Scott and Jo vs The Shadow: Episode Three
Dad gets the point; the doctor is a teenager; bad news
EPISODE THREE: Dr. Wing
So the next afternoon, after work, Dad and I drove into town. I wanted to see this mystic, Chinese, ancient doctor.
I was imagining a big house full of teak carvings and maybe incense in the air, and some dragon statues. And Doctor Wing would wear a long robe and have a long beard.
But Dad pulled up into a parking lot for a row of dentists and orthodontists, and the office on the end had neat gold letters on the glass door that said, “Mayfair Oriental Medicine.”
It was very disappointing. Just a doctor’s office. Like any doctor’s office. Inside, the waiting room was very quiet because the workday was over. We were his last clients. We sat down on hard plastic chairs in the tiny waiting room. A single very big watercolor painting of a bamboo plant hung on one wall. There were a lot of potted plants in the room, small, green, flourishing plants. No dragons, no gongs.
“This looks as boring as regular science,” I said.
Dad laughed.
A few minutes later, the door to the waiting room opened, and a teenage Chinese boy wearing ordinary blue scrubs entered. I was very disappointed.
“Mr. Nicholas, please come inside,” he said.
“Can I come, too?” I asked. I still wanted to see the magic show.
“Is it all right if my daughter attends?” Dad asked. “She’s very curious about Chinese medicine.”
The young man smiled, and his dark eyes lit up his entire face. “Please come in,” he said to me.
We followed him through the door and down a short hallway. “Are you Dr. Wing’s son?” I asked, supposing that he was helping out his father.
He turned to me, and his dark eyes lit up again with that happy sense of humor. “I am Doctor Wing.”
Both Dad and I were shocked.
He laughed outright. “I look too young!” he exclaimed. He fixed his dark eyes on Dad. “Mr. Nicholas, I am forty-three years old. I am married with three children!” And then he merrily laughed again. “But when I go to restaurants they keep handing me the children’s menu!”
We laughed with him. He ushered us into a room that had charts on the walls and a cushioned massage table in the center of the room. There were chairs against one wall. We sat down. Dad told me to observe, which was his way of telling me to stay quiet, so I observed and stayed quiet.
Dr. Wing asked Dad to describe all of his symptoms, and Dad told hm all about the pain, when it had started, how it had exploded, what the doctors had done at the Emergency Room. Dr. Wing let him say everything and listened carefully. I watched him, trying to figure out how that teenage face was forty-three years old.
When Dad had said everything and had answered Dr, Wing’s questions about his diet and how well he slept and when he woke up during the night, Dr. Wing told us, “Chinese Medicine is a study of patterns. We look for patterns of illness. To do this, we take pulses, and we also examine the tongue for swift diagnosis.”
“Oh!” Dad was surprised. “That’s what Western Medicine has done as well.”
Dr. Wing smiled. “We specialize the process a little more.”
He told us there are three different pulses in each wrist that he would check. The left wrist held the pulses for the heart, the liver, and the kidney. The right wrist held the pulses for the lung, spleen, and kidney.
He pressed the fingers of his right hand into Dad’s left wrist, and then we were all silent for a long time. About three minutes. I’d had no idea that anybody could take anybody’s pulse, even three of them, for that long. I could see he was pressing with different levels of pressure on the pulse points, his sparkling dark eyes intent. He finally nodded and then switched to Dad’s right wrist.
“Did it tell you anything?” Dad asked.
“Liver is weak,” he said briefly. And then we let him take the time to take the pulses.
When he was finished, he withdrew a pocket camera from his trouser pocket and asked Dad to put out his tongue as broadly as he could. Dad did. And Dr Wing took a picture of it. Then he asked Dad to let him see the underside of his tongue. Dad did, and he took a picture of that, too.
His face was serious and kind, and now I could see that he really was a grown man.
“The liver is very weak,” he said. “There is a great deal of heat, like a fire in the liver.”
I didn’t want to interrupt, but I wanted to ask a question, so I raised my hand. He smiled at me.
“Where is the liver?” I asked.
“The liver is on the right side,” he told me, pointing at my liver. “And part of it runs across the top of your abdomen.”
I nodded to thank him.
“This is where the pain comes from,” he told Dad. “Think of it like a fire burning out of control along the liver, and the heat rise up.” He pointed to a path along Dad’s shoulder. “It rises from the liver to the shoulder, to the head through the shoulder. Too hot.”
“Can you relieve it?” Dad asked.
“Yes, but this is not just a headache problem,” Dr Wing said. “You have serious debility in the liver. The blood is not good, not healthy. The pattern is blood deficiency, blood stagnation. And phlegm. We will talk about that more after the acupuncture. You will need an ultrasound of the liver.”
