Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 3)

I was extremely lucky to get “the needle guy” that day in 1995. During the following years, he helped to:

a)     alleviate my PMS. Acupuncture, however, wasn’t as effective as the B-compound vitamin intra-muscular injections he dispensed—we referred to those visits as his civic duty and the treatment as my anti-homicide shot;

b)     manage my allergies. Naturopaths test allergies via a machine that reads the body’s energy fluctuation when a suspected allergen is brought into proximity. No cuts, scrapes or scratches required. Just an ability to read my aura. (Early on in my alternative medical journey, my wee sis began calling him my “voodoo doctor” and it stuck);

c)      deal with a kidney stone. He sent me to Emergency when I called him at home one Sunday night, in so much pain I could barely breathe. After x-rays and a shot of Demerol, I was released on my own recognizance and went home to bed. I won’t lie; I took the prescription pain killers when necessary because pain that blows off the lid on a scale of ten demands immediate relief, but acupuncture helped my system to rid itself of that pesky little nugget without resorting to surgery;

d)     cure a back seizure that had me off work for six weeks in 2002. and

e)     generally kept me healthy with immunity booster shots, various supplements, and regular acupuncture tune-ups.

When you’re cooped up in a room with someone for hours at a time, you get to know them pretty well. We shared stories of family, personal history, politics, religion, and philosophy. We talked cars, hockey and chocolate. Books and music. Poetry and medicine. I could tell him anything, knowing he would keep my confidence and maybe offer some useful advice. He was a genuinely caring, compassionate, unconventionally conventional individual whose primary mission in life was to help and heal others. I fondly referred to him as a free radical. Bureaucracy drove him crazy, and it didn’t help that he was smarter than the folks who raided his clinic in search of infractions. (They never found anything.)

People drop in and out of your life as required. As I was beginning to rethink my health strategy, circumstances conspired to part me from my voodoo medicine man. Over the next few years, I began a program of therapeutic massage coupled with chiropractic to keep me on my feet, but I didn’t sign on with another naturopath. I didn’t want anyone else, so I dawdled. And dawdled. And dawdled.

I occasionally wondered about my voodoo doctor, about where he was and how he was doing. Ter and I would laugh about our history with him, because some of the stories are hilariously funny but you really had to have been there. Recently, “occasionally” thinking became “often”, and I found myself at the sink one night, wondering aloud about what had happened to him.

Two days later, the phone rang and guess who it was? I was so overjoyed that I shut my office door, propped my feet on the garbage can, and raved at him for fifteen minutes. “Where have you been? How are you? Oh, I’m so glad you called; Ter and I were just saying the other day …”

Turned out he had been thinking about me, too. “We’re on the same psychic network,” he said, to which I replied, “Well, yeah! Weren’t we always?” He learned that my life had done a complete one-eighty, I learned that his had done pretty much the same thing, and here we are, come full circle and reunited once more.

Part of me worries that he’s back for a reason, that some sinister health issue only he can fix is lurking in my future. The greater part is simply delighted at reconnecting with someone who means so much to me. He’s been put to work on my trick ankle, trying to coax it toward “a new normal” following an untreated incident from a zillion years ago, and so far, we’ve caught up on family, politics, medical theory and the best cocoa content in chocolate. Oh, yeah … and the ankle is coming along nicely.

Welcome back, Doc.

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 …

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 1)

My time with conventional medicine was done years ago, though I stayed on file with my GP until he retired. He had been our family doctor since the early 1970s, when we had just landed in Victoria and my mother found the clinic in the Yellow Pages. He was the junior partner at the time and man, did we luck out with him. He was the one who diagnosed my bones, referred me to the eye guy who pegged my Horner’s Syndrome, and kept the rest of my family alive throughout his career. I liked him enough to trust him, and that is no small favour when you’re dealing with someone’s compostable container. I was also fortunate with most of the specialists I knew growing up; though Mum was continually apologizing for my attitude, I think (hope) most of them appreciated my spirit.

On leaving the nest and hooking up with Ter, my medical route veered off the beaten path. I started seeing a chiropractor. Ter had her allergies tested. We began paying attention to our diet, not to count calories or fat grams, but to monitor the components of what we were eating. Ter was reading up on alternative medicine, i.e., naturopathy, homeopathy and acupuncture, as a more proactive approach to health care, something I agreed with because of my control issues. I believe in pre-emptive measures rather than calling in the experts when it’s too late; I’m unsure when this belief took root, but it feels like I’ve had it forever.

So, in the mid-1990s, when a warning light went on within my system, rather than call my GP, I called the naturopathic clinic located near my home. By then I was all for natural remedies; tell me what herb to make my tea from, point me at the right supplement, take me off sugar, whatever, I’m good with it. Just don’t stick me full of needles, okay?

I made an appointment for that Friday morning. The clinic was a partnership between four or five practitioners, each specializing in something but all fully licensed naturopaths. The fellow who came out to greet me had the purest blue eyes I have ever seen. He spoke softly, held my gaze when we were talking, and took copious notes. I answered every question as honestly as I could considering the personal nature of my symptoms. It takes real courage to describe a female malfunction to a total stranger—especially when that stranger is so attentive that you forget what you’re saying in mid-sentence.

When he had filled up two pages with notes, he looked me in the eye and said, “We can fix this easily enough, but I really think you’d benefit from acupuncture. Would you be willing to try it?”

I immediately froze.

“Does acupuncture scare you?” he asked, when I said nothing.

“Yes,” I replied. No point in lying, since he’d already figured me out. I had no interest at all in trying acupuncture; I had done my time with needles and it was never fun. They were all the size of darning needles, for one thing, and blood was always a factor. Mine.

Well, my magical voodoo man explained the basics and cleared up my misconceptions. I threw a hundred questions at him and he never flinched. His voice never changed its timbre, his eyes never left mine, and when he was finished with the overview, he turned up the voltage on those pure blue eyes and said, “Will you come back and try it?”

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

I walked out of the clinic with a follow up appointment and a disquieting sense that I had just surrendered my will to Dr. Svengali. Only when I was in the car and heading back to work did the charm lose its power. %&$#*%! I thought in disbelief, I got the needle guy!

To be continued …