Finding An Alternative Cure

For the first 6 years we were married, we were meticulous about using contraception because we were afraid we would get pregnant. Ha Ha Ha! Yeah right.....A few months before I hit 35, my biological clock began to tick very loudly. I went to see my gynae for a check-up before trying to conceive. I clearly remembered him telling me that I was almost 35 and that my time was almost up! Oh! How encouraging! From the viewpoint of western medicine, that's the age when a woman's fertility starts to head downhill - without any brakes! He told us to try for 6 months and see how we go. Six months went by. Nothing. Then the months turned into years. Deep down inside, I knew that my endo was a factor in our failure to conceive, but I never accepted the idea that I was infertile. That to me was an ugly word that meant impossibility. I didn't believe I was infertile because I was still having my periods regularly, painful as they were. My body was still preparing a home for a baby every month! Heck! I often joked to myself that a baby had better be worth all that suffering. But I knew the doctors couldn't fix my endometriosis, and therefore my "infertility". I was at a loss.

So one day, I decided to go the bookstore to read up more about getting pregnant. It wasn't like a military precision-planned, goal-oriented mission, but rather more like a "Hmm... I'm bored. Let's just snoop around the pregnancy books and see what it's all about" kind of a thing. I headed to the pregnancy section and there at my eye-level, the first book I saw was about - Infertility! It was called "The Infertility Cure - the ancient chinese wellness program for getting pregnant and having healthy babies" by Randine Lewis. Why they put infertility books together with pregnancy and baby books is beyond me - A tad insensitive if you ask me! Anyway, "infertility" and "cure" and "healthy babies" all in the same sentence? I was hooked! And it had a whole section dedicated to endometriosis! That book changed my life! That book is the reason why I am seeking treatment in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) today.

Having been pro-western medicine for all of my life, understanding and appreciating TCM was very difficult for me because chinese concepts like "wind", "heatiness", "stagnation", "ying & yang","pressure points" and "qi" were so abstract, intangible and unquantifiable. I preferred scientific explanations in terms of chemical/biological analysis. But what the author did for me was to bridge the gap between western and chinese medicine and explained TCM in scientific terms that made sense to me. And she was able to do that because she had been trained in both western and eastern medicine. And I liked the fact that it was her own infertility that spurred her onto TCM when she herself found western medicine lacking in areas of infertility. She came from a place of empathy, compassion and determination.

TCM, as explained by her, made a lot of sense to me. TCM treats your body as an ecosystem, and addresses the imbalances that are the root cause of our fertility problems. Its holistic approach makes sure that everything in our body functions as it should so that our conceptions and pregnancies have everything in place for them to be successful. To illustrate this point, take a woman who is not ovulating as an example. A typical treatment in western medicine would be to administer clomid, which chemically forces her to release eggs, usually many at one time, with unfortunately, some possible undesirable side effects. It treats symptoms but does not resolve her hormonal issues that caused annovulation in the first place. TCM however will go to the root of the problem and resolve why she wasn't ovulating in the first place so she could ovulate naturally. TCM infact sounded more logical, and much safer. The treatments usually involved natural herbs, not synthetic man-made chemicals. The more I read her book, the more I liked the TCM approach to resolving infertility. And best of all, it seemed that infertility in all its forms were treatable. WOW! It was like the dark clouds had parted and a ray of hope had shone down directly onto me! From then on, I knew that TCM was the path for me. I finally found a reason to be hopeful and I was determined to beat my endo and infertility, and have a baby - naturally.

A Diversion

I used to be sceptical about Oriental Medicine. Needles, herbal medicine and invisible Qi sounded so hocus pocus and unscientific to me. That was until I was almost blown over by the power of the Qi, demonstrated on me, by a Qi Gong Master. It made me a believer! I had gone to his class about self-healing through Qi Gong because of the many cases of cancers in my immediate and extended families. When you learn that conventional western medicine cannot cure cancer, you look for alternatives.

In our first lesson, The Qi Gong Master made it a point to prove to us sceptics that Qi really existed and what it could do. He called me up together with 2 other people to stand in a single file, one infront of the other facing the wall, with our backs to the rest of the class. He called up a 4th volunteer and gave him a piece of paper which had been "zapped" with the Master's Qi. Not knowing what was happening behind us, we just stood and waited. Suddenly, I almost fell backwards. I felt an overwhelming sensation of something pulling me backwards and then pushing me forward. All of us 3 in line were swaying back and forth in tandem with each other. We could hear the whole class crack up. It was only after the "trick" was over that we found out we had been played! The 4th volunteer had stood behind us, holding the paper out infront of him. And as bizarre as it sounds, when he pulled the paper back, he pulled all three of us backwards too! And when he pushed the paper forward, we all fell forwards. I swear, there wasn't a gust of wind anywhere near us! We had absolutely no control of our bodies and were moving like puppets. That was the power of the Qi, surging through our bodies - invisible, but extremely real and effective. That blew me away and it opened my eyes to a whole new world of medicine, the chinese way.

As I attended more classes and practised the Qi Gong exercises, I learned to harness and feel the Qi, which is a natural energy within us. By then I had been converted to a firm believer in the existence of Qi. I had learned to tap into it and guide the Qi to search wherever my body needed healing. My body would automatically move in response to the Qi, swaying or jerking involuntarily wherever the Qi is working. It's astonishing to experience this energy controlling my body. Qi is something you have to feel to believe because you can't see it. The more I practised the more convinced it was there. When I generate enough Qi in my hands, I would always feel a resistance whenever I try to clasp my hands together. It's like an invisible ball of energy in between my hands. Have you ever tried to force two magnets of the same polarity together and feel it repel each other? It feels EXACTLY like that! What you can't see doesn't mean it's not there! It is just amazing to me that we are actually equipped with all this energy and power within us to heal ourselves. Qi Gong has won me over because of its safe, all natural and non-invasive approach to health and healing. It's just you, your mind, your body and your breathing.

So the BIG question you're probably asking - Why haven't I healed myself from endo? Idiotically - I am just too darn lazy! I wish I had the discipline because it requires daily practice, for an hour each time to be effective. It requires you to clear your mind, and focus on breathing and meditation, which, for a whole hour seems like an eternity of boredom. If I have to suffer for health, running on a treadmill with music blasting into my ears while watching TV is more my kind of thing! The MTV generation like me are used to sensory overload and quick gratification. We prefer to pop a pill and have others do the healing for us, at a predetermined schedule that we can follow mindlessly. I believe Qi Gong works, and I am glad I have the knowledge and skills to fall back on. But I don't have the patience. Yet this experience has turned me around and put me on a different path. Western Medicine offered me no cure and little hope, but with one door shut, another opened for me. I knew there was something worthwhile in Oriental Medicine, which had been around for thousands of years longer than Western Medicine. And so my search for a treatment continues...