Healing with Hope and Optimism
I was in the ‘too hard’ basket.
I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and have been seeing an acupuncturist/Chinese herbalist for about 3.5 years. Today she said something about ‘optimism’ that made me start thinking about how much of that she’d given me.
My first visit to her came after 14 months of being unable to hear properly and having terrible balance. I’d been to multiple doctors and specialists with the end result being that there wasn’t anything they could find wrong with me. The fact that I could not stand in the ocean as each wave made me fall over, seemed ridiculous to them. That I had no quality of life seemed unimportant.
I was in the ‘too hard’ basket.
In 2005, I had Ross River Fever and Glandular fever — yes, together — and have never recovered fully. When this happens, it’s deemed that you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). When my ears went weird, I was in my late 40s which is when peri-menopause starts affecting women. Menopause and CFS aren’t things easily cured, so I’m a ‘bad’ patient because there’s no easy diagnosis, things interact with each other, and I’m going to be a problem for a while.
This kind of diagnosis, or my interpretations of these non-diagnoses, doesn’t give you much hope. I was frustrated that I felt there were things, serious things, wrong with my body and yet the medical community were fobbing me off — or worse, calling me a hypochondriac.
I had ‘bleak hope’ about life. I imagined living out my days without hearing properly, being unable to walk at the beach, unable to swim in the surf, unable to get on a boat or a train or bus or even a bouncy car. I’d already given up my career, social life, alcohol, coffee, gluten, and anything stressful due to CFS. By now, my quality of life was not looking anything like I’d imagined when I was younger. The years until I died looked pretty dismal.
Deciding to go to acupuncture was a last-ditch effort. I chose the practitioner because she specialized in fertility and women’s health. I went to my appointment with no great optimism. When she took my pulses and listened to my health story (or un-health story) she was lovely. For a start, she listened. She made appropriate responses. And then she said she couldn’t promise anything but she thought she could give me some help, although it was never going to be a short-term fix. It would require time and commitment on my part.
It’s the financial commitment that concerned me the most. In the medical community, I was covered by Medicare and my health fund (in Australia), but this isn’t always the case with alternate therapies. Having been ill for so long, my finances aren’t in a good place as I’ve struggled to work for years. So the financial commitment to my health wasn’t something I took lightly. In fact, it bothered me a lot.
I lay on that couch, acupuncture needles dotting my body, and I felt dead, empty. As the hour progressed, I began to feel the slightest tingling in my body, as if life was coming back to me. In the darkened room, with instrumental music softly filling the room with joy, my body felt something I hadn’t felt for some time — hope.
It took a few sessions for my hearing and balance to come good…but they did.
Today, as I lay in the darkened room with music softly playing, my body tingled with so much life, I did not feel one empty place. My nostrils tingled, my tongue felt like I’d eaten too much pineapple, from my toes to my scalp I vibrated with life.
I’ve done things this past week that I could not have envisaged when I first went to acupuncture. I am alive, with a creative life, and have begun selling my goods at a local market stall. I went out the day after the stall too, actually, I’ve been out each of the 3 days afterwards. In the past, something like a visit to the markets would have landed me in bed for a few days of rest and recovery.
When my acupuncturist said today that people with CFS need optimism, she wasn’t wrong. I needed her faith that she could help me. I needed my belief that I could help myself. I needed more than a bleak hope of surviving a few more years — I needed to enjoy my life.
I have to her thank for all the joy that is in each day. Yet, when I thanked her, she turned it back on me. She said without my commitment to myself, I wouldn’t have changed.
Maybe that’s the success of alternate therapies — that both practitioner and patient have a role in the healing. That one gives hope, and the other gives work. One opens the channels, the other works at healing. That both are committed to healing, using hope, optimism, and whatever technique is necessary to allow you to be open to receiving.
This has been the fastest change in my health and my outlook on life. I should have gone to her years earlier!
