Let's Pretend This Never Happened (35 page)

“Well, it can’t hurt,” I said. “You almost never see a fish with bad ankles. Or . . . you know . . . limping.”

“I think someone just sold you a bill of goods. Didn’t they used to sell fish oil back in the eighteen hundreds to suckers?”

“No,”
I answered. “That was
snake
oil. Although I have always wondered how you get oil from a snake. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through
for something that didn’t work anyway. Imagine how many people were getting bitten each day trying to oil snakes.”

“What are you talking about? You don’t
oil
snakes.”

“Yeah, you do. I’m pretty sure ‘oil’ is a verb in this case. You get cow milk by milking a cow, so you get snake oil by oiling a snake. This is all basic commonsense stuff.”

This was when Victor asked exactly what sort of herbal supplements I was taking, and insisted that I stop taking the ones that weren’t written in English or came in baggies from questionable health stores. He was right, but I was desperate, and it was that fit of desperation that led me to agree to let Victor take me to an acupuncturist.

I’d never gone to an acupuncturist before, but I’d heard enough about them to think that I knew what I was getting myself into. But it turns out that all the people who told me that acupuncture is awesome and doesn’t hurt at all
are complete fucking liars.
Or maybe my acupuncturist is just bad, or just really hates white people. Hard to tell.

Regardless, I think it behooves the world for me to tell you what really happens at an acupuncturist so that you won’t go in as blindly as I did:

1.
The nurse will tell you to take off everything but your underwear. So maybe you should wear underwear. And maybe they should
tell you that
when you make the appointment.

2.
Special note to people bringing their small children: What the hell is wrong with you? The “dollhouse” on the waiting room floor isn’t a dollhouse. It’s a shrine. If you let your son’s G.I. Joe “conquer it and claim it in the name of the United States,” you are probably going to go to hell. Also, maybe you shouldn’t piss off the guy who’s about to stab needles into you. Just a suggestion, lady.

3.
The acupuncturist will come in and you’ll try to explain what hurts, and then he’ll shake his head, because he doesn’t speak English. He’ll call in his nurse and you’ll explain about where your rheumatism is, and how long it’s hurt, and what drugs you’re on, and she’ll look at the doctor and yell, “SHE SAYS SHE HURT,” and then walk out of the room. Then the doctor will give you a look like “Why are you wasting my time?
Of course you hurt
. Why would perfectly normal people come to have needles stuck in them?” Then he’ll make you lie back on the table and start jabbing needles into you.

4.
The needles are small and won’t hurt at all. In fact, they’ll feel good. Ha, ha! Just kidding. They feel like needles.
Because they are.

5.
The doctor will stick one needle into your ear and it will start bleeding. You will be bleeding from your ear. I can’t even stress this enough. BLEEDING FROM THE EAR. Then he’ll open an English book about acupuncture and make you read a paragraph about how the ear is the shape of an upside-down fetus and so it’s good to stick needles in it. I desperately hope that paragraph has lost something in translation, because I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to stab needles in fetuses. I make a mental note to ask my gynecologist. Then I make a mental note not to, because even if I can manage to describe this properly, asking my gynecologist whether it’s okay to stick needles in fetuses is just going to make the next Pap smear more awkward.

6.
Forty-four needles later. Several of them are bleeding. The other ones actually start to feel a little tingly. The doctor will leave and you’ll try to look down at yourself, but you can’t because it’s making the needles in your neck stick farther into you. At this point you will pass out from shock.
Then the acupuncturist will come back in and smugly claim you fell asleep from all the chi. I agree, if
chi
is Chinese for “massive blood loss.”

7.
The forty-four needles all come out. You start to leave and the doctor laughs and tells you he’s just begun, and that now he has to do “your butt side.” Then you say, “My butt side?” and he’s all, “No. Your butt side.” Then the nurse yells, “YOUR BACKSIDE,” from out in the hall, and he’s all, “Yes. Your butt side.” Awesome.

