Bad Luck Comes In Threes?

Lately, my life has been hit by a wave of bad luck. As I laid down today like a pin cushion, waiting for needles to be stuck in, I showed my TCM doc how I was starting to look like a Dalmation. I was having dark spots on my abdomen as a result of bruising caused by the acupuncture needles.

He laughed, having understood the ridiculous hardships that have befallen on me the past week, and told me that bad luck usually comes in threes. So let's do a Bad Luck Tally, shall we?

Bad Luck No.1 -

Cut hand with broken glass - CHECK!

My hand got cut bad when I broke the glass pot I was washing, requiring stitches at the hospital.

Bad Luck No.2 -
Chipped tooth and broke filling while eating cereal - CHECK!

How bad can my luck get? And over a frackin' piece of cereal too! Beware all you eating Tesco's Fruit & Nut cereal. Their wheat flakes are hard as granite! For me, that meant going to the dentist to have some lovely excavation and drilling done on my tooth! A joyous occasion, this is not!

Bad Luck No.3 -

Getting all bruised up from acupuncture needles - CHECK!

A little bruising from acupuncture once in a while is not uncommon, as the needle will likely hit one of the body's many capillaries occasionally. Unlike most people, I bruise easily, but TWO bruises in a week? This is how sexy my abdomen looks, that is if Dalmation happens to be the hottest animal print now...

My TCM doc tried to cheer me up saying that all this bad luck meant that bad karma had been cleared away, and that something good was coming around the corner for me. I certainly hope it's a baby! I wonder if good luck comes in threes too? My husband joked that it might be triplets. Har Har! Fuhneeeeeee! Like I am that fertile!

I've completed all three of 'em bad lucks now! Can I please have some good luck now?

Don't you think it's weird how chaos and bad luck catches up with you like a tsunami after a period of calm? At least that seems to be the way my life plays out all the time! Does it ever happen to you that way?

Waiting...

Ooooh! I am so busting to go to the toilet but I have to wait another hour. I am desperately trying to fulfill the 4-hour recommended wait before peeing on the ovulation predictor kit. So hopefully writing here will take my mind off any fantasies about peeing!

And here's the latest update about my little skin - it's still alive! Woohoo!

If only I could describe in words the anxiety I felt as the doctor was peeling away the bandages... It's crazy trying to anticipate what I would see under there. Is it grey? Is it black? Is it dead? Will we have to snip it away? Please be alive, puhleeeeeze!

But as the wound was slowly revealed, I saw purplish and red blotches! According to the doctor, it's good news! Overall it looked red, and the blood supply is getting through. The skin is still hanging in there, literally too! The purple blotches were blood clots, but he said that would slowly be reabsorbed into the body. There were some watery blisters too, which he had to pop with a needle. It was so strange because I didn't feel a thing--there was no sensation there at all. But he said I wasn't out of the woods yet. It could turn necrotic--that's the medical fancy schmancy way of simply saying - dead! And even worse, the possibility of an infection, which would kill all my chances of keeping my skin. So he slapped on the antiseptic cream and bandaged me up. The other cut is doing really well though so there is no concern there.

Maybe eating all that special wound-healing fish soup actually helps with the healing. And perhaps my constant incessant instructive orders to my brain to heal my wound is helping too (if my brain were another person it would probably be very annoyed with me!) I am constantly visualizing the healing in my head- the blood and chi flowing to the skin, healing nicely and getting better (just so my brain gets the picture what it should be doing! No misunderstanding there!)

On the fertility front, it's CD16 today and I should be ovulating anytime soon, usually around CD19. So its POAS time! I think I've amassed some 200 bucks worth of OPKs in my collection for this. Shhh! Don't tell my husband!

And I've diligently gone in today for my electro-acupuncture and moxa, now No.7 for this cycle. I really don't know what my chances are of conceiving this month, with all the stress my body's gone under, including drugs I've been pumping into my body ie, antibiotics, tetanus shot, anesthetic, plus I'm due for some dental work tomorrow. More stress. Drilling! Aaaargh! My TCM doc said my heat level fell a little from yesterday (it amazes me how he is able to keep track or quantify something so intangible and subjective). I feel my odds are probably lower, so that sucks!

There's nothing much else I can do now. So I'm waiting to pee, waiting for my skin to heal, waiting for me to ovulate, waiting to get pregnant. Sigh! Don't you sometimes feel that you spend most of your life just w..a...i....t....i......n........g?

A Day In The Life of Zengirl

My heart sank when I went to the hospital today to have my wound checked - the flap of skin on my wrist had turned gray. And the doctor said it didn't look good. It means that the skin had not been getting much blood supply and it's dying. He did say that it was still early and that he would leave it there till my next check-up in 2 day's time. Oh, my dear little skin-please live!