“The liver?” Dad asked. “Not the brain?”
Dr. Wing shook his head. “No. Not the brain. This is liver deficiency, and it is advanced.” He gestured at the table. “Please lie down, face up. You must stay relaxed and quiet for an hour to let the needles work.”
Dad did as asked. Dr Wing showed me the acupuncture needles. They were so thin that they curled like hairs. He used a tiny plastic straw to load them, and he tapped each one through the straw into Dad. As he worked, he explained that each organ, even as it had a pulse in the wrist, also had a pathway that ran through the body. There were points along each path where a needle could be inserted to perform different things.
“We stimulate the immune system,” he said. “And we also can quiet the immune system. We re-balance the body with each treatment. We can energize the liver, or we can subdue and soothe the liver.”
“Which for me?” Dad asked as he lay there.
“For you, the liver is like a train engine. Huffa huffa huffa.” He made the noise of a train chugging hard. “But it not effective. Liver working too hard, not achieving anything. We must soothe the liver. This is why you have sleepless nights. You should sleep better tonight, after treatment.”
He put in a lot of needles. He started at Dad’s head with short needles on top of the head and then worked on the arms, then Dad’s chest and stomach. He pulled up Dad’s trouser legs as high as the knee and inserted needles into his lower legs and bare feet.
I couldn’t help but ask, “Does it hurt?”
“Sometimes,” Dr. Wing said. “Like bee sting. Not too bad.”
Dad was comfortable enough to talk. “Most of it just feels like a strong tap. But yes, once or twice I really feel it!” And he grinned ruefully as he stared up at the ceiling. “I feel a radiating sensation from some of them. Not painful. Just strange.”
Dr. Wing nodded as he worked. “Yes, that is the qi (“chi”) moving. That’s good! We want the energy to flow!”
OK, I thought, the qi is moving. What in the world is qi? But I didn’t ask.
After he had finished, Dr. Wing turned on heat lamps and focused one over Dad’s abdomen and one over his feet. Then he led me back to the waiting room and brought me a book, clearly a book for little children, but it explained some of what I had just watched.
For one thing, Scott had been both right and wrong about the mysticism. From the beginning, Chinese physicians had kept detailed records of their observations and results as they had developed their medical system. But it was really different from our medical system. They believed that blood carries energy—qi—and it’s this energy that is so essential for good health. It has to flow properly. It can get blocked and bogged down. When it does get blocked, disease develops.
How did they even figure out (or imagine) this energy, I wondered.
He came in to check on me in the waiting room, and I asked him.
“The blood has electrical energy,” he told me. “And that means also a magnetic energy that travels with it. The human body will react to the energy quality of the blood. The pulses and the tongue and other signals in the body tell us the quality of the energy.”
“So qi is just the electrical energy of the blood?” I asked.
He paused and thought about it. Then he said, judiciously, “Yes. But that means a great many things. Not just like turning on television.”
After an hour, he took me back to Dad, who had fallen soundly asleep. In fact, Dad was snoring gently when we quietly entered. He opened his eyes as I closed the door.
“Oh, I fell asleep,” he said. “Has it been an hour?”
“Yes. Good to fall asleep from the needles,” Dr. Wing told him.
Dr. Wing removed all the needles, and then he used the viewer pane of his camera to show Dad and me the photos he had taken of Dad’s tongue. He showed Dad a normal tongue, which was pink and had a little bit of white towards the back. Then he showed Dad the photo of Dad’s tongue. It was brick red, almost purple along the sides, with faint teeth marks in it.
“This tongue shows inflammation and illness in the liver,” he told Dad. “You must have an ultrasound done. We need that to see what is troubling the liver.”
“I feel so much better,” Dad told him. “Is it really necessary? Couldn’t I just come back and see you until I’m better?”
“Yes, you should see me once a week,” Dr. Wing said. “Immediately. But it is not legal for me to treat cancer, or to diagnose it.”
Everything stopped right there when he said that word. Cancer. His voice and eyes remained serene and calm. “I think you may have cancer. But only an ultrasound and a radiologist can tell you that. We must know. You must have the ultrasound.”
He handed a sheaf of papers to Dad. “Meanwhile, do not eat meat, any dairy, or sweets, or grains. Those foods will burden the liver right now. Eat vegetables for a few weeks. Cooked vegetable. No raw. We will see how that does. Nothing stimulating: no alcohol or coffee or tea.”
“You really think I have cancer?” Dad asked.
“I do not know for sure. Possible,” he said. “We must find out. Only the ultrasound can really show us.” He saw the looks on our faces. So he said to Dad, “You have a lot of life in you. Whatever is wrong, we work on it. We are patient. We will be diligent. No need to worry. When we see the ultrasound, then we will know. So do not worry. But this must be checked.”