8.
Forty-two more needles. All in my butt side. Two hurt like hell and are bleeding a lot. You start to suspect that the acupuncturist is just mad at you. You try to explain that you were not with the woman in the lobby who let her kid’s action figures commandeer his shrine. He totally does not believe you.

9.
Forty-two needles all come out. Then he pours some sort of liquid on you that I’ve decided to call “stink juice.” And he kneads it into your pores, so that you smell like a dirty old sock that someone has been storing patchouli and VapoRub in.

10.
Then you hear the sound of a lighter, and you suspect that you’re about to get your hair set on fire, but then the acupuncturist explains that he’s going to do a little “cupping,” which I think was what my first boyfriend referred to as second base. It sounded totally inappropriate, and I started to protest, but turns out it’s just when a doctor sets fire to the alcohol in a small jar and then places it over the skin so it acts as a vacuum and gives you an enormous hickey. Which, now that I think about it, still sounds kind of inappropriate.

11.
Then the acupuncturist will open up a piece of tissue paper filled with a white powder, and will hand it to you, and look at you in expectation. And you’ll be like, “Do you want me to . . .
Do I snort this?
” And then he’ll shake his head at your idiocy and make you open your mouth so he can pour what looks like the stuff from the inside of a Ped Egg into your mouth. Then he’ll laugh at your look of horror, and hand you water and make you keep drinking and swishing it in your mouth until it’s all gone. Then he’ll say, “Ginseng tea for detox,” and you’ll be all, “
That’s not how you make tea,
” and he’ll smile and walk out while you wonder why you just allowed a strange Chinese man to feed you mystery powder wrapped in tissue paper
when he doesn’t even know how tea works
. You can just stop wondering now, because there is no fucking good answer to this question.

12.
The acupuncturist will leave and you’ll get dressed, feeling mildly assaulted and vaguely confused, and then you’ll realize that you can actually put on your shirt for the first time all week without screaming in pain. And then you go and make another appointment for next week. Except your husband will vow to never drive you again because he claims that now his car smells like “old dirty hippie.”

But here’s the deal: Between the herbs, and oil, and acupuncture, and the cancer drugs, and all of the rest of it, you find yourself occasionally having pain-free days. Days that you learn to appreciate simply because no one stuck eighty-six needles in you that morning. Days when you have an impromptu picnic on the lawn because you can bend your knees that day. Days when studies are released showing that booze helps stave off arthritis attacks. Those are the golden days.

And even on days when I’m bedridden and can’t move, I’m grateful
to have my daughter curl up near me and watch old
Little House on the Prairie
episodes. I try to be appreciative of what I have instead of bitter about what I’ve lost. I try to accept this disease with grace, and patiently wait for the day when they find a cure. And for when I get my monkey butler.
³

1.
Or the Spanish Inquisition.

2.
Actual warning: “Some side effects may cause death. You should only take this drug to treat life-threatening cancer, or certain other conditions that are very severe and that cannot be treated with other medications.”

3.
Also, from now on, all the handicapped parking spots really do belong to people in wheelchairs and not just to people who
feel
like they’re disabled because they have really bad cramps that day. And also, if you’re in a wheelchair you get frontsies in line at the liquor store from now on. And you get free sexy shoes. We need to get this all passed in Congress
before I’m disabled because then it’ll look like I’m just doing it for me
because that’s what Jesus would do.

It Wasn’t Even My Crack

Not long after I quit my job to become a writer, Victor quit his to be an executive at a medical software company. This was awesome, except for the fact that now both of us worked at home and constantly wanted to murder each other. I took a lot of freelance writing jobs to pay the bills, including one where I was paid to review bad porn. Victor would walk around the house in his Britney Spearsesque hands-free headset, making business deals and screaming things like “BUY! SELL! WE NEED MORE ELEPHANTS ON THIS PROJECT!” Or something like that. Honestly, I wasn’t really listening. I just know that nothing is more distracting than a man wandering aimlessly through your home while yelling to himself about spreadsheets and investment returns while you’re trying to write a satirical article about the eternal cultural relevancy of
Edward Penishands
.

