Numbskull 4

“It’ll all be okay,” my wife promises, loving me, loving me, loving me.

“You have the worst turtle pulse I’ve ever seen.”

Turtle pulse?

After the chiropractor, after the podiatrist, and after the neurologists were done with me, I finally caved and went to an acupuncturist. Where else was I going to go?

I hadn’t slept well the night before, so my nerves were a little jangled. I walked into the office, spotted a Keurig and coffee pods, but forced myself to avoid using them. I didn’t want caffeine to get in between me and a possible cure.

After a short wait, the receptionist sent me back.

The acupuncturist came into the room and began to ask her questions for intake. What were my symptoms? Where on my body were they? When did they start?

She made clear right from the start that she was distrustful of Western medicine.  While I didn’t feel exactly the same way, I appreciated her position. I wasn’t so much distrustful of Western medicine as disappointed by it.

The problem was—and remains—being skeptical toward Western medicine didn’t mean I was any less skeptical toward acupuncture. I’m open to nearly any belief system, but I need some evidence in order to believe. Maybe not hard data, but something. A distrust of Western medicine alone is not enough.

“You have a lot of phlegm in your body. Damp too, lots of damp energy. I can feel it in your pules. The dampness and phlegm are blocking your body’s natural flows and rhythms.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant the phlegm and dampness to be literal or not, but I opened myself to it.  Dampness made me think of basements and mold, and phlegm reminded me of, well, phlegm. The terms, while not literally true, felt true-ish.

I felt like I was filled with phlegm.

Early on, I noticed that she used nature imagery in much of her diagnosis. This gently led me to think of my condition in terms of nature as well. I wondered if this was intentional or not. The neurologist talked of nerve fibers and cervical myotomes. Those words lent me no such imagery.

When I think of turtles, I think of these guys.

She showed me two of the several spots she used to measure my pulse (she called this “an acupuncturist’s MRI,” which I appreciated), on my left and right wrists. I don’t remember what my left wrist’s pulse was called, but it was doing okay. She called the pulse of my right wrist my “turtle pulse.” As I mentioned before, it was the worst she’d ever seen. My pulse was submerged, buried down beneath layers of figurative mold and phlegm.      

The nature imagery followed me out of my chair as I took of my outer clothes and lay down, stomach first, on the padded, heated acupuncture table.

“Are you uncomfortable?” she asked.

A padded, heated table to lay on? I was instantly comfortable, and told her so.

“Do needles scare you?”

They didn’t.

“You’ll feel a slight pressure. That’s the guide I use to place the needle. You’ll feel a slight poke when the needle goes in. Let me know if it gets uncomfortable.”

I responded with silence, assuming she’d take that as a “yes.” Between the heated table and the new age-y music and lying face down so I couldn’t see anything, I was already deeply relaxed. I felt the needle guide as a slight pressure, the needle itself as a gentle poke. The nature imagery my brain supplied me with was a small swirl of water near the puncture point. I pictured the needles sticking out of my back like fishing poles.

“I’m hooking up the electricity next. You’ll feel the wires on your back while I’m hooking them up.”

I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I felt wires on my back and the slight wiggle as she attached them to the needles.   

“We’re not going to crank it up very high. Let me know when you feel anything.”

I told her when I felt a slight flare of heat. My mental imagery now had my entire back made of water, with ripples radiating from the attached needles and wires.

“Everything okay?”

It was. My eyes were closed, my body already relaxed, even with all the needles.

“I’m going to leave for twenty minutes.”

Huh? I wasn’t expecting that.

She pushed a small plastic oval into my hand. “This is a panic button. Push it if you need me for any reason.”      

“Got it,” I told her. I couldn’t imagine ever needing it. Already I could feel a nap trying to find its way into my future.

The door closed. Only me and the new age-y music and all those needles. The warmth of the table lulled me in, and pulled me down. 

I kept breaking the flow by writing about the experience in my head, then abruptly stopping myself, forcing myself to stay in the moment (this is a common issue with me) rather than retreat into my head and play with words. The music helped, the nature imagery that turned by back to a shallow pool of rippling water helped as well. I imagined all the ripples coming from the needles and wires radiating out and intersecting, creating complex fractal-like patterns as they combined and recombined.

Oddly, I never saw what the needles physically looked like on my back. The image I took away remained entirely imaginary.

The door opened. My twenty minutes was up. As the acupuncturist disconnected the wires and pulled the needles out, she explained that she wanted to try something else.

“Have you heard of cupping?”

I had.

“Have you ever tried it? Are you willing to?”

No, and yes. I was willing to try anything that didn’t hurt too much.

The cupping experience was different than the needles. It was much noisier, for starters, with all these glass bells clicking against each other. Once they were in place, the mechanical “whoosh!” of the suction pump created a partial vacuum inside the glass. My sense of flow was interrupted by trying to figure out the mechanics of the device. My nature imagery vanished.

