by Jody Berger
Ignoring all the emails that had come before it, her email said she loved me and wanted to see me. My gut response was gratitude. Instinctually, I started crying and ignored the guts of her message: she said she didn’t know me, after forty-three years.
I was so grateful to get word from my mother and so into this heart-opening Mexican adventure that I brought my phone to our next class and read the email out loud. A big, sweet “aw,” came back at me from all sides. Everyone was happy and relieved that my mom had reached out to me. I was too. I was hopeful.
The next morning, I brought my phone into the wireless zone and sent my mom a note saying I was in Mexico with limited access to email. “Call me next week,” I wrote. “I love you too.”
That day, in class, Mitra taught about the sixth chakra, located between the eyebrows and often called the third-eye center. The sixth chakra is associated with compassion, clarity and the inner vision that gives us the ability to discern the truth and see the past, present and future.
After class that morning and the next day, I reconsidered the message from my mom. Surrounded by love and compassion and nurturing motherly energy, I realized I wasn’t ready to go home and wasn’t quite ready to face my mom.
We had a long history in which we’d built a clear pattern. Often when we talked, I felt unheard, misunderstood or dismissed, and she may have felt the same. I know she often felt hurt, like I was purposefully trying to upset her (though I never was). The email exchange about MS was only the most recent (and most upsetting) example of the two of us failing to connect. As I reread her last email, I wanted to believe that we could change in an instant and feared we couldn’t. I didn’t want to relive the past and wondered how our future relationship could be different. I wanted to lock myself into the perfect present where I was sitting: surrounded by love and warm ocean breezes with an invitation to kindness from my mom.
As beautiful as the picture was, it was still temporary; eventually we all had to leave Troncones. Two cabs carted all of us through the dark, lush landscape that eventually gave way to two-lane roads and then four lanes to the airport. And once we had all checked in and cleared the security line, we hugged good-bye and kissed and hugged again. We talked about having a mini-retreat or reunion in California soon. I waved as they boarded the flight to California and I waited alone another twenty minutes before beginning my trip back to Denver.
In Colorado, the air was cold and the sun was strong and my schedule was full. I had lots to do in the two weeks before I was to fly back to Mexico to spend Christmas with Bruce. My mom called, and when I saw those three letters on my iPhone, MOM, I cringed. The last time we communicated had hurt so badly that I was still hesitant to reopen that conversation. I feared I wouldn’t get to say what I wanted and needed to say, that we would hang up feeling unheard, misunderstood or dismissed.
I wasn’t ready to connect live over the phone, so I sent an email. It seemed safer, like an electronic olive branch testing the murky waters between us:
Hi Mom,
I’ve been thinking about you and the email you sent. I do love you and miss you and, at the same time, it’s painful for me when we interact.
A while ago, you wrote that you were overwhelmed with your anger towards me. And that’s true for me too.
A number of big life events—when I got married, when Hugh and I threw a party, when I got divorced, and most recently and most painfully, when I was having health challenges—seemed to go through the same pattern. Each time, I thought I’d feel compassion from you, and instead, I felt your anger. I don’t know why. I do know the amount of anger I feel from you is overwhelming to me.
This last conversation, in May, around my health issues, was the turning point. I really don’t understand your response and your anger at me then and I can’t pretend that didn’t happen. If you want to explain it to me, that’d be good. If not, I understand and I’m going to keep my distance for a while.
Love,
Jody
I hit “Send” and waited.
No response arrived.
It was disappointing. As difficult as our relationship was, my mother wasn’t a bad person; we just disagreed on how to move forward. She wanted to start over as if the past never happened and I couldn’t do that. The past had happened. Through a series of small decisions, made over time, we had built an unhealthy relationship. I’m sure both of us wanted it to be better, to be loving and thoughtful, and yet we couldn’t get there in an instant.
The same was true for my own health. I made a series of small choices over time that resulted in me going over the handlebars, running on adrenaline and eating in a way that, meal by meal, left me low on vitamins B and D and eventually probably resulted in this insistent tingling. Getting to a better place, physically and in my relationship with my mom, would thus have to be a similar campaign—nothing instant but a steady plan, taken choice by choice, day after day. And that’s where I determined to start.
CHAPTER 16
Go Find One
Bruce and I woke to the sound of the ocean and took a long walk on the beach. His family was coming in a few days for Christmas, and on this gorgeous day, we were alone, just the two of us.
We walked side by side, sinking into the sand with the waves crashing to our left, free-associating and talking about this and that, about nothing and everything. With New Year’s looming ahead, I looked back on this year of doctors and didn’t need any special expertise or self-awareness to see how I’d spent my time.
“I’ve been obsessed with my health and as much as I’m sick of going doctor to doctor and listening to all kinds of theories on what’s wrong with me, I also don’t want to fear doctors for the rest of my life,” I said. “Or think the only good ones live in Canada or California, because that can’t be the case.”
Bruce smiled, and we started walking again. When we reached the big rocks at the end of the beach, we turned around and started walking back to where we had started from forty-five minutes earlier. We walked along in silence, each in our own thoughts until I said, “My New Year’s resolution is to find a doctor I trust, not because I may have MS or may not, but because I want a doctor who knows me and is nearby. I want someone who looks at the whole picture.”
