The Dog Who Knew the Taste of Acupuncture
“Is this where you fixed Deokgu?”
‘Ugh… what is this?’
Gyeongwoo flinched.
Whimper-
Gyeongwoo, who had pulled his hand away without realizing it, looked at the dog with its drooping eyes and wagging tail, then reached out again. This time, he steeled his resolve.
‘Wow… the sensation is bizarre.’
He definitely felt something. But the information was jagged, as if the system were glitching.
The sensations in the limbs were clear. It felt as if the pain points in the dog’s legs were being transmitted directly to his own. However, the flow of the meridians in the internal organs was completely undetectable. The signal in the back and waist seemed to flicker, connecting and disconnecting repeatedly, making the sensation come and go.
‘Is it limited to areas with high physical similarity? Even though humans and dogs are both quadrupeds, the internal structure and neural network layouts are quite different…’
He was relieved. He didn’t want to experience his sense of smell going crazy or his intelligence dropping just because he touched a dog.
Gyeongwoo felt the dog’s right leg.
‘It’s true that it sprained its ankle, but that’s not the real cause.’
He couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause, but the right gluteus medius was severely atrophied.
‘Did it suffer an accident in the past…?’
It must have been limping around even on normal days, dragging its right leg. It seemed to have tripped on a stone while climbing an uphill path with such a leg, spraining its ankle, but the degree of the sprain wasn’t severe.
‘If it were in a normal state, it wouldn’t have been unable to walk just from a fall. The reason it can’t stand up despite a minor injury is because the gluteus medius can’t support it.’
Gyeongwoo patted the dog’s head and asked.
“Hey, have you ever had an injection?”
“Whimper…”
“Acupuncture needles are much thinner than injections. Can you endure it? If you can, I can fix you.”
Pant, pant-
The mutt looked up at Gyeongwoo with its tongue lolling out. It couldn’t possibly have understood his words, but somehow, he knew. The creature understood that he was trying to help.
Gyeongwoo took out his needles.
Tap-
What a commendable fellow. Even as the needle entered its foot, it only flinched slightly and stayed still, keeping its body low.
‘Since it sprained the inside of its foot, I need to loosen the surrounding muscles and ligaments. Can I use polarity on this one too?’
As expected, the polarity didn’t infuse. However, Gyeongwoo’s needles, which were becoming increasingly refined, sensitively found the trigger points in the muscles. And while they didn’t correspond 100% to human anatomy, they accurately stimulated the points that could be considered acupoints based on their location.
‘I heard there’s an animal clinic in Gangnam opened by a veterinarian who studied Korean medicine, but to think I’d be performing acupuncture on an animal.’
During that time, the dog stared blankly at Gyeongwoo, panting.
“You’re better than most human kids. At this rate, you’re practically at the level of a service dog.”
“Woof! Woof!”
“But the important thing is, it’s not here. Your real problem is right here.”
As he pressed firmly on the right hip joint, the dog’s ears perked up, and it slowly closed its eyes.
“Hey, hey, don’t get all comfortable.”
Gyeongwoo picked up the needles again to loosen the gluteus maximus, gluteus medius, and piriformis muscles. He couldn’t use polarity, and since it was a chronic condition, it would take quite a while to fully heal, but…
After the treatment, the dog stood up on its own power, albeit a bit wobbly.
“Can you walk?”
“Woof! Woof!”
The dog rubbed its body against Gyeongwoo’s leg once and headed down toward the village.
And the next day.
Gyeongwoo met a familiar friend at the junction connecting to Baejae-ri on the trail.
“Hey, you climbed all the way up here?”
“Woof!”
The dog, panting and wagging its tail, dropped a bone it had been carrying at Gyeongwoo’s feet.
“You want me to eat this?”
“Woof!”
“…Right. I’m sure this is very precious to you.”
As Gyeongwoo chuckled, the dog spun around, presented its backside to him, and sat down.
Wait, this is…
“…You want me to perform acupuncture?”
“Woof!”
Wow. The dog knew the taste of acupuncture.
He had thought it would get better if he treated it consistently, but he never imagined he’d actually see it again since he couldn’t go around looking for a nameless dog. But to think it would come find him itself. It even seemed to have brought the treatment fee.
Heh heh-
Gyeongwoo squatted down and buried his face in his hands, laughing. It was a hilarious dog.
