Meet the Good Witch: An Origin Story
How a baseball bat to the head led me to become an acupuncturist
and what I learned about unpredictable forces along the way
How does a person come to grow up to be an acupuncturist?
Let me tell you a wandering tale of bad childhood decisions, head trauma, and the unexpected way in which life leads you where you’re meant to be.
When I was 12 years old my parents divorced and my mom went back to work. As summer came around, it became clear that my siblings and I were not to be trusted day after day in the house by ourselves, and that a bit more structure was needed to get us out of the house and, importantly, out of trouble.
And so it was decided that I would join the softball team. Never having played a sport before in my life, and moreover having no real interest in doing so, I sucked. There’s just no other way to say it. I sucked so bad that my childhood best friend and my older brother, both experienced sport-ball players, decided to help.
The house we grew up in might have had an enormous backyard, but it also had a decent sized two car garage which, during the unsupervised times which my mother was trying to minimize, was free of cars and available for our trouble making purposes. On this beautiful sunny early summer day, it would serve as our makeshift baseball field. My brother sat backwards, legs dangling over the back of the riding lawn mower parked along the wall shared with the house just inside the opened garage door, while my friend and I were deeper in the bowels of the garage. She was batting and I was playing the most (un)likely position for someone as green and terrible at sport as myself to be started in – catcher.
The details of the scene beyond this are a bit fuzzy as I clearly wasn’t paying much attention, but I know that my brother threw the ball, she swung, and *thunk* hit me full swing just above my eye on the left hand side. I remember putting my head to my forehead and feeling it swell up like the baseball was now somehow growing beneath my flesh. While I didn’t lose consciousness, this is the last thing I remember until I was sitting at the hospital with my mom.
The doctor said that I might have a concussion but there was nothing to be done, go home and rest, I would be fine.
I wouldn’t let anyone photograph me for weeks after the accident, so these photos were taken long after the worst had passed.
Needless to say, my friend felt terrible.
Neither of us knew at the time that I would later accidentally step on her pet gerbil and kill it, thereby settling our “unthinkable horrors” score to some degree, so she attempted to do so by by bringing me a giant paper grocery bag full of candy. And so, for the first few days after I absolutely certainly without a doubt suffered a fairly severe traumatic brain injury, we sat in the dark basement of my childhood home playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis and eating candy. Hey, it was the 90’s.
You might not know that when a person suffers a severe blow to the head, in time gravity will pull the blood down and the bruising will reach towards the earth. Oh, and how. I had two of the blackest eyes you have ever seen, and the sclera of both of my eyes were bright blood red. Ya’ll it was bad, even my family called me Quasimodo. Still to this day my skull is slightly misshapen on the left hand side.
After the accident I began to suffer absolutely debilitating migraine headaches.
I’m talking furious, crippling, throbbing, blinding, searing monsters behind my right eye that would last for three or four days at a time. I remember that, when asked to describe the headaches to the endless line of specialist I later met with, I would say that it felt as if my brain were trying to fit out my eye socket. Still, when we went back to the doctor we were told it wasn’t possible that the two were related and suggested that I take and Aleve or two to cope with the pain.
Aleve, if you don’t know, is also known as Naproxen, and it’s in a class of drugs called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs which are generally not recommended for long term or frequent use because they can cause troublesome symptoms like, among other things, gastrointestinal damage and bleeding. I’ll come back to that another time though.
Because I had the headaches as often as I didn’t in those days, all I could do was curl up in a ball with a pillow over my head and white knuckle through the hours, popping Aleve with what I have to assume, knowing myself as I do, was absolutely reckless abandon.
The impossible thing when you suffer headaches like this is that other people can’t see them, and somehow the more often you get them and the more severe they are, the less the people around you believe that you have them at all. Every doctor we went to told us the same thing – there was nothing wrong with me. My classmates thought I was a weird loner because middle schoolers are middle schoolers, and truth be told what was happening to me was in fact weird, and it was accurate to say that I struggled to make friends and fit in, and that I was lonely.
I missed a lot of school, but there were many days that I just anguished through.
Some days the school nurse would give me an Aleve and let me lay down for a while, but often I would beg her with tears running down my cheeks to call my mom. Sometimes she would, but the school nurse was only my first obstacle in getting someone to come pick me up, and we both knew it. My mother, who had just recently returned to work after nearly a decade and a half of being home with us, and who was also responsible taking time off to haul me all over the Twin Cities metro area for tests, scans, specialists, and who or whatever else might possibly be able to tell us something, was generally not especially quick to leave work and come save me.
