Acupuncture again

Wow!

I admitted only a couple of days ago to being a bit sceptical about alternative therapies, even though I'm willing to give (some of) them a try. Today I got an answer in a big way about acupuncture - I still don't know whether it's any good for fertility (and of course I have the whole issue that sticking needles into me probably won't do an awful lot for my husband's sperm count), but boy, does it have an effect!

Today I had two issues I wanted the acupuncturist to concentrate on. The first was that I was due to ovulate around now (and may already have done so at the weekend) and wanted to give the egg a bit of a helping hand to get out and try to avoid creating another cyst. The second was that I've been getting a lot of tension headaches recently, and had a huge one today that lasted most of the day.

For the ovulation, he stuck needles over both ovaries. They're tiny thin little needles, and they only go a little way in - just beneath the skin. The cyst last month was on the right ovary, indicating that I should probably be ovulating from the left one this month. He gave the needle on the right-hand side a little twitch, and nothing much happened.

Then he twitched the one on the left - and crampy shooting pains started to go from my ovary all the way across the middle and down into my bits. Apart from the fact that he said it was a good sign, I have no idea what that meant, and it's certainly never happened before - but there was definitely a major connection between where he stuck the needle and the whole of my reproductive area, and it definitely felt as though something was going on there (but not on the right side, which I didn't expect to be active this month).

For the tension headache, he stuck a couple of needles in the back of my neck. When one of them went in, I felt a tingling sensation all the way down my back and a sharp pain about halfway down, nowhere near where the needle had gone in. There was also a dragging pain when he touched the needle.

After all the needles were in, he left me to lie on the table under the heat lamp while he wrote up some notes. About five minutes in, the muscles all the way down the right-hand side of my back took on a life of their own - my torso started writhing and twitching as the muscles contracted and relaxed in waves. I called him over, and after watching for a while in fascination, he took out the needle in the back of the right-hand side of my neck. My back spasmed one last time and then relaxed, and I lay completely still again.

I still can't tell you with absolute certainty what the therapeutic benefits of this treatment have been. But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the points where the needles go in have a huge significance and have a major effect on my body.

I'm still a little bit freaked out - but for the moment, I no longer have a headache, so I'm also a happy bunny tonight.