“Alright, let’s give it a try.”
When he felt the ankle, it had indeed almost healed, as it had only been a minor sprain. Yet, the limping gait was still due to the gluteus medius. Gyeongwoo took out the 0.30*60 needles he had brought just in case. They were slightly thicker and longer than the 0.25*40 needles he usually used. There were muscles deep in the hip area that the 4cm needles couldn’t reach, which had been a bit disappointing yesterday.
“This one will hurt a bit more, can you handle it?”
“Woof!”
“Right. If you’ve come all this way to find me, you should be able to endure this much.”
A week passed like that. Thanks to his diligent efforts to loosen the muscles, the dog’s hip muscles, which had been hardened, began to regain their elasticity, and its gait returned to normal.
Woof woof!
By the seventh day, it was running without losing its balance at all.
“Are you a young friend? Your recovery isn’t bad at all.”
“Woof!”
But that very day, even after the acupuncture, the dog followed Gyeongwoo around.
“Aren’t you going home?”
“Woof!”
“I told you to go back to your village!”
“Woof! Woof-woof! Woof!”
The creature just barked brightly, not letting him know what it was saying. Gyeongwoo eventually gave up and returned to the clinic with the dog in tow.
Miyoung, who had arrived for work, asked in surprise.
“Director, did you adopt a puppy?”
“No, it just started following me after getting acupuncture a few times.”
“Pardon??”
“It looks like a dog from the next village, but I’m not sure if it has an owner. Seeing it roam without a leash, it seems like it doesn’t, but seeing how well-groomed it is, it seems like it might.”
Indeed, it was too clean to be a stray. By the way, did people even perform acupuncture on dogs?
‘Though I suppose if it’s our Director, there’s nothing he can’t do…’
Slurp-
Miyoung poured water for the dog and took two hard-boiled eggs from her lunchbox to put in a bowl. After eating them, the dog turned away chicly.
“Hey, aren’t you going to say thank you?”
The puppy looked back once and vanished.
And the next day. The dog didn’t appear on Gyeongwoo’s jogging course.
‘Hmm, it’s much better, but it would be better to get a few more treatments. Does it think it’s fully healed now?’
Gyeongwoo shrugged and finished his jogging course. But that lunchtime,
“Director, that puppy from yesterday came again.”
Deokgu had found the clinic!
Thud-
This time, it brought a peanut caramel wrapped in plastic, dropped it at Gyeongwoo’s feet, stuck its hip out, and wagged its tail.
“You want treatment?”
“Woof!”
“Did you follow me yesterday to check the location, and decide to start punching the clock at the clinic starting today?”
Gyeongwoo was dumbfounded. ‘What is its IQ? Is it even a dog?’
Gyeongwoo performed the acupuncture, and Park Miyoung watched.
“Wow, so animals really do get acupuncture treatment!”
After that day, the puppy arrived around lunchtime every day, ate the snacks Miyoung gave it, received acupuncture, and went back.
“A dog’s life is the best life. Our clinic is hard to book, but it comes without waiting and doesn’t even pay the treatment fee.”
“It does pay the fee, in its own way.”
“Pfft. Today, it brought a mud-stained 10-won coin. A 10-won coin that’s hard to even see these days.”
As the two were talking while watching the puppy chew on a dog treat he had bought, three middle-aged women entered the clinic yard.
“Oh my, there really is a clinic here.”
“Deokgu! So this is where you’ve been disappearing to every day.”
“Is this where you fixed Deokgu?”
They were Baejae-ri residents: Yang Ok-kyung, Kim Hee-sun, and Shin Hye-young.
“Deokgu has been strange lately.”
“It usually comes to my house for lunch snacks, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of it these past few days.”
“But did you see that? It’s amazing how that limp Deokgu always had just vanished.”
“Right. It’s the first time I’ve seen it walk so normally since it returned to our village.”
Kim Hee-sun and Shin Hye-young chatted while eating steamed corn. The topic was Deokgu, the idol dog of Baejae-ri.
Deokgu had a whopping three homes. If it were a human, it might have had to pay heavy taxes as a multi-home owner, but since it was a dog, there was no such thing. The lucky fellow who slept in whichever house it felt like and wandered from house to house for meals had a backstory…
“That kid who loved to roam around like it had a wandering spirit, being tied up like that…”
Deokgu was originally the youngest of the five puppies born to Manbok at the Persimmon Tree House, and it had been exceptionally active and fond of people since it was a pup. Deokgu was adopted into town at three months old.
