By June Gervais
Eight needles quivered out of my body like silent antennae.
A man I’d met less than an hour ago tapped them into my skin, one by one. I let him do this to me, as I lay supine on a table that smelled faintly of alcohol.
Then he cut the lights. Left the room. Closed the door.
I lay there queasy and dizzy and hating this: the needles and the table and my terror. I wanted to leave my body and return when it was over.
But I would not call out for help. Would not say a word.
*
I’d never been on an acupuncturist’s table until now. For one thing, it had never been necessary, as most of my days had been spent in good health. Also, there was the issue of my lifelong, visceral terror of needles.
During a hospital stay in my teens, it took three nurses to hold me down for a blood draw. In my twenties, delivering my first child, I chose eight hours of raw pain over an IV and epidural.
In my early thirties, my second pregnancy triggered a platelet disorder, and I submitted as calmly as I could to the required weekly bloodwork. No matter how many times I went, it never got easier, baring the crook of my elbow for the phlebotomist.
“Oh!” they’d often exclaim. “You don’t have good veins, do you?” My fellow human, I’m so glad you brought that up. Let’s talk more about these tiny, thread-like, nearly inaccessible blood vessels, while you tie off that tourniquet and I try to force my fear-weak fingers into a fist.
If all this sounds very dramatic, please know I agree, and have the instinctive urge to apologize. Imagine we could disarm a fear just by acknowledging it’s irrational? My primeval self insists You don’t have enough blood to spare, even if science says otherwise. This breaking a hole in my skin—it is a breach of my city walls. Surely it will siphon off something vital, or leave behind something alien.
Here I was, though, in the dark, with needles in my wrists. And arms. And feet. Sharp and foreign objects lodged in my body.
But I’d been sick for months, and nothing else was working.
***
A tick got me here.
I never felt it, never saw it, but it carried a bacteria called Rickettsia rickettsii; and for months thereafter, so did I.
I know it sounds crazy that a person could miss the signs of an illness the Center for Disease Control calls the deadliest tickborne disease in the Americas (that’s the CDC website getting dramatic now, not me), but to be fair, you miss a lot when caring for very young children. Headaches, muscle aches, exhaustion: it all sort of blurs into parenting fatigue.
That creaking and clicking in my joints, though—strange. And the weakness. I was used to relishing my flexibility, my strength, how I jogged into my sixth month of pregnancy, or hiked in Acadia with a two-year-old on my back. Now I had to coach myself through the laundry. Just carry the basket down the stairs. Now a few armfuls into the machine. Halfway through sweeping the floor, my body was pleading to sit down.
If I gave in to that temptation, though, it was hard to get up again.
For an entire autumn, I attributed this crushing fatigue to various things I was probably doing wrong. I should drink more water. Sleep more. Manage my seasonal depression better. Then came the morning when I woke up drained again after a solid nine hours’ sleep, downed two cups of coffee in the course of the morning rush, and as my oldest climbed onto the school bus, I realized I could barely keep my eyes open. After being awake for an hour.
I finally called my doctor.
Bloodwork does have its uses. Like providing answers, sometimes. This one came rather quickly: a disease with an outlandish name (Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) which infects an outlandishly small number of people (6,000 U.S. cases per year) and can do an even more outlandish thing (kill you). Rickettsia ricksettsii are tick-borne bacteria that attack the endothelium—an essential layer of cells that runs throughout the entire human body.
I didn’t even know I possessed an endothelium. It’s not shown on those cheery “parts of the body” projects we color and glue in third grade. But tens of thousands of miles of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels cannot function without it. Attacking the endothelium is an excellent way to trickle strength from every vital organ and tissue in your body. Heart. Lungs. Spinal cord. Brain.
Rude, Rickettsia, but OK.
Sometimes this disease brings a telltale rash—that’s the “Spotted” part of its name—but that never materialized for me. I guess that’s fine, because my skin didn’t need any additional decoration, but it also made the disease sneakier. If you didn’t happen to see me splayed out on the carpet from the effort of normal daily activities, you’d think I was completely fine.
This is a hazard of appearing to be okay. You can get very not-okay before anyone notices.
***
After my diagnosis, I swallowed antibiotics for a month. This was supposed to take care of it. At the follow-up, my doctor asked: “How are you now?”
I’d been dreading this question. When tick-borne diseases don’t respond to treatment, the next step is sometimes IV antibiotics—in other words, regular sessions of holding still with a needle stuck in my arm. “Better than I was,” I said.
