Poetry Train Monday - 179 - No Pain, No Gain

I'm on Day 21 of NaNoWriMo.

I had a lot of catching up to do on my NaNoWriMo manuscript this weekend, since I'd planned to be at 37,500 words by Sunday night when I laid out my original word count graph. This year - my fourth NaNo - I had vowed to be finished ahead of time. Not 15 minutes to midnight on the 30th, like last year. Or the other years.

No, this year I was going to finish before the 30th. That was part of my word count plan. And for the first time doing this writing marathon, I was keeping pace with the other writers who'd finished early in previous years.

I'm a year-and-a-half into acupuncture treatment for my migraines and chronic pain issues, and I was having the best writing sessions ever. No crushing pain. No mental fatigue. No having to sleep with a heated Magic Bag on my neck. This NaNo was turning out to be awesome.

Then I went to my every-three-weeks acupuncture session last Saturday. My acupuncturist treated my back (which is always more of an ordeal for me) and then did gua sha.

This is what my back looked like when I got home.















That's my body shrieking. No, really. My office has had renovations recently and I'm highly chemically sensitive. I'm hanging in there, but only because I was able to move to a different desk. Still, I've been exposed to a multitude of things that bother me, and it shows in my gua sha marks.

Gua sha urges the body to detoxify, so with this much internal warfare going on, I felt hideous all week, as if I had a really bad case of flu. I muscled my way through daily word count for NaNo, but I couldn't keep up my previous pace. By Friday I was 10,000 words behind schedule.

But here's the good news. We had a swift temperature drop here in Nova Scotia over the weekend, which usually brings on a migraine for me. I had some signs of an impending migraine on Saturday morning, including the dreaded floating prism visual disturbance, which usually preceeds intense nausea and other wonderful miseries.

But remember my detoxing gua sha from last week? The visual disturbance lasted all of ten minutes or so. Nothing grew. No miseries. No narcotic painkiller.

It's all good.

I've caught up on my missing 10,000 words. My NaNo word count now stands at 36,011. So for the Poetry Train this week, I give you this opus:

No Pain, No Gain


Gua sha stripes are red
They lay you flat like flu
No pain, no gain it's said
But they sure as heck fix you


© Julia Smith, Nov. 21, 2010


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We've Got Another Storm Approaching? Really? I Can't Feel a Thing...

I have been a form of weather vane since I realized the correlation between my migraines and the approach of a low pressure system. I put two and two together when I was in my late-20's, when I lived in Toronto.

Then I discovered that there is such a thing as a barometric pressure triggered migraine.

I became a sort of Doppler radar as far as the weather was concerned. I felt an oncoming low pressure system, even when it was a few days away. The really bad storms are just giant low pressure systems, and my degree of pain was unrelenting for up to 10 days at a time.

For some reason earlier this year, I began thinking to myself: I resign from my weather vane job. The Weather Network can do it.

You've probably heard of rewriting subconscious 'tapes' that perpetuate negative life cycles. I just began doing this spontaneously earlier this year.

Then a pregnant coworker who is originally from Taiwan went to an acupuncturist to treat a throat infection, rather than take antibiotics while in her late-term pregnancy. My friend and close team member inquired as to whether our pregnant colleague's acupuncture treatment was covered under our health plan.

It was.

I made an appointment.

You can see my initial reaction to my acupuncture treatment, as well as the story of my knee injury by CLICKING HERE.

The pain levels and weakness for my knee went down immediately. The pain levels for the migraine have gradually decreased since I began treatment in mid-June. My practitioner, Vivian Yuan, works in partnership with her husband, Dr. Tem, an herbalist. I've been given two different types of Chinese herbal pills. The first was to 'dry up my damp'. The second focused particularly on my head pain. I've had two treatments with the second one and have improved significantly.

Last week, however, Hurricane Bill approached. I was in far more pain when I came to the appointment than she'd see me in before. After she had placed all the needles, she asked, "You okay?" I nodded and she left me to 'cook', as I think of it.

After I was done and she'd removed the needles, she asked if I was willing to try something different. Of course I said yes. If she thinks I would benefit from something, I'm there, baby.

She came back with a long rock with grip grooves in it. She said it was for a massage. I sat on a stool and she worked on my neck, back and shoulders with the stone. It felt great. The right side of my neck was sore because of the migraine, but otherwise it was marvey.

She told me I would have red marks for a few days. I headed home and then saw what she meant by red marks.


















Totally freaky.

First of all, these red spots didn't hurt in the least. Not to touch them, nor deep down in the tissue. The next day, my back was a bit tender if I swivelled. But that went away by the third day. Today, six days later, there are no marks at all.

What she'd done is called Gua Sha.

It's a form of Bodywork Therapy that has been practised in China for nearly 4000 years. It focuses on realigning Qi or chi energy within the body.

What's so amazing to me is the fact that she rubbed all over my neck, shoulders and back - yet the red marks traced a line along my spine and across my cervical vertebrae.

And what are the effects of my first Gua Sha treatment?

...well...

There's another big storm coming up along the eastern seaboard toward Nova Scotia this weekend. Tropical Storm Danny. I first heard about it on the news in the middle of the week.

I stared at the TV screen in confusion. Whenever a storm system appears on the weather report, I'm already feeling it. But this was actual news to me.

Today, my coworker mentioned that the storm had changed trajectory. I figured that meant it was veering away from us, because I had so few pain signals about it. No - it's heading directly for us.

Ha! Ha!

Really?

I can't tell.

Nikki says My mom's frozen shoulder got cured through the same treatment and that massage is good too!

Susan Helene Gottfried says SWEET. I did acupuncture after #2 was born. It really helped.

Heather says Happy to hear you are no longer a Doppler radar.