Feeling like Family

For the last couple of years I haven't been able to straighten my elbow fully. It is a good excuse for not wanting to iron but it doesn't really have any other advantages so I decided that this would be the time to address it.
I have been to the acupuncture clinic many times, about four or five for this elbow and have mostly been treated in the very front room. It is the "premium" room, bigger than the others and with a large window but today the front rooms were all occupied and I was escorted to the back, through the curtain to the kitchen and into the clinic version of a house's spare room.
It felt not as though I was relegated to the only available room but as though I was entering the inner sanctum, privileged to see into the soul of the practice.
There was a vacuum cleaner standing in the corner, some spare linen on a second treatment bench and a cauliflower in a bag, surely destined for some staff member's dinner. Instead of a large and venetian blind covered window there was a smaller window of obscure glass, it was open a crack and the blinds were pulled up, I could hear traffic on the lane at the back of the shop and little puffs of wind gave me a sense of the outside world.
I had a chat with my therapist while she placed needles and massaged knotty muscles then lay quietly for close on an hour and left feeling that I had received a special brand of medicine.