Inevitably Victor would wander blindly into my office as he walked around the house, looking as if he were screaming about project management to the confused cats hiding under my desk. I’d glare at him, but he would never get the hint, so instead I’d pull up a work-related porn clip from my computer, skip to the money shot, and turn the volume to eleven. Victor would look at me in horrified panic as he’d cover his mouthpiece and run from my office, desperately hitting mute and whisper-screaming
to me about being on an important conference call. Then he’d ask—in his professional telephone voice—whether everyone was all right, as it sounded like someone was hurt, and I had to hand it to him, because that was a pretty good recovery. Then he’d come back and explain the importance of silence on his serious conference call, and I would stress the importance of staying in his own damn office. Then he’d stress the importance of my “doing some real work instead of just watching porn at three in the afternoon,” and I’d stress that I was not “enjoying” the porn and that I was merely “reviewing” it. FOR RESEARCH. Considering that we spent a majority of our workday in pajamas while porn played in the background, there was a surprising amount of stress in that workplace.

Eventually Victor would stalk off, muttering about ethics and courtesy, and I’d scream down the hall, “THIS IS MY JOB, ASSHOLE. STOP HASSLING ME OR I WILL STAB YOU IN THE EYE,” and then he’d put his call on mute again and threaten to poison my coffee. It was a lot like working in a regular office, except that there were cats there, and also you got to say out loud exactly what you would have just said in your head if you worked in an office that had cubicles and security guards.

Before, when we both worked out of the house, we used to come home and bond by complaining about the moronic people in our respective offices who were obviously trying to destroy us, but now we couldn’t even have that conversation, because, as we were the only ones there, it was perfectly obvious that the only moronic coworkers now trying to destroy us actually
were us.
After many months of near stabbings, we finally agreed that we needed a house where our offices were farther apart, and we realized that there was nothing tying us to Houston any longer. We were free to move anywhere we wanted. Victor suggested Puerto Rico, but when I looked in my heart I knew where I wanted to move, and no one was more shocked about it than myself, because it went against everything I’d promised myself years earlier when I had Hailey.

When Hailey was born my first thought was that I needed a drink and that hospitals should have bars in them. My second was to assure myself
that Hailey would have an
entirely different childhood
than I had had. I looked at her little face, and I promised to never throw large, dead wild animals on the kitchen table, or set cougars loose in the house. Victor seemed confused but agreed, as he assumed that the drugs were still in my system. They were, but it didn’t change the fact that I was determined that Hailey’d have a life of ballet lessons and museums, and would never wander into the backyard to look at the caged bobcats, only to find a pet duck whose beak had been eaten off by a wild raccoon.

After Hailey was born, Victor and I had settled into life in the suburbs just out of Houston, and I struggled in vain to fit in. Hailey was almost four now, and she was sheltered, and protected, and slightly pale from lack of sun in her small private school, where she was learning music and dance and how to be exactly like everyone else. We enrolled her in gymnastics, but all the other preschoolers seemed to be practicing for the Olympics, and more than one mom mentioned putting their toddlers on diets, which was just fucking crazy. In the end, we decided to just quit and let her jump on the couch. Still, she was on the perfect path to fitting in beautifully in a normal, pretty life,
and it scared the shit out of me.
Both because I wasn’t sure I was actually doing her any favors by protecting her from a life that I found I actually missed, and also because I had to admit that I found myself feeling a little sorry for Hailey. For not being able to go explore the canals, or feed deer in the yard, or have memories of playing with baby raccoons in the house. We had our cats, and she loved our sweet pug, Barnaby Jones Pickles, who was awesome (who was as close to Laura Ingalls’s brindle bulldog as we would ever get), but he was no bathtub full of raccoons, and I suspect even he would have agreed with that.