Except my joints still creaked. Audibly. And a constant pain skewered the back of my neck, so I couldn’t give my kids piggyback rides or even look behind me. And I was still easily fatigued and weak, and fell over on my yoga mat when I attempted anything requiring balance, and I—
“I’m not 100% back to normal.”
“Get this herbal supplement.” She scribbled something on a slip of paper. “It’s an anti-inflammatory.”
No intravenous treatments? I walked out feeling like I’d escaped a prison sentence.
Two months later, though, I was still clicking and stiff, waking up in pain every morning. I called the doctor again.
Now she sounded annoyed. “I can’t give you any more antibiotics,” she said, as if I was malingering, angling for more Doxycycline like it was OxyContin.
“I’m not asking for antibiotics,” I said. “I just want to know—did this do permanent damage? Will I feel like this forever?”
“Well,” she said, followed by a string of noncommittal words communicating neither yes nor no. “Are you taking those supplements?” When I confirmed that I was, with little improvement, her voice got a degree more irritated. “I could send you to a specialist, but they’ll just say the same thing.”
I knew I’d answered wrong—that I was supposed to say that I was all better. That logically I should’ve been all better. Did she think I was exaggerating? For what? Drugs? Attention? I didn’t know what else to say.
I hung up and cried. Then I got angry with myself for crying. It felt childish and melodramatic, even though no one else was around.
Still, I cried.
***
In the mid-1980s, New Age guru Louise Hay appeared on the bestseller list with a book called You Can Heal Your Life. Some years later, when I was in fourth grade or so, the paperback made its way to our family bookshelves.
Hay’s premise was this: When we suffer from physical illness, it is due to some unhealthy thought pattern in our minds. Employ positive affirmations, change that thought pattern, let go of your need for that illness, and the disease will dissipate.
As a child, this sounded like magic to me in the best kind of way. I loved reading Hay’s list of symptoms—pages of alphabetized ailments, including exotic things I’d never heard of, like “candida” and “impotence”—and their supposed mental origins:
Cataracts: Inability to see ahead with joy. Dark future.
Ingrown Toenail: Worry and guilt about your right to move forward.
Kidney Problems: Criticism, disappointment, failure. Shame. Reacting like a child.
The book came to us because my mother had an interest in holistic health, though I doubt she subscribed to these ideas whole cloth—she later became a Physician Assistant and earned her Master’s in Public Health, a decidedly more scientific way of approaching the body. Sometimes a virus is just a virus.
But the connection between emotional and physical health did pique her interest. Her own mother, my grandmother, had had rheumatic fever as a child, a serious disease that left her temporarily bedridden and with a permanent heart murmur. No laughing matter, but my grandmother freely admitted—with a bit of mischief—that because of it, she’d always been favored over her two sisters, spoiled and pampered (at least by the standards of a poor family in the Great Depression). I don’t know if this childhood experience was really the root of her temperament, but there was no question my grandmother enjoyed the spotlight and knew how to maneuver it her way with any material at hand, including her own aches and pains. Is it any surprise my mother developed a permanent suspicion of anyone who appeared to be manufacturing theatrics, or making a show of anything at all—including being sick?
Both my mother and grandmother were fiercely loving, generous, resilient, but their demeanors were altogether different. My mother: self-effacing, prefers to be in the background, quietly getting things done. Able to withstand a good deal of physical pain without any outward display—has been known to wait out a headache for three days before taking an ibuprofen. Regarding her experience of delivering me, a nine-pound baby, without pain medication: “I don’t remember it being any big deal.” (PSA for potential birth-givers: It is, indeed, a big deal.)
I loved them both—but I wanted to be like my mother.
Deep down, though, I wondered if I tended more to Grandma’s temperament. I talked endlessly and argued with vigor and felt things deeply, all of which—if you’re a girl-child—quickly earns you the reputation of Dramatic. And though I never suffered a major illness, as Grandma had, I was plagued with chronic nosebleeds so profuse that I sometimes gave up on tissues and just bent over the bathroom sink bleeding. Which does kind of come across as an attention grab. Even if you’re nine years old and just doing it for convenience.
On one particularly moody day, standing over our sink at home, watching fat scarlet droplets roll from my nose at the pace of a dripping spigot, I remember moaning: “Why does this have to happen to me?”
My mother overheard. At the time, she was close friends with a woman whose youngest son had leukemia. “Would you rather be in chemotherapy?” she said.
