Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/85727
backwords our route to conception detoured through a Chinese herb dispensary By Jesse Cheng Dr. Peng appeared meek and bookish. His lab coat needed bleaching. I was skeptical. After our miscarriage, Uyen and I had begun searching L.A.'s Asian ethnoburbs for M y wife and I found him in the back room of a local Chinese herb dispensary, poring over medical texts in a makeshift office—nothing more than a desk and a patient's table squeezed between a couple of cubicle dividers in the corner. a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) specialist—a different kind of fertility expert to consult, in addition to the usual ob/gyn. I had reservations about a paradigm of healing I knew little about. Uyen's mind is much more open—at times insistently so. Game as ever in the dispensary, she requested a pulse reading. Dr. Peng applied two fingers to her wrist, head lowered in concentration. A greasy Finding the Stork wedge of hair shifted with gravity. He nodded to himself; the wedge shifted some more. The doctor then launched into a winding exegesis on the role of the pituitary gland, spleen and kidneys as these related to imbalances in my wife's reproductive system. Dr. Peng be- lieved Uyen would benefit from changes in nutrition and low-potency herbal supplements. We returned home to think it over. My wife thought the explanation made good sense. I, however, was stuck on the archipelago of brown splotches on the doctor's coat sleeve. But before we could decide whether to follow up with him, Uyen began to feel stabbing pains in her lower abdomen over the next week. An ultrasound displayed an ovarian cyst, for which Western medicine has no remedy short of surgery. Unless it grew to more than seven centimeters, the ob/gyn thought it best not to operate. Uyen suggested we revisit the local dispensary. I doubted TCM could treat something that the scientific medical establishment couldn't, and I remained more than a little put off by Dr. Peng's dingy backroom operation. As it turned out, he had a ready cure at hand: a knife-free regimen involving a concoction of mixed herbs to be boiled, reduced and ingested twice a day for the next three weeks. Hers was a common problem, Dr. Peng assured us, nothing to worry about. The cyst vanished in less than a month. "Five centimeters, right side, now all gone," he murmured, peering at the ultrasound image through smeared glasses. "Wow," Uyen said, "you remember it was five centimeters, on the right side?" One declared). In addition to the growth's disappearance, how- ever, more detailed scans revealed my wife's uterine lining to be precariously thin. If we were to conceive, the fetal implantation would be tenuous, and Uyen would likely miscarry again. The ob/gyn prescribed a course of estrogen to build up the lining, followed by high dosages of progesterone to halt the thicken- ing in its tracks. Side effects—headaches, nausea, vomiting— would be virtually inevitable, and unpleasant. Uyen wondered if an alternative paradigm of healing might present another, less radical plan of action. I was still hung up on the smudges on Dr. Peng's eyeglasses lens, not to mention the sizable ring around his lab coat collar. And yet, insistently open-minded my wife remained—so back to the dispensary we went. These days, with our soon-due baby girl bouncing kicks off thing I'd complained to my wife about was the man's practice of maintaining no written records of our visits. Dr. Peng cast his eyes downward, bashful at the praise. "Such things are not hard to remem- ber if you let the mind stay open!" he said. It was indeed an auspicious result. Uyen's obstetrician was delighted, too ("Sometimes cysts spontaneously disap- pear of their own accord," the M.D. 42 wholelifetimesmagazine.com Uyen's now-robust uterine wall, I'd like to think I've become less of a curmudgeon about TCM. It was a regimen of herbs that again did the trick—no hormone injections, no side effects at all. Uyen's obstetrician marveled at the turn of events ("Looks like the little one's here to stay!" the M.D. announced, with smug satisfaction). My wife and I have kept the secret to our- selves, continuing to meet with Dr. Peng as the date draws near. "So you are 36 weeks now, right?" he asked on our last visit, straight from memory. Not a written record in sight. I tried to catch Uyen's eye, but this was all old hat for her by now. As well it should have been. Some things really aren't that hard to remember, if only one lets the mind stay open.