Testing, testing.....

In August my brother referred me to a woman named Moneca, who uses a diagnostic machine calibrated to eastern medical uses, in the hopes that I would get more insight into what is causing my muscular dystrophy. I made an appointment in mid-September, which didn't work out, and then my first official diagnostic treatment happened six days ago.

The first time I went to her office in a yoga centre on Burrard St. The visit was fraught with bad timing and circumstances. First, the yoga centre, supposedly a healing centre, is on the second floor with no ramp or elevator access for disabled persons. The railings were too far apart on the broad staircase leading up to reception so I struggled to hoist myself up a step at a time hugging one of the railings. I was shaky and exhausted by the time I reached the top. Inside, the toilets in the washrooms were in stalls on raised platforms with nothing to hold onto to pull myself up. Some of the yoga rooms were also on a split level with no railings to assist with the stairs. The atmosphere was upper-class yuppie elegance, all white and beige with low light and low upholstered furniture without arms or backs that I could not use, and soft, meditative music playing. In spite of the elegance and that Walmart friendliness of the staff who greeted me, I couldn't get over how much disregard they showed for disabled people. I tried to describe how difficult it was to use their facilities, but their cognitive synapses seemed unable to register the information.

Moneca arrived as I was recovering from my climb. She apologized, though she had little choice since I was fuming by this time. She led me down one of the nondescript hallways to the small room she rents. There she discovered that she forgotten the cables she needed to connect her hocus pocus machine to her laptop. She left me sitting on a stool for half an hour while she ran to Office Depot and then to Best Buy looking for replacement cables.

When she returned she found she had also forgotten her batteries and all her running was to no avail. She was stressed out to the point of crying and couldn't put herself in an intuitive space, which is so necessary for this kind of treatment. I was not in a good space either. I had just learned the night before that my second lover Matt had dropped dead of a heart attack at the finish line of a triathlon the weekend before and I was overwhelmed with sadness. She asked me to talk about about my loss while she gave me a free foot massage, but she turned everything I shared around to talk about herself. I surmised that she was too stressed to focus on me.

Moneca does home visits for the same price, which I didn't know at the time she booked me at the yoga centre. I wasn't impressed that she hadn't suggest that when I booked given my mobility issues. The H1N1 flu, the film festival and bed bug infestation delayed her home visit for six weeks. We finally set up a mutually acceptable date for a week ago.

She arrived with her all-encompassing bio-feedback machine and energy "zapper". I don't know its real name, but it's more than a diagnostic machine. It does something with electro-magnetic frequencies to alter bodily responses. She calls it "zapping"; probably not the correct technical term. She strapped bands around my ankles and wrists, and a large band around my head (that left indentations in my forehead for 2 hours after she left), and cables to connect all the components to her laptop. For two hours she assessed my bodily composition, chakkras and emotional patterns and then "zapped" me to make corrections.

The machine seemed to sense that I was both diabetic and had some issues with muscular dystrophy, but it focused on vitamin deficiencies and my emotional state (low-grade depression, low sex drive and my heart chakkra wasn't very open at the time). I didn't get any leads as to what was causing the muscular dystrophy. The machine threw out vague terms for problems I was facing, such as "trauma" and "poison". When I asked for further clarification she just shrugged and said "They're just words on a page." At another point she told me that I come from a very good genetic stock. The machine read my stock to be a "1" while hers was a "19". She wasn't to tell me much about what that meant either. She confessed she was only able to use 10% of the machine's capacity as she was still learning about it. She had paid $23,000 and was obviously trying to recoup some of it be doing these half-ass assessments. I paid her the $100 fee (which she told me later really should have been $150) and she left.

Two days later she sent me a report that was almost a verbatim repeat of the "words on a page" that the machine coughed up without any interpretation. They were largely useless to me. She also gave me 5 points to work on before her next visit: 1) Check wheat consumption (my sister's treatment for a gluten allergy seems to have worn off after the H1N1), 2) Eat less salt, more raw foods, 3) Learn about hormones dopomine, seratonin and oxytocin (to what end she did not explain), 4) Pick up a book by Mantek Chia called "Microcosmic Orbit" to learn the tantric practice of circulating lust energy through the body, and 5) Understand that what I eat affects me. That last point assumes I know nothing after struggling with food allergies, digestive and diabetic issues and their treatments over the past 20 years. One can always learn more, but where exactly should I focus? This report was supposed to be worth $150? Not!

Today I also went to see a famous Vancouver naturopath and acupuncturist, Larry Chan, who I was referred to by Thomas Moore, the "intuitive healer" my sister recommended. Thomas had said my dystrophy has been caused by excessive uric acid in my body over the last 20 years. My GP says that makes no sense since he tests my kidney function and for uric acid every year, but Thomas told me Larry Chan "walks on water" as far as he was concerned. While I didn't put a lot of stock in Thomas's diagnosis I did more more insights into my dystrophy. I waited four months for this appointment. Hopefully something will come out of it.

Although Larry Chan's manner instilled in me more confidence in his professionalism than Moneca's did, the initial hour-long appointment was $250 and he has requested I have two tests done, one that costs $80, a second that costs $158 and a follow-up appointment that costs $90. Total cost before I get any feedback or treatment = $578. There goes Christmas!!