Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Acupuncturist

So I finally succumbed to seeing an acupuncturist in hopes to cure my pain. Somehow, through translation from my English-speaking mouth to her Chinese-thinking mind, my issues with pain have turned into I'm possibly infertile and I should start trying to have kids immediately. I was even given some handy black, round Chinese herb pills to take in order to make my nether regions more satisfactory for child growing.

It's almost like she's humoring me when I say I have bad back pain (lower and upper) because when she pushes on my back, I don't feel anything except a little old Chinese lady pushing on my back. But my pain isn't muscle pain per se -- it's like deep tissue pain attached to bones. She seems to truly believe that I have neck, shoulder and collar bone pain because she really gets a kick out of sticking needles into my tightly wound-up neck/shoulder muscles, hooking up the electrodes and turning the juice on in order to release some bad chi. I'm starting to think that's all stress related anyway since I've always been one giant stress ball ready to burst.

So she'll treat the pain I've come to her with, but after one visit she's decided that taking birth control pills is the cause of all my pain, and that if I don't stop taking them, my ovaries will shrivel up and no longer produce eggs. For effect, she told me about all these 40 year old women who come to her for help, and even with all the money they've spent going to doctors, nothing works. Nothing. No babies for them. The same thing will happen to me, she tells me. I need to stop taking birth control pill NOW! Today! Just wait and see -- when I want to have a baby, I won't be able to. Nope. Not unless I want to have a raisin.

And what's really terrible about this whole scenario is that 1. this is not the first time I've been badgered about becoming pregnant (for different reasons), but 2. I still had needles in my skin while she was lecturing me about babies! I was being held hostage in the back room, while she tried to ply me with all these baby thoughts. I even tried to tell her that I have a lot of pain issues to first contend with (it's been what, 5 years of pain?), and I'd like to just feel better or as good as I can for a little while before I decide to carry around a baby for 9 months.

Somehow she turned that into I was worried about money. Ah, but see, when I'm 40 I'll have money, but no baby, and then I'll be sorry. It's like she was putting a curse on me or something.

But I realized that this is how our relationship will be until her Fremont location closes down (end of this month) -- I will come for pain, and she will treat it, but right after that she'll hold me hostage while lecturing me about babies.

What is it with people and babies? I think I was better off when I would say I definitely didn't want a kid. But now that I don't feel that way, and since I don't answer the "do you want kids" question with a lot of negative comments about babies and kids and so on and so forth, I get the lecture instead. Just because I would want one some day (if that day ever arrives), doesn't mean I have to get a talking to about how I'm going to be infertile for one reason or another.

It's almost enough to give me a complex, I tell you. I told my husband that instead of a baby, I would like another cat. Specifically the cute tuxedo cat that lives in our condo complex. And I would name him Penguin. If I named my baby Penguin, people would think I was weird, like Gwyenth Paltrow naming her new baby Moses.

So I'll stick to cats for the time being.

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