This was said with no derision; she was inviting me to shift my perspective. To walk off the stage and return to reality. Nobody was suffering tragedy here. It was a minor inconvenience.
“No,” I groused, staring into the silver eye of the drain cover, splatting it with another drop of blood.
I had already looked up nosebleeds in Hay’s book, of course: A need for recognition, which sounds an awful lot like Wants attention. In truth, I would’ve been happy to be free of this condition. It’s embarrassing to spontaneously start bleeding from your face when you’re at, say, a slumber party, or in the middle of a math test.
As I got older, I began to grow irritated with Hay’s ideas.
Yes, some symptoms truly are psychosomatic. Yes, the mind is powerful; it’s the reason placebos work. Is every kidney stone, though, really a “lump of undissolved anger”? Do people like my grandmother manifest rheumatic fever due to some unmet craving?—or can we acknowledge the role of Streptococcus pyogenes and the risk factors of poverty and genetics? In the words of David Groff, condemning the effect of Hay’s claims in the early days of the AIDS crisis (“How Louise Hay’s Spiritual Pseudoscience Harmed a Generation of Gay Men”, Slate.com, September 20, 2017):
Some of Hay’s disciples, believing they had failed to follow her dicta well enough, died ashamed, disempowered, and betrayed. Many AIDS survivors and caregivers have testified to the tragic personal cost of Hay’s philosophy…
And yet You Can Heal Your Life has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. Perhaps there’s a strange comfort in thinking that our suffering is all of our own making. If we made it, perhaps we can un-make it.
***
I hadn’t thought of Hay’s ideas in years, and it’s probably clear I don’t believe in them. All the same, as my tick-borne symptoms lingered, I began to secretly fear that she might be right. At least a little bit. At least with me.
What if I wasn’t healed yet because I didn’t sufficiently want to be?
Immediately after my diagnosis, the doctor had directed me to rest—a hard prescription to follow as the mother of littles. In a two-parent household with young children, one parent’s relaxation time usually comes at the expense of their partner. Honestly, I’d been craving adequate rest (and time to write, and time to just be) for nine years straight, since the birth of our first child. What if I had manifested these lingering symptoms to evade my share of parenting and household work? Was I really this tired, or was I being dramatic?
Once an idea takes root, it’s hard to kick. Whose fault, if I was still sick?
***
At this point in my adult life, my mother had been working as a Physician Assistant for more than twenty years. When it came to her own healthcare—her chronic neck and shoulder pain, for example—she availed herself of Western medicine and went to physical therapy, but she also sought pain relief through acupuncture. It worked wonders for her; to my bafflement, she described her sessions with needles stuck in her body as “very relaxing.” Worried about my lingering symptoms, my mother gave me the number of her acupuncturist. “No pressure”—she was well aware of my phobia—“but it couldn’t hurt to try.”
I must have been having a particularly low day, to dial that number. But this is how—despite all my terror—I now found myself in an acupuncturist’s office.
The exam room was peacock blue, half calming and half clinical. A wooden cabinet brimmed with jars I avoided looking at.
The acupuncturist had chin-length curly hair, a bit like the poster of Eddie Vedder on my teenage bedroom wall. He spoke in a warm voice, wore normal-person clothes instead of creepy white scrubs, and everything in his demeanor said super chill. After taking my pulse, examining my tongue (awkward), and palpating my abdomen (ticklish), he said, “In Chinese medicine, we call this a blood deficiency.” Of course. Always with the blood.
He began to talk, in his super-chill manner, about nutrients and metabolites and the liver channel. I would never watch The Liver Channel. The longer he talked, in fact, the warmer I felt, which in medical situations was usually my prelude to queasiness, followed by spots in front of my eyes, followed soon thereafter by me waking up on the floor.
Given that I was already flat on my back, I probably wouldn’t fall to the floor; nonetheless, fainting in the middle of a conversation makes you seem like some nubile damsel from a silent movie, and I really did not want to do it today.
After all this talking, he rolled up my sleeves, rolled down my socks, rubbed a spot on my foot with cool alcohol, and said, “Breathe in.”
Couldn’t hurt to try, my mother had said.
He tapped the needle into my skin, a quick prick. And it didn’t hurt much. This is fine, I tell myself. You are fine. Seven more needles. You are fine, you are fine.
Except no, actually—you are not fine. Each needle punctured a new little hole in the psychic sea wall that kept panic at bay. Dread flowed in.