But on the TCM front, I seem to be doing quite well - despite the fact that I had gone out to party last night and stayed out till 5 in the morning! We had a triple date with some friends who had flown in from Sydney. The two couples who have 5 kids between them got somebody to baby sit all their kids, and it was going to be an all-adults wild night out, which was so rare! Woohoo! My part-Mummy, part-Frankenstein arm was not going to stop me!

We went for a lovely dinner at a Balineses restaurant. I gave in to the temptation of an icy cold non-alcoholic Lemongrass Mojito (YUM!) and I thought I'd counteract that with lamb, which apparently is warming. Maybe it worked. Our Sydney friends wanted to go dancing after, and sadly, we had no idea where to take them. We (the other 2 couples) have not gone clubbing like for at least a decade! How sad is that? They asked me when was the last time we went dancing---"Ummm....On my wedding day 10 years ago???" Tragic! Well, we did find our way to a strip where all the "happening" clubs were and after sussing them all out, we found one with music that we liked. Dancing. Pool. More cold drinks (eeek!). Chit-chatting (or more like shouting across the deafening music. Ringing ears after. We stayed till they closed (is that cool?) and adjourned for supper at a 24-hour place and ate and talked some more till the crack of dawn! It was so much fun! It was an incredible and one rare night for us late thirty/early forty somethings!

And SO! What was my TCM doc gonna say about last night? Surprisingly, my heat levels have gone back up and are staying there despite the cold drinks and the trauma my hand's gone through. He wasn't too happy about the cold drinks though...

So I had Moxa No.6 today. He's giving me a break tomorrow though. Yay! I've been spending so much time at his clinic-I'm there everyday. It's kinda interesting hanging out there though, seeing all sorts of patients come through. Today they got a call informing them that a famous celebrity was coming in . So all of us at the clinic were gossiping and guessing who it could be. Within minutes, a pretty young woman walked in with her father. Apparently it's a famous actress and VJ. I don't know who she was, so it was kinda anti-climatic. Oh well!

Anyway, back to my unglamorous life, I'm doing all I can now to help my wounds heal well. My TCM doc recommended juicing some aloe vera with red apples (with a bit of ginger to counteract its cooling properties), and having that once a day. And also making a soup from a special type of fish called the snakehead or Channa Striatus, which supposedly has anti microbial, anti inflammatory and wound healing properties. I had no idea where to get any of these ingredients except the apples, so it was speed-dial Mom 911 time! Amazingly, she managed to get some aloe vera from her neighbor's garden and find the fish too! My mum's so great! She comes through for me every time!

So that's pretty much a day in the life of me. Snore, snore! I wonder who reads this stuff???

Shit Happens!

Here I go again! Accident-proned me has managed to land myself in the ER for gashing my hand open in two places today.

Be Warned: This post is not for the faint of heart! Stay away if you can't deal with descriptions or photos that contain blood!

I was washing my pyrex pot (the one I was going to boil my herbs in) when it slipped onto the granite edge of the sink and cracked open, cutting my right hand open instantly. Before I felt any pain, blood was gushing out from my palm. There was a cut 1 inch long and it looked like a quarter inch deep. Then I saw a second bleed 2 inches below my wrist. The wound looked odd - it was then that I realized a piece of my skin was hanging by a thread and the gash was also bleeding profusely. That was when a little panic started to set in.

Luckily my husband was nearby and rushed for the first aid kit. (No soy sauce this time-for those who knew what happened last time!) Having lived in earthquake country (California) before, his First Aid kit was well equipped with sterile gauze, bandages and useful stuff for klutzes like me! He bandaged me up and we headed to the Emergency Room at the hospital near my home.

The ER was full of people, but the doctor managed to see me within 20 minutes. He checked for my motor function-I was able to move my fingers. Thank god no tendon was cut - that would require more complicated surgery to reconnect it. Only a little of the muscle and capillary vessels were cut.

As for my skin - he gave me 2 choices:

1) Reattach it - if the blood vessels are not able to nourish and heal the wound, it has a chance of dying and turning black, which would then lead to a big scar

2) Plastic surgery where they would graft skin from somewhere on my body to replace the dead skin, if I am worried about scarring

Cut my skin from some beautiful virgin part of my body? No thanks! I am not that vain! So I went for option 1 and hope for the best!

