Five days ago I got sick. I was in the grocery store thinking how tired I was, so very, very tired - and then the chills hit me. My body felt weighted down and all I could think of was getting into bed. I hurried out, went home, put on a heavy sweater and comfy pants, and got under the covers. This was Sunday, and I pretty much stayed there until Wednesday.
I dragged my sorry self to my acupuncture appointment on Wednesday morning, having not slept well at all. In fact, in a feverish part of the night, my sickness had actually materialized to me in the form of an ugly green goblin. I remember thinking, "Whatever is inside me is a nasty, nasty beast" My acupuncturist said that she could help me. As before, I relaxed and let her do her thing, which, it turns out was a series of different things designed to "scare" the cold out of me.
First was cupping. While I had heard of cupping, I had never had it done before, nor did I really understand the procedure. What it feels like is someone putting tight clamps onto various parts of your body for short periods of time. Not exactly torture, but certainly not pleasant. My areas were my upper back and neck, and what was being administered to me were small glass jars with all of the air removed, acting like suction cups to draw the blood to the surface. It seemed...medevil, like the next steps might be bloodletting or leeches.
Then I had my acupuncture treatment, with a lot more needles in my face than I had had before. I drifted and listened to classical music.
Afterwards, a shot of B12, right in the ass.
Finally, the herbs. I was given 2 baggies of herbs and a jar of warm black liquid. The acupuncturist showed me how to break up the herbs and suck on them, until the flavor was gone. I put the dried chips in my mouth - they were bitter, but not awful. "They taste like wood, " I said. "That's because they are wood," she answered. Pretty straighforward. I imagined myself getting in some kind of an accident, while these herbs were in my mouth. The medical examiner would extract these bits of twigs and roots from the back of my throat, and wonder what the connection was, like in "Silence of the Lambs".
The jar of warm black liquid was a little bit hard to swallow. Literally. I poured myself a nice, big glass of the stuff after lunch and proceeded to sip. Bitter, almost oily, grassy, strange. I wondered if I were drinking my own bile - which possibly had been extracted through those cruel little glass cups on my skin. I drank it - then, and 3 more times that day. Each swallow resulted in me sticking out my tougue and saying "ick!" like a 6-year old.
I looked in the mirror and examined the purple circles all over my back and neck. I decided they looked like hickeys from a Robot Space Monkey.
Wednesday night I slept, well. No green goblin. This morning I woke up without aches. I got some things done.
I still have a cold. And I cough a little, too. But whatever she did, and I don't claim to undertand any of it, scared the nasty part away. Space Monkey hickies, sucking on twigs, and a few gulps of bile. Yup, I'd do it all again in a minute. Good riddance, beast!