The acupuncturist finished, clicked off the lights, and left me there with my body looking like a prairie studded with cell towers. I pressed my terror down. Refused to think about it. But any slight shift and I felt a needle tug at the skin of my wrist. Eight needles are in me… I was mildly sick.
I sang quietly to myself, as I had in childbirth, in the rising tide of labor. I sang hymns in a whisper, I sang about the sea… If there were a panic button, I would’ve pressed it, in hopes that Eddie Vedder might return, but I would not let myself call out.
I waited out the eternity until he returned.
“How are you doing?”
“Okay,” I said, or something like that. He held my wrist, checking my pulse. I knew it was thrumming like a rabbit’s heart. “Open your eyes. Orient yourself to the room.” Afraid to see the needles, I stared at the drop ceiling and made myself breathe.
“What did you like to do when you were a kid?” he said.
I was too panicked to ask the logic behind this question. “Draw.”
“Draw what?” He pulled a needle from my foot. Then another. Was he setting me free?
“Stories. Picture books.” My pulse was slowing. He tugged the needles from my legs. Arms. Wrists. “Make collages.”
“Feeling better now?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He lifted my shirt to expose my belly, winter-pale, and rubbed two spots with alcohol, above and below my navel.
Oh. I was not free.
“Breathe in.” He tapped a needle in. “Breathe out.” Another. Something in my abdomen convulsed, as if the needle had gone halfway through me, which was impossible, it was a fraction of an inch, but it felt like some vital organ just uncoiled. Another surge of panic. “What was that?”
I expected him to yank the needle back out, realizing that I was having some serious adverse reaction. Instead he laughed. “That’s chi for you.”
That’s chi?
I’d never questioned the legitimacy of this practice. Reputable studies bear out the benefits of acupuncture for chronic pain. I didn’t even quibble with the idea of chi or energy channels or meridians or whatever this was about. But at that moment, lying on an actual table with actual terrifying needles in my belly, I was sure I’d been had.
He headed for the door again.
“Do you have any tips for calming down? Like, staying calm? Because I’m kind of freaking out here.”
“Keep thinking of happy childhood memories.” Then he was gone again.
If I whispered them aloud, it would keep me breathing. Play-Doh at the kitchen table. Reading behind the armchair, hidden. Nature walks with Mom. Costumes.
Costumes: Playing dress-up. My mother braiding my hair. My mother painting my face. Dressing me up at age three for Halloween, a carnival fortuneteller, blue drapey nightgown and kerchief and beads. Hats, bonnets, scarves—
I started to cry.
There, alone on the acupuncturist’s table, in the dark.
Something about costumes was making me cry, and yet suddenly this was all I wanted to think about. All the
Halloween regalia my mother made me, recycling whatever we had on hand. The thoroughly 1980s fuschia flower-girl dress from my cousin’s wedding—altered into fairy-princess attire with handmade princess hat, cone trailing chiffon.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, bonnet, cloak.
Black-and-white cat, fur around my wrists.
Butterfly, cardboard wings encased in yellow satin.
My mother had been a childhood tomboy. She was a natural beauty—so striking that all my life, people commented on it—but she was indifferent to makeup or anything “fancy,” and chose her clothing with a strong preference for comfort, simplicity, and earth tones. She wouldn’t have chosen these costumes for herself. But every year, she made them for me. Spent all those hours sewing and digging up adornments and ribboning my hair.
I was hit with a sudden wave of ecstatic gratitude for her. The odd and powerful sense that she was in the room. Lying there on the acupuncturist’s table with two needles in my belly, tears rolling sideways down each temple—why was I crying like this? I didn’t know, exactly.
In a costume—it’s okay to be seen. Sanctioned flamboyance. If you happen to attract notice, no one calls you dramatic. It’s all right. You are in costume.
But what did any of this have to do with Rickettsia rickettsii?
Or the deficiency of my blood, or the state of my endothelium, or whether I was going to live the rest of my life with fatigue and arthritis?
The acupuncturist opened the door. No possible way to play cool this time. Flat on my back, I’d managed to cry into my own ears. He handed me a tissue; I mopped my face. “This happens,” he said. “Our bodies and emotions are all connected. Like, we’re not just a big bag of organs. And you have to let the emotions through.”
