Healing Hands

This past week I have succumb to one of fall and winters worst enemies: the common cold. It was really inevitable. I see half a dozen patients with the same ailment every day; I’m bond to contract it at some stage. The threat first hit me on Monday afternoon with the beginnings of a mildly irritated throat, by sundown I was in fulminate pain. Over the next few days it progressed in the usual fashion with a persistently running right nostril, followed by a fauceting left nostril, culminating in the now melodious hacking cough. As happens with every such event for me, the virus has seeded itself in my larynx, preventing conversation at anything higher then a whisper. Oh, the joys. To say that I was a good, compliant patient that took the motherly advice that I so easily deal out on a daily basis to my patients would be, for lack of a better word, inconceivable. I still went to work, potentially infecting those patients who consulted me. I continued with my daily gym routine, although at a rather piddlely pace. And I marched through my daily chores as if some infectious agent had not inhabited my body. Admittedly, Wednesday morning I had a slight thought this vector of evilness might have overtaken me when I attempted to perform a procedure on a patient that I’d been doing monthly since I arrived and failed. The wife of said patient, one of the prominent elders in the community, was very forgiving and wished me to believe that the instrument was defective and not my handy work. I knew better. So when she returned today with her husband to repeat the procedure, she made sure that I received the medical treatment I so desperately needed. Being specially trained in Maori healing massage, known as mirimiri, she runs a clinic each Thursday with two other women trained in the same. The clinic is open to anyone with an ailment and is regularly filled to capacity. The idea is to connect the spiritual and physical aspects of healing, thus providing an additional level of recuperation. Today was my turn on the table. With no room for shame, I undressed in front of these three elders and climbed underneath a thin sheet. Starting with a simple laying on of hands in a carefully dictated fashion, the three then progressed to kneading nearly every inch of my body. The end result: fantastic! Not usually a believer is such complimentary techniques of medicine; I must admit I could feel the heat leaving my body. For the first time in the week, I actually felt better. Yes, the purest would say that the timing correlated with the natural resolution of my cold, but, for today, I’m choosing to credit the healing hands.