I have been treated with acupuncture a couple of times in the past by a slightly inexperienced naturopath and those treatments had actually helped so thought it would be a great idea to visit London’s most renown acupuncture expert Professor Cheung. Today I had my consultation and 1st treatment with Professor Cheung and it is this experience that I wish to share with you.
When I walked into the updated century old building I was immediately asked to remove my shoes and offered slippers. I was then explained the fee schedule and the expectations should Professor Cheung accept me as a patient. (I assume Professor means Dr., but everyone calls him Professor). It was explained that Professor Cheung would probably ask me to come in for 5 days in a row and the amount that I’d have to pay each day. He would also create a mixture of Chinese herbs and these would be purchased separately as part of my treatment. I know you’re doing the math and thinking that this might be getting expensive and you would be right, but I felt compelled to meet the Professor and hear what he had to say.
I would not want to guess how old Professor Cheung is but I will just say that he is older than me and he has a gazillion certificates from all over the world, many of which are in Chinese. He wears a large jade ring and on his wooden desk sits a 2 foot jade eagle with wings expanded. I explained my pain to him and threw in a couple of extra complaints for good measure. From across his desk he placed his fingers on my wrists. I thought he was taking my pulse, but then realized he wasn’t timing and appeared to be only feeling my blood pulsating through my body. Fredrick, a young Chinese man, came into the room wearing a mask and pushing the blood pressure machine. Frederick took my temperature and blood pressure and since I’ve never learned what those numbers mean, I have no clue whether it was high or low. Whatever the results, they were written down in Chinese by Professor Cheung, as was everything else on my chart.
The next part of my consultation made me a bit nervous because it felt kind of Frankensteinish, but I think I did a good job of not placing judgement or saying, “what the hell are you doing?” He asked me to hold a metal prong with a wire attached to it and a metal probe at the other end of this wire. Yes, you would have been nervous at that point too right? He started probing my ear and said, “tell me when it is sensitive”, which I immediately translated to mean painful! At any second I expected to be zapped, but happy to report no zapping. As he probed my ear all of a sudden it hurt, sort of like a bad bruise was being jabbed at and I said OUCH! The first ouch produced laughter from Professor Cheung, as did every ouch that followed. In fact he seemed to grow more and more pleased with my ouches and I was beginning to think that he was enjoying himself a bit too much.
Professor Cheung sat back at his desk and proceeded to confirm with me everything else that he suspected might be wrong. Things that I had not told him…. Crazy little stupid things that I had lived with for years. The first thing he said was, “you drink a lot of hot drinks don’t you?” Anyone who knows me know that I am a tea-aholic so I was a bit surprised by his statement and wondered how he knew. He knew my hands were cold, he knew my feet were cold, he knew about my lung condition and he knew about other things that I will not share publicly. It’s all in the ear apparently. Who knew? Professor Cheung told me that the pain in my hand is due to the problem with my lungs and that he would be treating me holistically. Fredrick then escorted me to the treatment room.
Now here is where the real fun started. I lay on my back with my pants and shirtsleeves rolled up and three 2 inch needles were inserted into each hand. There was mild discomfort but nothing too bad. Then Professor Cheung began inserting the needles into my ankle area. The 1st needle goes in…. Ouch (Prof. Cheung laughs). The 2nd needle goes in ….. not bad ….. I can do this. Then the 3rd needle is inserted just below my ankle bone and the weirdest indescribable pain \ shock went through the centre of my foot. I mean the pain was not even near where the needle was inserted. I yelled rather loudly, “HOLY SHIT”, which are not words I would normally use in professional company, and Prof. Cheung laughed even louder. I was starting to realize that he was not laughing at me exactly, but was pleased with each success. He said, “That’s your kidney”. I replied, “well my kidney did not like that!”. He started on the other leg and I kept asking, “is that going to happen again?” because I was quite concerned there was no way I could prepare myself for this sensation a second time. I braced myself as he inserted a needle in the same spot on the other foot…….. no pain. “Only one good kidney”, Prof. Cheung said. And here I didn’t even know that one of my kidneys was so unhappy.
But the best is yet to come. The next thing that happened was Frederick attaching electrode type clips to the needles on my hands. I could see they were attached to a machine beside the stretcher. I had no clue what would become of this situation and kept asking myself if I should trust these people. Frederick said, “tell me when you feel a pulsating in your right hand.” My right thumb started to twitch. I’m talking about involuntary electrical jolts causing my right thumb to twitch every second. I looked down and saw my veins pulsating just as quickly. “I’m not sure this is right, it’s very fast”, I said. Frederick replied, “it’s good, tell me when you feel the pulsating in your left hand.” This time my whole left hand started jumping and all my fingers were twitching. “We’ve got it too strong here Frederick”, I know I was sounding slightly frantic, but he assured me that this was good too. He said, “It’s like your 1st day of school because you don’t know what to expect but next time will be easier”. Now I can’t remember my 1st day of school, but I am fairly certain that it was nothing quite like this. I laid there for 30 minutes trying to not focus too much on my twitching hands and thinking that headphones with Bach’s Toccata and Fugues would make this a happier experience. I was alone in this room for the 30 minutes with nothing but a shelf full of Chinese medical books to stare at and feeling like I was in a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
As I was pulling myself together after the treatment I noticed a giant picture of an ear on the wall. Within each area of the ear there was a picture of an organ or area of the body. Sure enough within the area that was sensitive in my own ear was a picture of a kidney and next to it were lungs. Our eyes may be the window to our souls, but it is most definitely our ears that tell the story of our bodies. I cannot tell you yet that acupuncture has worked or even made anything better, but I have appointments with Professor Cheung for the next four days and I am apprehensively embracing my acupuncture experience extraordinaire.
