Manual Transmission

Study of a Hand, Auguste Rodin

FOR MOST of April, I was in free fall. Courtney McDonald caught me.

I lost my footing early in the month when my husband sat across from me, gathered my hands into his, and said, “I need to tell you something. I’ve just gone to the police. I’m being blackmailed.”

He’d been a victim of online extortion – a con job spanning 10 months. The scammer initially connected through social media. Using faked photos and a fake backstory spooled out over weeks and months via direct messages and texts, the scammer hooked into his most tender qualities – kindness and compassion – then manipulated him into a lapse of judgment that trapped him for months in a web of panic and shame.

I was gut-punched. A hole had opened in ground I once thought was solid. Disoriented, I tumbled in.

Courtney knew none of this when I arrived for my massage appointment. She only knew what I told her: Three weeks earlier, I sprained my foot and broke a toe. Since then, I’d been walking with a limp and my hip and lower back now ached.

I had been seeing Courtney regularly for several years. A specialist in medical massage, she finds and releases the tight muscles, trigger points and compressed nerves I bring to her table whenever I go overboard in my athletic pursuits.

On this day, I had a simple request: Please make me feel better.

TO BE IN Courtney’s studio is to feel better almost immediately. There are plants big and small, including a yards-long pothos cascading down the side of a shelf alongside a string of tiny white lights. Sunlight filters through stained glass on the windows. Paintings – a landscape, a portrait, a seascape – hang on the walls, as does a signed photograph of the actor who played Captain Benjamin Sisko on the television series Deep Space Nine. We bonded over that one right away.

Let’s start face down, Courtney said. She left the room while I undressed and climbed onto the warmed massage table topped by a fuzzy blanket and a set of sheets as soft as a baby’s bottom. I felt like I had settled inside a warm peach.

She began at my feet. Her hands worked their way up the muscles, ligaments and tendons of my calves, hamstrings, glutes and lumbar spine. When I flipped onto my back, she repeated the process, this time up the shins and into the quadriceps.

Courtney and I sometimes chat as she works but I grew quiet as she began to focus on my neck and upper back, then my shoulder and chest.

When she tucked my wrist between her elbow and body and steadied my outstretched arm, I began to weep. Tears seeped from the corners of my eyes and collected in the alcoves above my earlobes. Cradled in her arm ever so slightly, I felt safe for the first time all month.

I’m sure she noticed but she said nothing. She continued to deeply massage my forearm, then my wrist, then every part of my hand, her fingers, knuckles and palm working their way over mine.

I thought I had come in for hip and back pain. Turns out my real pain – grief, sorrow, anger, uncertainty, fear – was trapped everywhere in my body. Courtney gave it a way out – through my hands.

“I can’t hold on to these things anymore,” I thought as Courtney worked.

Her hands replied. “It’s OK. I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”

SO I LET GO of grasping for answers I’ll probably never get: How could he let this happen? What was his Achilles’ heel? What primitive part of the brain overruled higher-order thinking, the part that says “No. This isn’t a good idea”? Had his open heart surgery two years earlier affected his cognition? Who was behind the online fraud – some transnational syndicate running an AI-driven template? And the bigger, scarier question: How strong do I have to be to get past the hurt?

I allowed myself to rest in the unknown because Courtney was there to hold me.

“I’ll give you a few extra minutes to gather yourself,” Courtney said when she finished. She stepped out. I got off the table and dressed.

“How are you doing?” she asked when she came back in.

“Hands. Who knew?” I said.

Courtney smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

Medical massage provides therapeutic care, and Courtney certainly eased my hip pain. But there was something else going on, alchemy that turned her work into healing and awareness.

I’ve heard it said that we make things sacred with our attention. That is what Courtney does. It is holy service.

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Though coming forward can be difficult if you are the victim of an online scam, cybercrime experts encourage you to:

• Talk to someone you trust. Tell them what is going on.

• Stop all communication and block the scammer.

• Do not send any money or meet further demands.

• Report the incident to local police and, in the US, to the FBI.

• Remember – you are not at fault.

More than $16 billion was stolen through internet crime in the United States in 2024, according to the FBI, up 33 percent over 2023. The total is probably greater because many people who are scammed don’t report the crime or their losses.

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