🎧 Chapter Twenty-Eight | Ch’i
When the Cure Feels Like a Trap: Navigating the Maze of Alternative Healing
What you need to know:
Trusting Tony’s spare advice, Jennifer decides to return to the clinic and work a bit more with Dr. Rick. His manner continues to be discordant though, and once again, Jennifer’s left off-center and wondering.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ch’i
A Musak track of gongs mixed with harps played through ceiling speakers. Across the way, on a C-shaped reception desk, a tabletop waterfall gurgled. Behind that desk, two industrious receptionists tapped at keyboards while a third talked on the phone. “Yeah. Totally cool,” she said, her voice relaxed in that quality of chill common to people in the northwest.
This was the next Friday and once again, I paged through a back issue of The New Yorker and paused on a comic with two Godzillas among skyscrapers. In their claws, they held handfuls of humans.
“Of course, you feel great,” one said to the other. “These things are loaded with anti-depressants.”
“Welcome back,” Dr. Rick said.
The same thinning ginger hair, jaw hugging beard and trim mustache, wire framed glasses, white coat, ill-fitting khaki slacks.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, tossed the magazine aside.
Down the hall we went and Dr. Rick stopped at the same door as last week, waved me inside, tossed his tie over his shoulder and washed his hands.
Easing to sit, I pulled my purse into my lap. Waited.
Turning the water off, Dr. Rick tugged down two paper towels from the boxy dispenser. “So, how you feeling?” he asked, that tie still hooked over his shoulder like an odd appendage.
I almost suggested he fix it but then thought no. He’s the master. Let him do what he wants.
“Everything stopped. The voices. The sensations,” I said, fixed my gaze on him and not the wonky tie. “All gone.”
“Voices?” he asked. “Sensations?”
Seriously? He didn’t remember? How was that possible?
“Let me introduce myself. I’m Jennifer,” I said, half joking. “Tony recommended me? I told you about voices I was hearing?”
Dr. Rick wadded the damp paper towels into a ball, tossed them into the trash, flipped open my file and looked through the notes. “Oh. Right,” he said, more to himself than to me. “PTSD.”
Really? I shared the most intense experience a person could have and he forgot?
Taking a pen out of his pocket, he wrote a few notes. “It seems we’ve moved it,” he said.
“Moved what?” I asked.
“The ch’i.” Dr. Rick said, peered over the top of his glasses. “It’s a way to say energy.”
“And you moved it? This ch’i?”
“We moved it,” he said, back to writing notes that were actually the little slashes and dots creating Chinese characters. The sting of being forgotten shifted into being impressed.
“So? Is this ch’i like electricity?” I asked, trying to find some common ground. “Like in a lightbulb? Or like gas that lights the furnace?”
Dr. Rick flipped my file closed and tossed the pen aside. “Both have sources. They’re not the same as ch’i.”
“So…ch’i has no source?”
“Exactly.”
He stood there, hands now in the pockets of his white jacket and blinked at me. A strange silence yawned wide and then wider and in it, my restlessness. I didn’t care what Tony or his Sufi dancer said about Dr. Rick. I had to get away from him.
Looping my purse over my shoulder, I stood. “Okay then,” I said and edged to the door. Difficult because the room was so small and he was in front of it.
“You’re leaving?” he asked.
“The treatment worked. I’m healed. Thanks,” I said, waved him to move. “If you don’t mind…” Still, he stood there, scratched his head as if perplexed.
“We’re just getting started,” he said.
“Look,” I said, shaking with resentment at his manner and how he actually forgot all I told him before. “You don’t remember my situation, which is fine, I imagine you’re busy but then, when I ask a question, you don’t make any sense. Ch’i has no source? What does that even mean?”
“Oh,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “Ch’i is a big concept for the…every day person.”
“You’re a teacher,” I said. “Isn’t that what you do? Explain big concepts?”
A blotchy pink stain rose up his neck. “I apologize,” he said, hand to his chest. “There is a lot going on. Please…” Here he motioned toward the empty chair. “Let’s try again.”
No. I’m leaving I wanted to say but I was unable to go. Why, I’d ask myself many times over the years. Why did you stay?
