Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 2)

I am lying on a table. One pillow under my head, two stacked under my knees. The blinds are drawn, but the windows are so big that the overhead light isn’t required. It’s a nice room. Peaceful, quiet. The only sound is my heart hammering against my ribs.

What the heck am I doing here? More mysteriously, how did I get here?

The doctor comes in and I am reminded. Oh, yeah. Blue eyes.

He asks me how I’m doing and I say let’s get going. He smiles—if the eyes don’t get you, the smile will—and my first acupuncture treatment proceeds.

It was so long ago now that I don’t recall the details. I’ve had so many treatments that it’s almost become a snore, but something interesting always happens whenever a point is activated. Be it a spark, a zap, a rolling wave or a lightning bolt, my body feels it. I do recall asking the doc if the points were plugged into anything to generate the response. He said, “No. It’s all you.”

The needles, by the way, are not needles in the conventional sense. They vary in length, not so much in thickness. An acupuncture point is like a metal fishbone, so thin and delicate that it will quiver if you blow on it. The doc sets them in place by tapping them, one by one, along the circuit wherever he senses an energy blockage. Millennia ago, the Chinese healers mapped out the human body’s circuit board, identifying meridians through which our internal current runs; if a snarl occurs and energy is blocked, physical and/or mental symptoms can result. Acupuncture frees the blockage and allows the body to reset naturally, without chemical interference. Sometimes the symptoms disappear at once. Other times, a few treatments are required but, hey, that’s why we’re called patients. A precondition or a longtime trouble spot might not be relieved at first crack, so hang in there. Eventually, the treatments will take.

After the points are in place, the doc gives each one a little twist to activate it. This is where the fun really starts. A surface spark can happen right away, a bright little ping! not unlike a carpet shock. Sometimes I get a deeper, rolling sense of an engine trying to turn over before the point ignites. Sometimes it feels like a charley horse, other times I get an oh my God thermal implosion. By the time all the points are in play, each response, however intense, has faded out to nothing. That’s when the doc leaves me in peace, to rest and let the points do their work.

I usually fall asleep. The doc can tell when I’m cooked by taking my pulses. I can tell because I shift from dreamy mental meandering to a disco beat reverberating in my head. The points are plucked pretty well in the same sequence in which they were placed, and I’m good to go. My energy is better, my mind is sharper, my emotions are stabilized … and during the next few days, I’ll occasionally feel the ghost of a particularly intense point as my body continues recalibrating.

To be continued …