the plum blossom

If it's Tuesday, it must be acupuncture! Because Marcy has done so well with moderating, if not curing, my crazee, today we worked on a couple of my less pressing problems: trying to get my (look away, male readers) menstrual cycle back on track, (resume reading, dudes) and working on my right ankle that I sprained crossing Comm Ave a few months ago which is still stiff and sometimes swollen.

We did the regular part of our session where Marcy puts the needles in and then goes away for a bit, leaving me to relax with the heat lamp on my feet and the massage therapy music on the CD player. I was kind of dozing in and out, and then I felt a whoosh, and my whole body, especially my arms and legs, felt very very heavy, like I had a whole bunch of covers over me weighing me down. It was really cool. I never had that happen before. I'm sure my chi was doing something interesting.

Then Marcy came back, took the needles out, and showed me the thing she wanted to try on my ankle: the plum blossom. Okay. Picture a very small circular mallet with little spikes on the inside of it.

No, wait, don't picture that. I'm describing it very badly. I found it online. Voila! Or, y'know, wallah! Whichever you prefer.

So Marcy told me that basically she was going to meat-tenderize my bad ankle with this device, the principle being to get blood flow going into the tissue, especially the ligaments which, as you know, are pretty nonvascular tissue, thus the long healing time for ligament or tendon injuries. Okay, so basically this plum blossom stuff is the Chinese medicine equivalent of cross fiber friction in therapeutic massage or tissue stripping in MFR. Kinda ouchy but it gets the blood flowing into where you want it. She told me it might hurt and it might bleed. I wouldn't say it hurt hurt: it felt very similar to getting a tattoo, just the weird feeling of being pricked repeatedly. But it did break the skin a tiny bit.

We'll see if it actually does anything beneficial for my ankle, but it was just kind of awesomely fascinating. (I asked Marcy if anyone ever kicked her when she was doing it, and she said yes!)

xoxo