These were tough times for me, and they went on through middle school and into high school. The headaches all but incapacitated me and, meanwhile, my parents divorce was progressively getting messier and messier. A regrettable byproduct of this was that my responsibilities at home were growing, both before and after school. To make matters worse, in spite of these obstacles, I was enrolled in even more odious extracurriculars that I had no interest or will to participate in. Everything felt hard. My social life, academic performance, and above all, my mental health suffered. Maybe I’ll come back to that later on, too.
Something had to give, the way I was living was not sustainable.
As what might be considered our last ditch effort, we decide to go see what we then more or less considered to be a modern day witch doctor, who would perform some sort of quackery that we had heard had helped others in such hopeless situations – a chiropractor. And, it actually kind of worked. At least, it was the first thing that gave me even a glimmer of relief. But, I had to go three times a week and still the headaches persisted, though slightly less frequently and sometimes less severe. The chiropractor had an acupuncturist on staff and at every appointment he would urge me to see her, but my sixteen or seventeen year old self was not at all interested in that. Poked with needles? No thanks, I will disregard your professional medical advice which my family pays you to provide and instead I will continue to endure the fires of hell as I have been doing the last four or five years.
Then one day I found myself in his office with one of the big ones, barely even able to lift my head or open my eyes. After I predictably refused acupuncture, citing my flimsy argument previously mentioned, he shrugged at me in disbelief and said, “Could it possibly be worse than what you feel right now?” And he was dead ass right and his words finally landed, so I agreed.
I’ll honestly never forget it. Hand to God, my headache was gone when I left there that day.
It was astonishing. I continued to go three times a week for a while, then down to two and eventually one, then every two weeks and once a month before the headaches were just… gone. I stopped seeing the acupuncturist and got back to my life.
I didn’t think about her much after that, until few years later when I was working as a delivery girl at pizza shop. A coworker of mine left an invitation to her mother’s graduation ceremony on the desk in the office. The Minnesota College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine at NorthWestern Health Sciences University. Only then did it occur to me that I could be an acupuncturist, too. I suddenly knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.
And so I set my sights on grad school and became an acupuncturist.
One day, years later, when I was working in private practice with my good friends and talented colleagues at Artifex Wellness in Minneapolis, I saw the name of that childhood friend who had hit me with a baseball bat and inadvertently been the catalyst for the entire string of events that had caused me to become an acupuncturist show up on my schedule.
Though we hadn’t spoken in years, we were friends on Facebook and I knew that it was likely she was coming to see me for a fertility issue. Fertility patients have always been especially energizing and meaningful ones to me, but there is also an underlying element of uneasiness with them, especially in my early days in the clinic. I just really wanted to be able to deliver, you know what I mean? I didn’t want to let anyone down, or witness anyone’s heart breaking even more. This feeling was especially present with this particular patient.
For one thing, it was different than other fertility patients I had seen, in that the inability to conceive was not the concern. In fact, my childhood friend had no problem getting pregnant, she had effectively done so three times in recent years, but she had not been able to carry any of the babies to term. She had lost all three at various stages of pregnancy, the most recent and heart wrenching of which had forced her and her partner to live the worst nightmare of all expecting parents. They had been faced with impossible decision to terminate a third term pregnancy after learning that the baby had a fetal abnormality that, if allowed to progress, would render the the child’s life a short and painful one.
In my experience, it’s impossible to eliminate the emotional component of case like this with any patient, but I set it aside as best I could and got to work. Within a short time, she was pregnant again, this time with twins. The excitement, hope, and fear that she experienced throughout the pregnancy were mirrored in me, but I held my feelings close to my heart and focused my energy on devouring any information and resources related to prenatal care that I could get my hands on. There was a felt sense of responsibility, as if I had given her a small piece of the hope that held her and, if something were to happen, an element of her agony would have likewise been at my hands.
As you might have guessed, though, her pregnancy went smoothly, and I’m delighted to share that she and her husband are now parents to two healthy, spirited, and joyful little girls.
This story reminds me that, when allowed enough time, everything in this life will come back around.
There’s no way to predict how we might touch the lives of others, and even a horrible accident might radically alter the course of time and the roads that unravel before us, ultimately leading us exactly where we need to be. The suffering we endure, the decisions and mistakes that we make, and the work that we do all lead us along our path and, if we are lucky, the beginning will come back around again to remind us of where we have been and how far we have come. It will affirm that we are moving in the right direction and fill us with the confidence, inspiration, and motivation that we need to carry on through whatever may come.
