Just before I go …
It is Mar. 10, 2009, less than 24 hours before my parents and I leave for China. It is an auspicious day in many ways, and I woke up in the night last night feeling I had been lax in keeping up with this blog over the last couple of weeks.
First of all, today is, in my own personal calender of things, the 16th anniversary of the day I was officially diagnosed with MS. An infamous anniversary as the neurologist was cold and, after making my parents and I endure a very apprehensive wait for over an hour, went on to explain that pretty much I should just go home and get a wheelchair and forget about any hope. My Mom has a much clearer and less positive recollection of the events that took place, I think!
Over the years I have forgiven this neurologist, and see him more as a poor soul put in the unenviable position of having to communicate very difficult news without any preparation or training in how to do so. In any case, fortunately, his coldness helped create in me an anger against the arrogant absolutism of western medicine (as I saw it then). I was especially angered by their use of the word ‘incurable’ with regard to MS and other diseases – incurable engenders fear and hopelessness which is totally unnecessary as, really, MS is only incurable within the paradigm of western medicine at this particular point in time! There is absolutely no reason to conclude that it is incurable in all healing traditions, or that western medicine itself will not find a cure for it in the near future.
I say fortunately because from this anger I felt came a stubborn drive to not give up hope and a defiant sort of openness; a willingness to try any kind of therapy I could lay my hands on – my motto, gleaned from my friend’s father, being “I don’t care if I have to dance naked around a fire waving eagle feathers; if it works I’ll do it!” And so for the last 16 years I have tried every kind of therapy I could get my hands on that I could afford. As I didn’t know the cause of my illness, I didn’t limit the kinds of therapies I tried in any way; I worked on the emotional, spiritual, mental and physical levels constantly trying to heal as best I could on all levels. A blessing that did not look to be such when delivered as a cold diagnosis.
But I digress. I have not written on the blog recently for the simple reason that the healing is already begun. The last two weeks have made it clear that this is, you might say, a spiritual journey. I have noticed that the anxieties that have come up in me due to the stress surounding this trip, have been spiritual or emotional in nature. I am hardly worried about the physical voyage or physical treatments at all. Some are surprised at this when I tell them, but I lived in Korea for 4 years, so being in foreign country not knowing the language is not as big a hurdle for me as it would be for many others. As to the treatments, I have tried so many different kinds of therapies that one more engenders little fear. What does shake me to the core is the fact, the miracle you might say, that I am going on this voyage with my parents.
I finish this post after arriving in China on March 15. I was so stressed and anxious about the trip that I felt I could not focus or get clear on what I wanted to write. I hope what I wrote is of interest anyway, and that all the other things I wanted to write will come back to me so I can blog them in the near future as I settle in here!
2 comments March 15th, 2009