She checked to make sure I was feeling okay, then told me she’d be back in twenty minutes. I heard the door close.  

Those twenty minutes were not uncomfortable, but I did not feel the relaxation I felt with the needles.

The door opened and closed again.

As with the needles, I waited while she turned off the vacuum, and pulled the glass cups off my back.

“Go ahead and get up. Take your time.”

My eyes had been closed for much of the last forty minutes, and I’d been sitting on a luxuriously comfortable bed. It took me some time to return to reality.

“How do you feel?”

“Dizzy.” I did. The lights looked too bright.

“Get up whenever you feel ready and walk around.” As I did so, she tempered my expectations. I appreciated that, as I didn’t want a repeat of what happened in the chiropractor’s office, where the potential result of her work were presented with a magician’s flourish.

“You should feel some small changes in your body. There’s a lot of phlegm and dampness trapped in your body. You’re one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen, It will take some time to get you all unblocked and working again.”

Normally, discussions of all the phlegm and dampness trapped in my body would have provoked an inward roll of the eyes. But the imagery worked for me: I felt all plugged up by some phlegmatic substance, and the moldy basement implied to me by the word “dampness” fit with how my body (and my spirits) had felt of late. I’d promised myself to be open to everything that happened.

I walked, stretched my legs and arms, put my clothes back on.

Again, she asked, “How do you feel?”

How did I feel?

#

I felt better.

The first thing I did was raise my eyebrows, my standard test for face numbness. I immediately felt the slab of dulled skin above my eyes, in my forehead. So, yes, the first thing I noticed was that the head numbness had not left me. I licked my lips, wetted my tongue. My mouth and lips were still numbed.

My arms, though, felt like they had lost part of that surface “hum,” the only way I can think of to describe it.  I think of it a as sensory noise, barely noticeable. Any more intense and it might turn into itching, or pain. My best defense against it had always been sweaters and flannel shirts; the soft material against my skin defused the sensation.  

The hum was gone.

My arms and legs felt less--I hate to use this word, but it fits: phlegmy. Perhaps the word fits because it was suggested to me repeatedly before, during and afterward the acupuncture session. But the thick, bloated feeling underneath the skin of my wrists and ankles was noticeably, quantitatively lessened.

Something happened during that session. Something small, but something.

I felt better.

#

I had gone to the Emergency Room twice, at a cost of over $50,000 ($45,500 paid by insurance). I spent more than an hour in an MRI tube, had a lumbar puncture, and conservatively maybe thirty blood tests. They found nothing fundamentally wrong with me. They gave me a prescription for vitamin B-12.

I went to the neurologist four times. They conducted two nerve conduction studies. One neurologist told me I had neuropathy. The other neurologist said, “That’s not neuropathy.” They made no attempt to alleviate the condition, other than increasing an already existing pain medication prescription and giving me prescriptions for physical therapy and B-12. My first PT appointment is still several months away.

“Call if your symptoms change or worsen, of course. And if there’s an emergency, call 911!”

The chiropractor I visited overpromised, and them treated the result as a failed magic trick.

My podiatrist gave the most practical advice of all of them: buy some sensible shoes.

I’m not saying I’m a true believer in acupuncture. The changes in my body are small, and as I type this I am raising my eyebrows and feeling my numbed forehead, confirming this odd and unnerving condition has not left me.

Still. For a period of several days, the severity of my symptoms has lessened, something I’d been told was unlikely. My next visit to the acupuncturist is in two weeks. I held onto no expectations on my first visit, not wanting to raise false hope. And even now my expectations are small. I haven’t turned my back on Western medicine, nor have I embraced other approaches. I write this as I straddle the cusp of belief.

I feel good. I’m looking forward to the next visit. I am buoyed by the idea of modest, measurable improvement. My panicky heart-racing periods of anxiety have been dialed back greatly by the notion.

Believe whatever you like. Certainty is impossible, and truth is mutable.

Western medicine offers the cold language of lumbar punctures and MRI tubes. And I trust science. But my last visit with a neurologist left me with a seeming certitude that dissolved easily over the next several weeks.

The acupuncturist talks of phlegm and dampness. I don’t take the words seriously, but the small changes in my body speak volumes. The certitude is based in observable changes. My fingertips no longer buzz. That thickness at my wrists and ankles has disappeared.

So many other truths compete with the truths of the Emergency Room and the acupuncturist’s table.  The fearsome truth of the 2 a.m. panic. The sensible shoes truth of the podiatrist.     

I return to the warm embrace of my wife, where she whispers her beautiful, necessary lie into my waiting ear. “It’ll all be okay,” she promises, loving me, loving me, loving me.

I want to believe. 

My mind calms, my body calms.

It will all be okay.

Why believe otherwise?