The easy answer was fear. What if I left and the voices came back? The hard answer had to do with habit and familiarity. I was raised in a family of people like Dr. Rick, my adoptive family. The lack of human feeling and emotional detachment were wholly familiar and I did not yet possess enough self-awareness to understand how quickly these behaviors sent me into tailspins of confusion and doubt. So, I stayed.
I motioned at that tie slung there on his shoulder, a kind of mea-culpa I suppose. Looking, he hastily tugged it into place and smoothed it down. “I’m always doing that. Thanks.”
Once more, he was before me on that wheeled stool looking like a praying mantis, all knees and elbows.
“I’d like to take your pulse,” he said. Hand out for my wrist.
Having sat down again, I gave him my right hand.
Dr. Rick took hold, lightly, and his hand was surprisingly cold. He tapped around while looking past me at the wall. Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap. Tap. Then the tapping stopped.
This close, he smelled musty, like dried rosemary mixed with mushrooms.
“Am I alive?” I finally asked.
Dr. Rick smiled slightly, more like a twitch at the edge of his mouth. He lowered my hand to my knee, rolled over to the counter, and took up his pen. From that seated position, he opened my file once more, and made a few more notes. “I think we should continue on the present course,” he said, closed the file.
“More needles then?” I asked. “The ones that ‘don’t hurt’?”
Another twitch at the corner of his lip. “I didn’t say they wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “I said they wouldn’t hurt much.”
“Well, they did,” I said. “A lot.”
A feeling of sparing between us then, not unlike my own kids only there was no referee.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. Standing, he shoved the stool under the exam table, turned, and opened two high doors over the sink. He rummaged through a series of narrow white boxes on a high shelf. “I’ll try a thinner needle,” he said over his shoulder. “Hop on the table. Shoes off.”
I eased out of my tennis shoes, then my socks. On the exam table, I did as before, resting my head on the airplane-sized pillow, and stretched my legs long. I felt like Spencer lying there, my arms pressed to my sides. I could hear Jo saying, “You’re a mummy!”
Dr. Rick stepped to the end of the table, set one of the packets between my now bare feet, and ripped open the top of the other. He eased out a single needle, held it up as if for my inspection. The thin filament caught the light.
I didn’t want that stuck in my body. Still, I nodded, then closed my eyes.
Tap went the needle.
“Ouch,” I said, because thinner or not, it still hurt. I expected Dr. Rick might not do the second one, or at least might give me a moment to catch my breath. But then came the second bite of pain. “Yikes,” I said, gripped to the sides of the table and opened my eyes, giving him an accusing look.
Oblivious, he wadded up the packaging, tossed it into the trash beside the sharps container and looked at his watch. “I’ll be back,” he said, heading to the door and leaving as I should have earlier.
It wasn’t as bad as the time before, not as disorienting, and there was something comforting but also heart breaking in that realization. I was…acclimating to him, to this. And to get through, I studied the clock over the door, followed the tick-tick of the second hand. Around and around it went. Soon, I thought, soon he will return and I’ll be freed.
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Rick strolled into the room, and with a couple tugs, took out the needles.
I felt that diminishment within. That inner collapse. A sense of something of myself slipping away.
Hand out, Dr. Rick tugged me sit up. Stepping back, he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Anything happen while you rested?” he asked.
“I was waiting mostly for you to come back.”
He chuckled as if what I said was funny. But I didn’t laugh.
“How many of these treatments will I need?” I asked.
“Well…hmmm,” he said, massaged his whiskered chin. “I’m not sure. At least a couple months’ worth.”
“A couple months,” I said. “Eight?”
“Sure. That will be a good start. How are you feeling now?”
I shifted my weight side to side on the table, bare feet dangling and at my ankles, tiny bright red spots of blood now dried a darker color.
“Not really here,” I said. “I feel kind of detached.”
“Hmm,” he said, fished his pen out of his pocket. “Let me write that down.” Backing up, he opened my file, and made still more notes. Then he closed the file and smiled like all was well.
“Same day and time next week?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
Next -
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Mid-Life Crisis
Returning to the clinic for her sixth of eight appointments, Dr. Rick is late and then reveals something of a very personal nature that, ever so-slightly, nudges the course of Jennifer’s treatment plan in a new direction.