acupuncture #2: acceptance

Today was my second acupuncture appointment. We reviewed some of what we went over last week and I asked more specific questions about my treatment and felt more comfortable overall. One thing she brought up today was the importance of acceptance. I'm not sure what this means to me yet. I accept that I am infertile and have opened myself up to treatments that may demand changes in lifestyle, ways of thinking, and behaviors, but do I accept what being infertile means now and also in the future: the possibility that I might never birth a child? I'm really not sure. When she said that word, acceptance, I felt the physiological jolt that signals tears may be approaching, just at the speaking of the word. Obviously, I'm not there yet. Do I have to be? I think part of what she was trying to say, or prevent rather, was the hope that TCM is going to fix everything and get me pregnant. She recommended a measurable goal for the next couple of cycles--to increase my fertile cervical mucus, to eliminate clots during menstruation and to decrease PMS symptoms. I can accept that.

I drank my first herb "tea", 5 teaspoons of a mixture of herbs mixed with water, herbs including dang gui, rou cong rong, huang qi, ba ji tian, lu lu tong, di long, hong teng, yan hu suo, and e zhu. I googled them all to learn more about their properties and uses. The only one I was familiar with was Dang gui, or dong quai, used by many women for natural hormone regulation. The others for the most part, are used mostly for liver and kidney qi, blood flow and depression.

Depression. I think I often forget about depression and IF. We get so used to this feeling that we no longer name it, recognize it or describe it and it becomes indistinguishable from what we seem to feel on a daily basis. We forget that we didn't used to feel this way.