Wired

I managed to squeeze in my first shock therapy session this afternoon. It wasn't too bad. It felt pretty similar to the e-stim I had as a kid on my back as part of physical therapy (except with the e-stim I had the controls in front of me and could turn it up or down-fun to test your limits!). The office is in the 2nd story of an old Victorian house only 5 minutes from my office. It's a comfortable and quiet office. C, my acupuncturist, had me lay face down on the table. She put 2 needles in each leg, one in the lower calf, and one in the upper calf. Then she put 2 needles on each side of my lower back. She hooked the wires up to the needles and told me to let her know when I started to feel something. One by one, she turned on the current to each needle and adjusted the strength based on my feedback. The idea is to make the current as strong as possible without causing pain or discomfort.

The sensation at first was that of a muscle twitching and as time went on it felt more like a vibration. Kind of like I was a car on idle. After all the needles were hooked up, C left me to my thoughts for 10 minutes. I tried really hard not to think. When that didn't work, I tried really hard not to think about work. That didn't really work either, so I tried to visualize the blood flowing through my body and specifically to my uterus. But the problem I have with visualization is that I can usually only do it with things I can see or feel. I've certainly never seen blood flowing to my uterus (other than on the U/S screen) and I certainly couldn't feel it. As a kid I was a gymnast and I used to visualize all my routines in my head the night before a meet to calm myself down and get to sleep. So I figured that I should visualize myself actually doing something (don't get the wrong idea here). The best thing I could think of was to visualize myself skiing through knee deep powder as that was the most fun I've had with any physical activity lately (again, don't get the wrong idea here).

So I was busy gliding down a mountain on my imaginary skies when C came back into the room. She asked how I was doing and if any of the sensations had become more faint. She said that the brain sometimes stops sensing the current after awhile, the sensation becomes fainter, and that allows us to increase the current. I did allow her to increase the current to my left leg, but that was it. The right leg still felt pretty strong and my back felt like I had a weight lying across it. The back was the only part that really bothered me after awhile and I'm actually a little sore in my lower back. Makes me wonder if I don't use those muscles enough.

C left me for another 10 minutes and then came back, unhooked me and I was done. All in all, pretty painless and maybe even a little relaxing. When I got back to work, I was sitting in a meeting and I could almost still feel the vibration going through my body. I was trying to think of the right word to describe it and what popped into my head was "wired." Funny considering I was literally wired to electricity just a few minutes before. I had one of those "ah-ha!" moments and finally realized why we use the word "wired" to describe that particular feeling. I'm sure I sound like an idiot, because of course that's what the term refers to-I just never thought of it that way.