“So find one…”
The first week of January, I did. Deepak Chopra’s book, Perfect Health—in which he explains Ayurvedic medicine, one of the world’s oldest healing traditions, which looks at the body, mind and spirit as one integrated whole—had resonated with me. I searched for an Ayurvedic doctor and found Nita Desai, a Boulder physician who runs East West Integrated Health. I called to set up an appointment and started to fill out the extensive paperwork she requested. I answered questions on my diet, my sleep habits, my stress load and how often I “eliminated” excess food—which took me aback, since I’d learned as a kid that no one should ask or talk about that kind of stuff. She asked me to keep a food diary for three days to see what my diet was like and to list any medications, allergies, or past emotional or physical traumas. She also asked for any and all test results, saying that she often saw the test results in a different light and analyzed them differently than other doctors.
On a blue-sky day, I left my home in Denver and started up the road to Boulder. Ten minutes into the twenty-five minute drive, the sky turned bluish gray, and I was glad I’d thrown a jacket in the car. Ten more minutes and the sky grew darker still, and I wished I’d thrown in a hat and gloves too.
Snow was starting to fall when I found her office. I checked in with the receptionist and looked around. The waiting room was barely big enough for four chairs, the water cooler and a small bookshelf. An illuminated rock sat on the floor next to the water cooler and a framed photo of open bags of brightly colored spices hung on one wall.
I looked at the books on the shelf and smiled. She had Perfect Health too.
After a moment, Dr. Desai
came around the corner to take me back to her office. A small woman, no taller than a sixth grader, she had short dark hair and looked to be my age. A taller, younger, dark-haired woman was with her and asked if she could join us.
“Hi, I’m Victoria, a fourth-year medical student. Would you mind if I observe?”
“Of course not.”
Inside her office, Dr. Desai flipped through my records in the standard manila folder with two holes punched at the top that every doctor seems to have. The difference was that the folder was already fat, and this was our first meeting. I knew they were the pages I sent her, and still, as she flipped through them, I got a little nervous and my palms began to sweat.
Dr. Desai asked questions calmly with a completely neutral face, showing neither approval nor disapproval. She asked about the initial symptoms. She was the first doctor who was actively interested in the abdominal distress that had started long before the tingling. She asked about the tingling, so I told her it had started in my right hand, jumped to my left and, after the steroids, landed in both feet too.
I told her that I’d pulled or torn something in my hip, which made the heel-toe walk part of Silver’s evaluation really challenging. “I think he thought this was a neurological symptom, and I think it was related to the hip joint being out of whack,” I said.
I told the now-familiar story of how he spent fifteen minutes with me, ordered an MRI, called me at home and told me I had MS. And at this, Dr. Desai looked up from the pages in her lap. She looked to me and then to the med student, who seemed equally surprised.
“Victoria is closer to medical education,” she said. “Aren’t there asymptomatic lesions—lesions that show no symptoms of disease?”
“Sure,” Victoria said. “Often. In fact, many perfectly healthy people have asymptomatic lesions that aren’t indications of any medical problem. They’re just there.”
And for the first time, I was thrilled to have a medical student in the examining room too.
Dr. Desai continued, “There are studies about lesions…” but I was so excited I couldn’t wait for her to finish her sentence.
“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t know. I had just thought and hoped this was the case and the lesions didn’t matter and that lots of healthy people had lesions. “I wanted to ask Silver if you took one hundred people off the street, how many would have lesions. But I could never get a hold of him to ask that or any other questions.”
And then I almost relaxed and we rolled on through the interview, asking and answering questions on diet, exercise and the effects of the Prednisone.
“My symptoms got worse,” I said. “I’d only had tingling in my extremities, and all of a sudden it was a full-body experience, starting at a spot in my low back and radiating out. I have a meditation practice but couldn’t find calm while on Prednisone.”
Dr. Desai nodded again. “That’s the Prednisone reaction. It’s common.”
Then she looked at my food diary and asked about breakfast. “Is that instant oatmeal?”
“Yes.”
“And lunch, what’s in the salad?”
“Spinach, tomatoes, maybe some goat cheese.”
“Uh-huh, and how many times a week do you eat chicken or fish?”
“Two, maybe three.”
She frowned. This didn’t seem to be the right answer.
“How often do you have a bowel movement?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “every couple days.”
Judging from the look on her face, this was definitely not the right answer. “You need to eliminate every day,” she said.
“People do that?” I asked, disgusted.
Dr. Desai nodded and continued with questions—nearly an hour and twenty minutes worth—until she said, “Now, I’ll do the exam. Can I see your tongue?”
I showed her my tongue. She made a note and looked at my face, drawing lines on a small outline of a face on her page. She then held my right wrist to check a number of pulses, looking down in deep concentration. She did the same on my left wrist and took my blood pressure. It was 110 over 70.
I looked blank so she added, “That’s very good.”
I looked around the room and noticed a framed photo of a man in orange robes and a sculpture that looked like a small animal skull on her bookcase. I was idly reading her diplomas when she said, “OK, I need to review this information, so now is a good time if you have to get some water or use the restroom.”
