ah yes, my pretties, i promised you the gory details of my trip to the acupuncturist, and gory they are indeed. the experience, on a whole, was a bit unsettling, altho i have a new-found respect for naturopathic medicine.

before i signed the release forms, the doctor went over the acupuncture process in detail. altho i generally prefer to err on the side of too much information, i did NOT need to know that they sometimes stick the needles in as deep as four inches and then wiggle them around. eww! somehow i had thought this was only going to be a series of pin-pricks. i’ve never been crazy about needles, but i’ve had blood drawn and a few body piercings without disastrous results, so i figured i could handle it. somewhere during the discussion it occurred to me just how bizarre it was that i’m letting this guy, rather, paying this guy to stick needles in me.

anyway, the treatment consists of him sticking a bunch of needles in and then leaving me in a dark room with soothing music to contemplate my navel for about twenty minutes. for the first treatment i had a total of 10 needles – one in each wrist, on either side of my neck, on the insides of my ankles, between my big and 2nd toes, just below my bellybutton, and one on the top of my head. the needles are hair-thin, and they really didn’t hurt much more than a pin prick. that is, until we got to the one between my toes. the needle grazed a nerve and instantly i had these crazy nerve signals running up and down the length of my foot. if my body were a cartoon, the nerve would have been a rope with a bunch of bells tied to it – cowbells and liberty bells and big huge church bells and little high-pitched jingle bells – hundreds of them, and suddenly something was tugging on the rope and every one of the bells was going off all at once, and the rope was on fire and this was all inside my foot.

okay, i know that’s weird, but that’s what was happening inside my head right then. as soon as i tensed up all the other needles started to hurt, and then there was sensation like the middle of me, all my guts, got really really tight and tense, and i started to tremble in that deep core-shaking sort of way. the doctor had to talk me through breathing for about five minutes. if i had been sitting up i would have passed out cold, but since i was lying down it wasn’t possible for me to actually lose consciousness (which really would have been a blessing, i have to say). anyway, i survived the next twenty minutes, but the acupuncture created this really unpleasant floating sensation that made it impossible for me to drift off to sleep the way that supposedly lots of patients do.

the verdict? i think it’s too soon to tell. after the shock of the nerve-thing, i just crawled home and lay around for a while. i felt kinda genki later in the evening, so maybe it made a difference, or maybe it was just psychosomatic, but hey, who cares what the cause is if it works. the real test of my sanity, though, will be to see if i make it back for my appointment next week. what, let someone stick needles in me again? we’ll see.