January 17th: The Healer

Today my mom and I walked around the city we both used to live in. And she met Chris, an Eastern medicine scholar who I've met with once before.

Chris is insanely smart but his ideas are radical, even though they come from thousands year-old medicine. And yet it makes more sense than anything I've ever heard. And I have heard it all. Drug names and surgeries and treatments since the time I could talk and listen. I know more about the immune system than premed students. But for all these years, I was hesitant to explore this other type of medicine.

I was afraid, afraid for another treatment to fail, afraid to lose myself in another attempt to get better. But I trust Chris. He's highly trained and young but so goddamn smart. He is humane, even when sticking needles in me and burning moxa on my belly button.

I let him burn me and it didn’t hurt. I wasn't tense and I didn't scream. It was warm and relaxing and I felt a release, a sudden absence of something I cannot yet name.

I promised to dedicate the next six months to give my complete focus on getting better. To find the right mix between diet, natural healing and Western medicine. Because the drugs my doctors give me now are band-aids, and we've got to heal the root. No more chemo. No more drugs that only make me dependent on other, scarier drugs. 

My regular doctors are fine to tell me that my lifespan is shortened, that this and that will kill me and I am not okay with that. Maybe I was before, but I'm not anymore. Of course, I could get hit by a truck tomorrow, but it won't be a truck full of immunosuppressants and steroids, no, no.

I’m searching for healing. That is what this is about. I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid yet but my eyes and ears and are wide open. Even if this means eating bone soup, the recipe for which seems to be taken out of Hansel and Gretel.

I am practicing patience and I am hoping to find peace. And in that peace, joy.