Victoria and I headed out to the hallway, and I realized how tense I was. “Wow, it’s awful.” I told Victoria, “Even though Dr. Desai is nice, I’m really afraid of doctors now.”
“That makes sense. You had a pretty bad experience.”
“I know, right?” I said. “MS is a pretty difficult diagnosis, isn’t it? Mostly a diagnosis of last resort?”
“It’s supposed to be a diagnosis of exclusion,” she said. “You have to exclude everything else.”
Back in the office, Victoria and I sat quietly while Dr. Desai finished making notes. “OK, I’m going to explain it to you in both Western and Eastern traditions.”
“Do you believe a body can heal?”
“Yes,” she said. “Do I think I can help people get closer to health? Yes. Now if you were in a wheelchair, I’m not saying I could get you up and walking again. I don’t know…”
Again I cut her off. “It’s a philosophical question. After Dr. Silver, I promised myself I wouldn’t see another doctor without asking if we were in alignment. I believe the body wants to be in balance and in health so we need to figure out what’s in the way of that. Do you believe that?”
She looked slightly confused, maybe a little annoyed (I don’t blame her given all my interruptions), but she agreed. “Yes, I believe that. I come from a different perspective. It’s unlike other doctors.”
I nodded.
“Now,” she smiled, “I’m going to explain it to you in both Western and Eastern traditions. From the Eastern medical perspective, your vata is out of balance,” Dr. Desai said. “Your constitution is vata-kapha…”
And, again, I cut her off. (I’ve got to stop doing this.) “Really?” I ask, my voice rising eagerly. I’d learned the basics of Ayurveda from Deepak Chopra’s book. I’d read about vata, pitta and kapha, the three doshas, or mind-body personalities in Sanskrit. All of us are born with a specific combination of the three, and according to Ayurveda, keeping them in balance is the key to good health.
I knew I was vata. Everything I’d read about it sounded like me: woven from the elements of air and space, vata types tend to be lean and long limbed. They’re energetic and agile. They are comfortable with and even eager for change, they live in constant motion, and they crave creativity over security in their work.
All of it was me: I have trouble finding shirts with long-enough sleeves and I couldn’t gain weight if my life depended on it. I’m a writer with little financial security and endless amounts of frequent-flier miles. And there’s that problem of forwarding addresses: I’ve lived in ten cities in six states since I left Detroit as a seventeen-year-old.
After vata, I figured I was pitta, the element of fire that makes people intense, opinionated and often outspoken. That sounded like me too, although I really wanted to be kapha. When I read Perfect Health, I really, truly yearned to be that solid and sensible combination of earth and water. Kapha types are healthy, sturdy and reliable. If they RSVP, they show up. They don’t miss your wedding because they can’t get a flight out of Indonesia. Kapha types have tremendous endurance, and physically, they’re the non-vata. They gain weight when they eat too much or forget to exercise, and they never feel like a good wind could send them off course.
I often feel like one good gust and I’m outta here. I’ve never been confused for sturdy. And for the last year, I’m the one who didn’t believe I was healthy. After the who
le Dr. Silver fiasco, I forgot that for the first forty-two years of life, I ran marathons at will and never stayed in a hospital, never suffered illness more intense than a cold, and never broke a bone despite all my adventures.
“Yes,” Dr. Desai continued, “it’s your kapha that kept you healthy most of your life. It makes you strong physically. Kapha types are good at endurance sports. It gives you good physical and emotional endurance.”
At this point, I was so happy I could hardly think and yet, it was about to get better.
“You’re not that unhealthy,” she said. “You’re not that far from optimal health.”
And with that, I went from happy to elated. I was intensely relieved to know there was a doctor nearby who understood me and all my intertwined systems and saw them as close to optimal health. I was so relieved that I could barely concentrate on what Dr. Desai was saying as she started to explain those systems. She started talking about subcategories of doshas and the pulses she checked and what it all meant. “Your prana, tejas and ojas are all normal,” she said. These are the vital essences that control mind-body function.
That sounded good. The next level down, the seven bodily tissues, showed something less good. Basically, Dr. Desai said, my kidney and adrenal pulses were weak, and there was something going on in my small intestine. She flipped back through some of the pages I sent and asked about chelation.
I explained what I understood from Dr. Duncan, the woman I saw in the spring who had tested me for metal toxicity—that the heavy metals in my system were causing the tingling and I needed to take a chelating agent to remove them.
“That’s one theory,” Dr. Desai said. “Here’s what I believe happened. Before the tingling started, you went to Mexico and got some sort of stomach bug. That’s why your stomach hurt. Western medicine is not equipped to read the most subtle changes, so your doctors said it was nothing.
“Because of what was going on in your intestine, you were unable to absorb nutrients from your food and you developed an extreme B12 deficiency,” Dr. Desai continued. “The first symptom of a B12 deficiency is tingling in the fingers and toes. You started feeling better because you started supplementing your diet with vitamins. Then you started doing chelation, which takes everything out of your system, and you started feeling bad again.”