-Deokgu must be living well, right?
-The owner runs a big hardware store, so the yard is spacious. It loves to run around, so it must be happy.
But a year later, Man-sik from the Persimmon Tree House returned, panting while holding Deokgu.
-I took a peek to see if it was living well… and oh my!
It was tied up in the backyard of the hardware store with a leash less than 3 meters long. What made his blood boil wasn’t just the short leash.
-Because it wouldn’t stay still and kept jumping to the end of the leash, that crazy bastard tied its right leg and attached an iron ball to it!
-What? That son of a bitch deserves to be struck by lightning.
-When I said I’d take it back, he muttered, ‘It’s my dog, what’s it to you?’
-Oh my, so what did you do?
-I told him I’d file a complaint with the county office, and he made all sorts of faces before untying it. That hardware store should go bankrupt.
Deokgu, who returned to the village like that, developed a violent aversion to leashes. It didn’t even want to belong to a single owner, as if it had been deeply hurt by people.
-Oh, Deokgu.
The village residents, whose hearts ached to see the dog they had watched since it was a puppy return with patches of fur missing and limping, decided to take care of Deokgu together.
-Alright. This is your home. We won’t tie you up, so come sleep here at night, okay?
There were a whopping three residents who thought that! Deokgu ended up with three homes.
Another year passed like that. Deokgu, loved by the residents of Baejae-ri, started wagging its tail again when it saw people, and it became plump and its fur became glossy, but it couldn’t recover from the limp in its right leg.
“My heart ached to see that kid who loved running so much limping around, but I guess since it was still young, time solved it?”
At that moment, finally, Yang Ok-kyung, who couldn’t hold it in anymore, opened her mouth.
“That’s not it, there’s a secret.”
“A secret?”
The two perked up their ears.
“It received acupuncture.”
“Acupuncture? What kind of acupuncture?”
“The one you get when you’re sick. The one you get when you go to a Korean medicine clinic!”
“Deokgu received acupuncture?”
Ok-kyung, who was saying things that made no sense, whispered to them about the scene she had secretly watched while hiding.
“A young man performed acupuncture? Ah, the public health doctor at the health center?”
“No, no. I know the face of Dr. Gong.”
“Then who is it?”
“It’s someone I’ve never seen before. But it definitely got better from that day on. And the suspicious thing is…”
The atmosphere was becoming increasingly mysterious!
“Deokgu disappears for about two hours starting at lunchtime these days.”
“Now that you mention it, it hasn’t been coming to my house either.”
“Right. At lunchtime, it’s either my house or yours. I was worried, so when I saw Deokgu yesterday morning, I followed it slowly. And it was heading toward Yongdeok-ri.”
“Yongdeok-ri…?”
“Could someone be treating it there?”
“By any chance… shall we try following it once?”
And so, the three of them had followed Deokgu today and arrived at Gyeongwoo’s clinic.
“Why did we only just find out that a clinic opened in the next village?”
“But why are there no patients?”
“It’s Deokgu’s benefactor, so we should spread the word! First, shall we all get some acupuncture?”
“Yes, yes. Let’s see the skill that fixed Deokgu, who was limping all the time!”
The middle-aged women entered the clinic noisily. Park Miyoung stepped forward to stop them.
“Excuse me, but—”
“It’s fine, let them in.”
Miyoung turned around in surprise at Gyeongwoo’s words.
“You already saw three patients this morning, though?”
“I was planning on increasing the daily reservations anyway.”
“To how many?!”
“About 5 or 6. Just explain it appropriately when they leave.”
He had been wondering how to start increasing the number of patients, and a puppy he met on the road had brought him a connection. It was a quite pleasant connection.
“Then, please enter the Director’s office one by one.”
“Director’s office? No, no. We have to go out to the fields in the afternoon, so just treat us all together in the treatment room.”
The women in their 50s swarmed in and occupied one bed each.
“Where are you feeling uncomfortable?”
“My back.”
“My hip joint.”
“My elbow.”
And after each of them received acupuncture in turn, the three people’s reactions unfolded!