Saturday, November 19, 2011

CONNECTING THE DOTS

I guess this topic has mainly to do with health issues and medical care, although I think it has implications beyond those concerns. I don't know how many times I've repeated to friends and health care providers both that I work with a homeopathic physician, have since January '09. In doing so, a pattern emerged due to an unfortunate series of illnesses about which I first consulted with my OB/GYN. With my thinking conditioned by medical science, I stubbornly equated the pain I was experiencing with infection, not an unreasonable anxiety. Unremitting pain can easily provoke panic, and in my case, led to much laboratory testing and high tech imaging, with no conclusive results. Culturally, we are presented with compulsory behemoths, among them the conventional practice of medicine. In the pattern I referred to, once all laboratory assays were completed and I was still afflicted with pain, I would then consult with Andrew Franck, the homeopath. Referencing other cultural models of medicine, he was able to diagnose and treat. In one stunning instance he recognized a disruption to the Chi as it would more naturally flow through the energy channels of Chinese medicine, what we very tediously refer to as 'acupuncture meridians'. Anyway, in a more recent visit this summer, he advised me to "get in touch with my body", a rather remarkable prescription. Walking out of the Healing Arts office nonplussed, it wasn't until an idyllic moment of sunbathing on my back patio that I did exactly that, and realized that my body itself was a remarkable instrument of healing if only I could trust it. You can bring the horse to the water but you can't make it drink is an old saw. In another one of these serial illnesses, I pleaded with urologist number 1 to please understand the chain of events as I understood them leading up to my symptoms. Arguing with this individual was futile, and I had to move on to another medical office before I was satisfied that my anxieties and concerns had met with the corresponding appropriate examination and tests. Ultimately it was once again Andrew Franck who diagnosed what turned out to be a stubborn abdominal spasm. But by this time I'd gone through five months of pain. Too, I've put myself through a lot of unnecessary turmoil relationally with others. My tendency seems to push right up to and beyond my own boundaries of comfort in an effort to reach out, but my generosity in assigning attributes to people who then prove themselves uninterested in responding to me often turns around to bite me in the ass. There are some who would then cynically assert that any attempt at establishing loving relationships is futile. I'm not one of them, but I'd like to think I've learned something about staying safe. Sometimes we need the help of others to make sense of the world, to 'connect the dots', as it were. Staying free and autonomous better enables us to engage in the reality of others, but there is just as much legitimacy in walking away from those who can't assist us understanding what happens to us in life and why.