To help with the pain, he gave me local anesthetic, which HURT LIKE HELL! Although my cuts were quite bad, I hadn't felt much pain, which was rather surprising- until he jabbed EIGHT times around my wounds with the syringe! I was grimacing in so much pain! DH who saw everything said my hand was swelling up like a balloon where he was pumping the anesthesia! Within seconds, the numbness kicked in and he proceeded to wash my wound with savlon antiseptic, hydrogen peroxide and then saline solution. Well, thank god for the anesthetic because I don't think I could have handled the stitching and stretching very well. According to DH the doctor managed to stretch the loose skin and sew it into a nice fit back to where it should've been. It was shrunken and curled before. Eewww! Gross right? He gave me a tetanus shot plus anti-biotics and pain killers. I will have to go back every second day to check on the skin and to re-dress the wound. Stitches should be out in a week's time.

Here are the gory pictures. Sorry they're not very good quality. They were taken with a cellphone camera.

Here are my raw wounds after the home bandages were removed, before being treated:

Here's the doctor stitching my palm:

.......And here's the doctor stitching my flappy skin back:

As the local anesthetic is beginning to wear out now, I am starting to feel the pain. I've been told not to use my wounded hand nor get it wet for now. So I am currently living the life of a one-armed lefty - a precarious task for a righty! I am wondering how I'm gonna get through everyday stuff like having a shower or wiping my ass!!!! I am having great difficulty typing all this with one hand, but I seem to be managing - one letter slowly at a time!

As if this wasn't enough of a set back, my endo ass has begun to throb a bit - just when I thought I was getting better! My TCM doc asked "What happened" when he saw my heat level had dropped. Perhaps I had enough heat to fight off ass-throb day on CD10, but I didn't have enough heat reserves to last me through CD11, which had been a cool overcast and rainy day. Either that or ass-throb day was late by a day! Either way, I think my heat is all spent!

Despite all this crap that has happened to me, I still feel blessed and lucky - that I had not done even more major damage to my hand and that it was only one hand, and that the glass had not slashed the main artery on my wrist (it was so close) which could have led to death. Sure my hand will not look pretty anymore, and my life will be very inconvenient for a while, but all things considered, I think I was quite lucky today!

TCM Works For Endometriosis!

I nearly forgot that today was Ass-Throb Day!

Today, CD10, is the day that my endo habitually and passionately tortures my butt by making it throb like hell - more specifically, my whole rectum tract. But today my ass didn't feel anything like a nuclear reactor waiting to explode. Infact it was rather zen in there! Which made me forget all about Ass-Throb Day!

This could only mean that my endo is losing its clutch on me and that I am truly getting better!

After months and months of acupuncture, herbal medicine and several sessions of moxa, I can finally draw the conclusion that Traditional Chinese Medicine is working for endometriosis. My symptoms of pain have decreased significantly and my periods are getting more normal. All you endo gals out there, pay attention! There is hope in TCM!

My endo has begun to heal without me taking a single dose of Lupron, birth control pill, or going under the knife. The prognosis for TCM as a cure for endo has always fundamentally sounded better to me than Western Medicine. What Western Medicine offered was ridiculous. Having no solution, nor any idea what causes it, it experiments by offering victims drugs to stop your body from functioning normally. They butcher you up, cutting parts of your body away and then cross their fingers, and hope that the endo won't come back, even though they know it likely will. These surgeries expose you to the risk of death, eg: from having a bad reaction to anesthesia, or from overdose due to a miscalculation of dosage, to the possibility of infection. In many cases, the pain continues and repeated surgeries are even normal. And for women desperately trying for a child, all the drugs and multiple surgeries just leave your body even more hostile to pregnancy. And to counter the increased infertility, they put you on more drugs and hormones and force the conception to happen outside the body (IVF), and put it back into your body knowing that your body hasn't been fixed in the first place. Yet women subject themselves to all this craziness and risk because Western Medicine tells them that there is no cure and that there is no other way.

Well, there is it seems! TCM is certainly uncommon in the western world, but it has been used to treat the largest nation in the world for thousands of years. Western Medicine is only now slowly discovering the wonders and knowledge of this ancient form of medicine. But specifically in endometriosis, I have personally seen how effective it is for me. So given time, I believe it really works.

And how does TCM work for endometriosis? I had to ask my TCM doc again today. I know that it reduces the symptoms, but with all their medical terms like yin, yang, wind, heatiness, dampness, deficiency, and stasis, it's really hard for me to understand how it works. I mean, it's hardly scientific! After his explanation, this is my conclusion: Endometriosis is a condition caused by "stagnant" blood or poor circulation in the body. Acupuncture and herbs work by dissolving these stagnant blood and improving its circulation. The adhesions will disappear because the TCM treatment works by regenerating the cells in your body, like in stem cells, repairing dead or damaged cells of the scar tissue (adhesions). At least this is how my medically primitive mind understands it. I don't really care how it works exactly, as long as it works and I am not experiencing any bad side effects from it.