I accepted this from him, but also, it was a little ridiculous. Did this need to be explained to me? I was a deep-talks-with-friends person, a journaler, a therapy veteran. A writer. Surely I was totally okay and open with powerful feelings. Everything was fine here.
Just crying about Halloween costumes, that’s all. Sweet relief when he tugged the needles out. I was quick to cover my belly and put on my boots. “With these illnesses,” he said casually, “Lyme’s, tick-borne—medicine can treat the body, but—” I zippered my jacket. “There’s a whole emotional dimension to illnesses like that.”
I looked away, because I couldn’t start crying again. No doctor I’d spoken to, no article I’d read, had acknowledged this: that there was something strange and peculiarly emotional about this sickness.
***
I went for a half-dozen sessions altogether. Every time, I panicked. Often silently wept. Once—belly down on the table, with my face in a donut-pillow, needles in the back of my neck and head—I remember watching my own tears splat to the ground. There’s something particularly pathetic, I think, about crying onto someone’s floor.
I don’t know if those sessions really helped my pain. But they did… something. Up until then, I had not allowed certain thoughts to linger in my mind too long. In the days after my appointment with the acupuncturist, I started to allow them.
That I could have died, for example.
That tick, for example.
How it fed on me for anywhere from two hours to ten days, and I never knew. Injected these peculiar bacteria into my bloodstream, which spread from that tiny puncture to colonize my whole body. My blood vessels deteriorated for months and I never knew.
And for all my professional wordsmithery, somehow I was never fully able to talk about it. When my friends asked
“How are you feeling?”, what I said was Pretty tired. But what I meant was: This is a different kind of tired than I’ve ever felt. As if life is being drained from me.
Or if I dared to say My joints click and creak now, it’s kind of weird, they would try to reassure me: “That’s no big deal, mine do too.” I felt too embarrassed to respond: But mine didn’t. And it happened so fast. And that was frightening. My body doesn’t feel like mine. I’m only in my thirties. If my knees hurt this much now, what will it be like in my sixties? What if this never gets better? What if there’s nothing I can do?
I felt silly saying that. So I did what I do, which is walk around in the cheery guise of someone who’s collected yet another crazy story to tell around a campfire. “In college in Vermont, I used to do maple sugaring…” “…and I dialed a wrong number, and ended up bar-hopping in New Orleans with a guy named Steamboat Willie…” “…and this other time, I got the deadliest tick-borne disease in the Americas. Did you know it can give you a lifelong allergy to meat? And possibly gangrene? Haha, but it’s cool. I’m still eating burgers. With all my digits.”
If you want to signal that you don’t take your own problems too seriously—that you’re 100% self-pity-free—just keep levity at the ready. When sad, make jokes. When vulnerable, make jokes. It’s how you reassure people you won’t be too scary, won’t be the needy friend, the energy vampire at the party.
It’s okay to attract notice if you’re in a Halloween costume. But not if you’re in pain.
I was in pain, though. Still.
And I was scared. Still.
And I was still sad.
There is an emotional dimension to these illnesses, the acupuncturist said, and I didn’t know how much I needed someone to say that.
***
I don’t want to give the impression I articulated this entire epiphany on my first drive home from the acupuncturist’s office, or even the second or third. Mostly, after that first appointment, I was trying to pull myself together and drive safely while blowing my nose into an old fast-food napkin. When I walked through our front door, my eyes were still bloodshot from crying.
“How did it go?” my husband said.
I relaxed into his hug, and then sank down to the couch.
This was a man I’d known for twenty years—the man who’d fathered my babies and seen me paralyzed with fear the night before I delivered our second child, terrified of the next day’s IV of Pitocin. He knew what it took for me to lay down on that acupuncture table.
How did it go.
I didn’t have words for all that yet. Pain is messy, and so are revelations, and awakening to the weird things we do and why. It takes time to see it clearly, to arrange it into language.
In the meantime, Second Child, now five years old, ran into the room and started to climb up on me. “Gentle,” I said, as I often did these days. “Mama’s body still hurts.”
How did it go. What to say when you’ve paid someone to stab you and then cried into your own ears? I didn’t have all the words.
Start with just a few words, then. The words you do have.
“I hated it,” I said. “I hated it. But I think it was good.”
About the Author
June Gervais is the author of Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (Penguin, 2023), a queer coming-of-age novel set in a 1980s tattoo shop. Her writing appears in Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, Sojourners, North American Review, RHINO, The Common, Big Fiction, Image, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram (@june.gervais.writer) or at junegervais.com.