The Cure

Medical consultations, a pharmacy’s worth of pills and a change of diet: No matter what she tried, it seemed nothing could cure May-lee Chai of a debilitating digestive disorder. And then she met The Master.

I was in my apartment in San Francisco, sobbing violently. I couldn’t breathe. I opened a window to try to let in a little air, grabbed a box of Kleenex, choked down some water and continued to cry.

The qi gong master remained calm. He manipulated the qi between his hands, cupping them as though he held an invisible ball, rolling it around and around.

He sat beside me and touched my right leg, transferring the energy to me. The friend who brought the master to my apartment held my arm.

Eventually, I stopped crying.

Let me go back to the beginning, to January 2001 when I was struck down with a mysterious illness while on a trip to Boulder, Colorado, with my father. I woke in the middle of the night in a deep sweat, pain ripping through my abdomen. I crawled to the motel bathroom and was sick for the rest of the night.

The next day, my father drove us the 220 kilometers back to his home in Laramie, Wyoming. For three weeks, my illness continued. The pain came in waves, sometimes lasting as long as four hours at a time. The doctors concluded I had a severe case of the flu.

After a month of being sick continuously, it became obvious I did not have the flu. So the doctors checked me into the hospital and put me through a battery of tests for cancer, polyps, Crohn’s disease, celiac sprue, ulcers, liver diseases, ulcerative colitis, viruses, strange parasites, bacterial infections, even pregnancy. All negative. All showed the same thing: I was good health. Except that I wasn’t.

I was sent to a psychologist, who thought anti-depressants might help. They didn’t.

I went to a gastroenterologist who prescribed me anti-spasmodics. They controlled the pain, but did nothing for the food allergies: Foods I used to be able to digest suddenly made me violently ill. For a year, the only meat I could digest was pork, and I hate pork. I used to be a vegetarian, but now all fruit and vegetables were out (except bananas, and boy, did I get tired of eating bananas every meal, every day). Then suddenly I was no longer able to digest pork. But chicken was OK. And so it went. Year after year. My reactions to foods shifting abruptly. No doctor could tell me why.

I began to suspect that stress might be a trigger, that maybe I had some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had had plenty of stress in the previous two decades – a childhood marked by gunfire; during my 20s caring for my mother, who developed cancer when I was still in grad school; caring for my father through open-heart surgery and other illnesses. Maybe the stress was just too much, I suggested to my doctors.

But how does one treat decades of stress and grief?

In January this year, I was found to be severely anemic and given a dose of chemotherapy that very nearly killed me, or at least made me feel that I was dying. As I lay on the floor, my right hand swollen to four times its natural size, trying desperately to explain the weird side effects to the nurse as I held my cell phone with my left hand, the nurse simply told me she had no idea why I was having this reaction to the iron infusion chemo, that going to the ER would do me no good, but I could try putting ice on my hand when I was able to stand.

Then she hung up.

Finally, in May, I decided to go through every test my new gastroenterologist in San Francisco suggested. I was sick of being sick. I’ve been to ERs in so many states, I could practically write a Zagat’s guide to emergency rooms in the U.S. I’d endure what I had to endure, I said, if she could only get to the bottom of what was wrong with me.

After a week of brutally invasive biopsies and tests, I was prescribed antibiotics. The doctor thought perhaps I had an overgrowth of bacteria in my upper GI tract. She then went to a conference in another city, and I started the antibiotics.

And so began another disaster, another ER trip and the aforementioned result of my becoming bedridden. I began to pray to my dead mother, my deceased grandparents. “If I’m going to die, let me die quickly,” I prayed. “I can’t live like this.”

Then out of the blue, I received an email from a friend I hadn’t heard from in years; she was having dreams of dead people, she told me. She knew I was in trouble. She was studying acupuncture and after we talked, she persuaded one of her professors, the qi gong master, to come to my apartment.

First, the qi gong master taught me to meditate. “Just close your eyes and concentrate on the face of someone you care about,” he said.

Thinking of my mother made me too sad, so I quickly switched to the face of my grandfather, a kind man who died when I was 19. He had been a part of my life since I was a baby, and when I was a child, I saw my beloved Ye-ye every weekend. He lived with my grandmother in a cramped apartment filled with Chinese antiques, a sheet-covered sofa, books I couldn’t read and piles of old magazines.

The year I turned 12, we moved far away from my grandparents. My grandmother died, and my grandfather became consumed with grief. I would see him again only twice, briefly, before he died.

“What happened to you when you were 11 or 12?” the qi gong master asked.

My eyes flew open. He was still seated, his eyes closed, calmly manipulating the qi between his hands. I closed my eyes again and got out, “We moved,” before I began to cry.

That’s when the qi gong master issued his diagnosis. The accumulation of repressed fear and sorrow was making me ill. I had steeled myself through those rough decades and I had held my grief in my guts. I realized I was clenching my stomach even as he spoke.

He showed me a few simple exercises to manipulate my qi, taught me how to improve my apartment’s feng shui, and said it would take a few more years to recover, but I wasn’t going to die. Not now. I would get better.

And slowly, over the summer, I have gotten better.

The American medical system is very good at fixing parts of the body when they break down: a bone, a tendon, an organ. But it doesn’t see the body as a whole. Over the years, as I visited doctor after doctor, I came to feel like the proverbial elephant being examined by the three blind men.

The qi gong master’s prescription with its emphasis on balancing the mind, body and soul makes sense to me, and it’s got me back on my feet. (I still take the Western meds that had proved effective in controlling the spasms. Qi gong is not an instant fix.)

Later, my friend told me something the qi gong master had said as she drove him back to the college that evening. “He said he saw a white tiger demon spring from your chest,” she said. “He didn’t tell you because he wasn’t sure if that would freak you out.”

No, it didn’t bother me at all. On the contrary, I was quite pleased to be free of that white tiger demon.

Illustration by Admira Pustika

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