(originally published in Alternative Medicine Magazine)
By Allison Bartlett
It was dark out, my husband was speeding, and I was turning my head back and forth from the road to our moaning 11-year-old son in the backseat, praying all the while: Please let this be appendicitis.
Let this be appendicitis. How does a mother get to this point? Had I been thinking rationally, of course, I’d have grasped the absurdity of my wish. The fact is, the road we took to the emergency room that night was just another leg of a long, circuitous journey that began when our son, Julian, developed frequent stomachaches years ago. His painful episodes, while never before this intense, had been almost continuous, so the chances of them stemming from a simple case of appendicitis were pretty slim.
Exactly when it all began is hard to pinpoint, like trying to remember the first raindrop of a raging storm. As a baby, Julian needed to be carried around a lot, and only in retrospect did I realize that he may have been uncomfortable even then.
Once he learned to talk, he would often quietly report, after meals, that his stomach hurt. “Where?” I would ask. “All over,” he’d say, rubbing his bloated tummy with his small hand. The pediatrician assured me the aches would eventually go away, but they didn’t. In fact, they got more frequent as time went on.
Over the years we consulted several pediatricians, who tested him for various bacteria and parasites. But when everything came up negative, all they had to offer was, “Children get stomachaches. It’s normal.”
I was particularly frustrated by the patient smiles that would come over their faces, usually followed by gentle suggestions about how much attention Julian might be craving. The more I described his cheerful disposition, how rarely he complained about anything else, the more I sounded like the mother who doth protest too much.
Eventually Julian was given a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is basically another way of saying, “Something’s wrong with your gut, but we don’t know what or why.” The doctor suggested we stop giving him dairy products and recommended over-the-counter remedies like Pepcid AC or prescription medicines like Prilosec. Still, nothing helped.
By the time Julian turned 11, his belly hurt from breakfast to bedtime, so the doctor visits continued. We consulted a homeopath, with no success, and we saw a physician who put him on what seemed to be too many supplements and not enough food (mostly broth and rice). Since even these meager meals seemed to worsen the pain, my already thin boy said he’d rather just skip this snack or that meal.
Then he started missing school—one week turned into another, and then another—at which point I contacted his pediatrician’s office and tried to convey the seriousness of the situation. The receptionist told me the doctor could see Julian in a week or two. Desperate, I called a good friend who recommended a family practitioner in our neighborhood, Daphne Miller, who agreed to see him the next day.
Miller approached Julian’s case with compassion and urgency, assuring me she would not give up until she’d solved the mystery. But after ruling out the usual suspects—intestinal obstructions, bacteria, parasites, ulcerative colitis, H. pylori, Crohn’s disease, and more—she too could only come up with what she called “the grab-bag diagnosis of IBS.” And she felt that Western medicine didn’t have much to offer.
“My toolbox has reached its limit,” she said—something no other doctor had ever acknowledged to me.
When I look back on that time, I realize the hardest part wasn’t waiting for more test results or even seeing Julian in pain. It was that I’d grown accustomed to my 11-year-old boy no longer attending school, looking as pale as his pillowcase, and spending his waking hours with a heating pad clutched to his middle as he drifted, ghostlike, from his bed to the sofa and back again. I was beginning to consider his state normal, and that was frightening.
Then, a few months later, we found ourselves rushing to the hospital on that dark night, and it was clear he was far from normal. In the emergency room, the staff quickly gave Julian one shot of morphine, then another. They took X-rays and blood, and I was feeling optimistic, still wishing for appendicitis. It hung there in my slow-motion emergency room thoughts like a promise of maternal morphine. But when the doctor returned from the lab, he said the films looked—that’s right—normal.
That dreaded word again. I couldn’t believe it.
And, as it turns out, I shouldn’t have. The next day Miller met with the radiologist to review the films. True, Julian’s appendix was fine, but the radiologist was surprised by the excessive amount of gas that was filling Julian’s entire intestine. What caused it he couldn’t say, but it was enough for him to see what I knew: Julian’s pain was real.
That’s when Miller recommended what would turn out to be Julian’s salvation. She suggested we take him to see Stephen Zilber, a licensed acupuncturist and herbalist in San Rafael, California, who had cured a patient of hers with ulcerative colitis, another intractable intestinal disorder. As we approached Zilber’s office, I tried to hold my skepticism at bay—I mean, everything we’d tried so far had failed. Julian, on the other hand, was strangely hopeful, even calm. He knew that acupuncture meant needles, but he showed no signs of fear.
Using Chinese methods of diagnosis (examining Julian’s tongue and pulses), muscle testing, and something called NET (neuro-emotional technique), during which the body’s response to certain words is measured, Zilber quietly went about his exam. In less than an hour, he reported that Julian had a sensitivity to eggs, an imbalance of bacteria and flora in his small intestines, and built-up emotional stress—a cluster of symptoms he said was known in Chinese medicine as “wind in the intestines.”
None of this sounded all that different from other diagnoses—another vague intestinal disorder—but Zilber assured me he knew what to do about it. He proceeded to treat Julian with acupressure and laser acupuncture (which uses light instead of needles) and sent him home with some herbs. As we left, Julian told me he could barely feel his stomach pain. Still, I had my doubts.
Within a few days, though, they began to be replaced by hope as Julian felt well enough to go back to school. Two weeks later, Zilber explained the theory behind his treatment as he inserted needles into the webs between Julian’s thumb and index fingers and between his big and second toes. In Chinese medicine, these are the four gates of the body, he said, and needling them is thought to be like opening the front and back doors of your house to let the breeze through—or in Eastern terms, to free up the stagnant qi, or energy. When I asked Julian what the acupuncture felt like, he said, “When he put the needles in, it felt like he was turning a gauge and all the gas came pouring out.” And how did it feel? “Great!” he said.
As treatment progressed, Julian was not only back at school, he started playing baseball, going to drumming classes, and even sleeping over at friends’ houses—something he hadn’t been able to do without fear of having to call us in the night to bring him home.
At 13, Julian still takes herbs occasionally, and he goes in for an acupuncture treatment every few months. But he’s basically fine. I try to check in with him periodically and ask how he’s doing, but it’s no easy task. He’s too busy dashing from one kind of fun to another—a street hockey game, a wild party with his friends—and the heating pad is nowhere in sight.