How my body is behaving today is another testament to its healing effects. It's raining and chilly outside but my usually cold body is unaffected. After all, it is Ass-Throb Day! I used to think that my ass is able to predict rain, as it always rains when my ass pulsates with pain. I believed they were related. I have developed a highly sophisticated formula for this event:

Endo + Rain = Ass Pain or

Endo + Ass Pain = Rain

Well, there's no ass pain, so something else is missing from the formula and it's definitely not the rain. By logical deduction, it appears to be the endo. And that's my highly scientific conclusion.

With the results I am getting I will definitely stay on the path of TCM now. My TCM doc is currently prescribing intensive moxa for me. (I just want to clarify to anyone reading this out there that moxa is not a fix-all method for all conditions. It is appropriate for people who are suffering from cold conditions like me) I am very focused on healing my endo right now because I believe that it is affecting my fertility. So once it is resolved, I truly believe I should be able to conceive naturally. This notion is not too far-fetched because I conceived once before with the help of TCM.

I had my 2nd moxibustion session for this cycle today. It went really well, although the guessing-the-right-twin didn't go so well for me! I could've sworn that after having had a long look at the twin who did the moxa for me yesterday, I would've been able to distinguish the two. I thought I had the same girl today, but nope-I was wrong - AGAIN! It was the other twin today! So now I have an interesting guessing game to add to the smokin' fun of moxa now! Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Burn, Baby Burn!

I started my first moxa session of the cycle today! Yay! The moxa's been doing wonders for me! Sometimes AF really overstays her welcome, hanging around for up to 10-14 days! But this time, AF's visit lasted only 7 days! My body looks like it's finally finding its balance and behaving as it should. Gosh! Dare I say-I'm actually becoming normal!  

I had hoped to start the moxa earlier but my TCM doc said AF had to be over first. He gave me a break over the weekend and so here I am today, CD9, never been so eager to be torched and smoked before! 

The moxa didn't get off to a good start however. I had 8 needles in my body and only 20 minutes to get each of them heated with the moxa. It took the woman 10 minutes just to do 2 needles! Hello! I'm paying $35 for 20 minutes - get a move on there! She was fumbling around a lot and seemed unsure of what she was doing. That was strange I thought, considering that she did pretty well the last time. I blurted out,

"You did the moxa for me last time right?" 

"No. That was my sister."

HUH? It turns out, she's an identical twin! And both she and her sister worked the same job at the clinic! She was identical in every way, down to the length of the hair and even the sound of her voice! I was flabbergasted! All that time I thought I was speaking to her sister! It was the first time she was administering moxa and it showed! I must say I was pretty anxious the whole session through. But I'm happy to say that I left without a single burn mark on my body! 

My TCM doc's very pleased with my progress. After checking my pulse today, he said that my heat levels were impressively good, considering I just had my period. It had also been good throughout my period. I guess you could say I am no longer a cold-blooded reptilian! He's keen to see me get stronger and better, and told me to come in for moxa everyday for the next 4-5 days. I'm so excited to be doing this for my body, knowing how good it is for me. I just hope the girls doing the stinky moxa for me will be just as happy to see me! 

What I Had For Dinner :-(

I was a really, really bad girl today. I binged on the worst sorts of food that you could ever eat for endometriosis and fertility-- wheat, dairy, caffeine, hormones and cold drinks!

A new mall had opened up in our neighborhood and we succumbed to the lure of TGIF, which seemed to be so happening tonight. It was packed and every table seemed to be celebrating someone's birthday.

So here's my menu of poison for the night:

APPETIZER

Fried Mac & Cheese:

Wheat and dairy galore! Great for enhancing inflammation already caused by endometriosis!

MAIN

Chicken & Shrimp Pasta in Creamy Cajun Sauce:

More wheat and dairy galore! My Endo-induced inflammation is gonna have a party!

Non-organic chicken! A shot of yummy hormones to tip my already crazy hormones off the charts

DRINKS

3 cups of cold Pepsi:

Liquid Caffeine! Wonderful for killing fertility! It's thirst-quenching coolness is wonderful for creating blood stasis, period pain and endo. Just what I need!

Now my stomach feels like there's a tornado blowing in there! I am not looking forward to what my TCM doc has to say about me tomorrow... This is pure self-sabotage. And I am sure I will pay for it dearly! But I feel so happyyyyyyyy!

Do you ever give yourself a break and succumb to the dark side occasionally...especially when it comes to food?

(Pic compliments of Zoey when he was a kitten)