I had anything like this was after one of the England World Cup matches earlier this year when we were at Al’s house doing press-ups outside as a punishment for not catching the ball in some silly game we made up. I must have done over 100 press-ups that evening with no stretching beforehand and the next day I couldn’t even get out of bed. I only did ten the previous night…surely it can’t have been that.

Well anyway, at 3pm Tan took me to the massage place we’d been to a couple of days before and explained the problem to a bloke. We went upstairs, where he rubbed by back with hot water infused with herbs, and then started to massage all over my back. Tan said he was making the muscles relaxed before he would attempt to crack my back, which was not what I wanted to hear. However, it later transpired that there was to be no cracking…something a lot more scary in fact.

He did a very good job of the massage, and although the pain was on my left side, he stated that my right side had problems due to having been sitting down too much at a desk and not exercising enough. I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion – if it was muscle stiffness, it might have been caused by playing badminton. Anyway, he put some oil on my back, then started to scrape my skin with an implement like a comb but without the teeth, made from bone. This was to prepare my back for…cupping.

Cupping is a strange procedure whereby you heat up a glass bowl and quickly stick it on the victim’s back while there is a vacuum, which sucks the skin up into the bowl. I really don’t understand what practical purpose it serves but I understand it has been common practice in China for around 1700 years. Check out some information for yourself: http://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+cupping

Here is a video of the procedure

Well, I don’t know what the masseur was using to heat the bowls, but it sounded like a blowtorch. The painful part was not the heat of the bowl, but the suction of the skin into it…he must have placed about twenty of these bowls on the whole of my back and by the time he had finished I felt as though I had been lifted into the air such was the pressure on my back. I could hardly talk, but managed to ask how long till he took them off – “five to ten minutes”, he replied, which felt a lot longer than that. Actually, having read a couple of pages I realise the masseur was probably heating cotton wool balls soaked in alcohol to heat the bowls.

Me after my first round of cupping.

When released, each bowl made a noise like a fart that you only half tried to keep in, but the relief was tangible. By the time he removed the last one with a satisfying “prrrrweeee” I could have laid there for an hour. But to my horror, a minute later he started putting a new set on. That’s like going to the dentist, having an injection and a filling, then going to the waiting room only to be called back a minute later for the same procedure again. This time was more painful too, and I gave a quite audible sound of relief as they were removed. It didn’t help that Tan kept saying: “ooh, that one’s really bad…look how dark”, as if I could.

I nearly passed out when I heard he was coming in for a third run, but Tan said I actually didn’t have to have it if it was painful. Well, I’m sorry, but from where I come from that’s a challenge. I said of course he could do it again, and grinned and bore another ten minutes of this strange pain…

The results are quite scary. If you didn’t know better, you’d think I had caught some alien form of disease, or was the illegitimate offspring of a human and a tortoise. Don’t look if you’re just about to eat.

Me showing I liked the experience by the international sign of the thumbs up.

They charged 30 kuai for the experience, which lasted about an hour, and included more massage and pressuring of acupoints after the cupping. I did feel a bit better afterwards, apart from a general tightness of the back, so I suppose it was value for money.

That's what it looked like afterwards. And still does three days later as I'm uploading this stuff...

Back home I was told I wasn’t allowed to have a shower for four hours, so we went out for a bbq with biao ge (the bloke who is always there – I now know he works there and his speciality is duck) and a couple of other blokes. Unfortunately my heroic story of pain and suffering didn’t appeal to anyone’s compassion as it’s quite normal for them there.