Our photographer friend Johnny is a super picky sleeper as he has to sleep on a bed that is one hundred percent horizontally even. Otherwise, he would rise the next morning being super cranky and miserable to everyone around him. It was that fussiness that forced him to buy a 12-seat FORD cargo van and turn it into a camper van, with a bed equipped with four legs powered by electronically controlled hydraulic jacks. You can always find one bright yellow color high-precision torpedo level bar on his camper van bed as he relies on it to adjust the four legs to get to the perfect 100% even before he goes to sleep. Judging by all the great and award-winning wildness photos Johnny produced in recent years, you could not help but appreciate that yellow torpedo levels bar rest in his camper van.
I, on the other hand, pride myself on being an easy sleeper type. I could fall asleep easily under most of the manageable circumstances. This capability becomes a rarer and more precious personal commodity when we progress in our age and it turns into envy among my old friends.
I get even luckier as my husband is an equal partner in this terrain. One proof of that is that we could feel very comfortable squishing ourselves at the back of our almost 20-year-old SUV and have a sound sleep at one windy subzero seaside. This coupled superpower comes in handy whenever we were called on duty to accompany our nomad photographer couple for a weekend BLM camping trip as we could react at the last minute of possibility (largely mandated by the photographer’s required weather conditions), hopping on our SUV and getting to go.
Johnny has been strategically training us to go longer on our nomad trips and the last Memorial Day trip was one step stone for that. I and my husband slept in the back of our SUV for a total of five nights, mostly at one riverbank!
Every night we slept even better compared to the previous night. And by the last morning, I woke up and decided that we reached a new record. We two ended up sleeping on the bare structure of the back chairs for the previous night. Our two air-filled narrow mattresses were kicked down and piled up at my side. Since we slept on a 10-degree slop because the pulled-down back chairs would not get to 100% even, when I woke up in the early morning, I found my weight was heavily forced on my two legs that curled up almost to my chest against these two air mattresses under my side. Apparently, as always, my husband won the battle even in our sleep as he was lying straight and slept soundly like a log.
I hurried up and went to the river for my last time kayaking without anyone’s help for the first time. The early morning river was too beautiful to wait for others to wake up.
We came back, and I even drove three hours in turn. Everything was normal till the next day. I suddenly found myself could not squat down to pick up something on the ground.
The sensation was very very strange, like you were standing there and suddenly didn’t know how to walk anymore. I had to take a deep breath and move my whole body very very slowly trying to bend down. There was no pain, but just a small voice protesting loudly in my mind “I can’t do it! I don’t know how!”
“Now I know the feeling of those Caucasians who are not able to do an Asian squat.” I heard myself joking with my husband.
We decided that all I needed was some good rest and hope this strange sensation would be gone.
The rest went on and off for three weeks, during which time I hurt myself in another explorative kayaking session where I experimented with how fast I could row the boat (and it WAS very fast!)
I decided to visit my acupuncture doctor. By the time I laid down on the massage bed, my whole body was in big pain all over the place.
I’ve worked with my acupuncture doctor for more than two decades. She is familiar with every bone in my body the same way as an old-school car mechanic who processes the most detailed knowledge of his loyal customers’ cars. We even talked about my sudden body problem the same way as my husband talked to the mechanic of our car.
It turned out, in her words, one most possible explanation, was that the 经络 meridian network on my calves, especially the lower part near the ankles, went into a coma due to that last night’s forced positions for too long.
“A what? Coma?!” I bursted into laughter, and two dozen of needles on my back shook along with me.
With my prolonged stay in the New World continent, my skepticism of Chinese traditional medicine grew along with my age. The only exception still lies in acupuncture and I always felt grateful I could have such a reliable body mechanic to go to for regular maintenance and occasional emergency repairs.
Some nerve cells and neuronetworks on my calves went into a coma was something beyond me. But one thing I still adore about Chinese medicine philosophy is that there is always room for a subjective explanation that can be so convincing (based on the experience of the doc) that the patient can hop on a psychological battlement along with the doctor when the doctor cannot get clear scientific pieces of evidence of a medical phenomenon s/he has trouble to decipher.
I chose to believe her about the coma theory.
“It will take one month or two to recover, based on the other case I dealt with not long ago. If you had come to me three weeks ago immediately after the incident, you would have had a better chance to recover sooner.” My great doctor said.
Well, up to this moment, while I was typing, I could already do a squat with some strong willpower. I am looking forward to the day when I can asian squat down without thinking twice about how I do it.
Wish me good luck.
More importantly, maybe next time I will sleep in a tent instead of in a car.
