my first needle!

I got to needle my first person yesterday! I've been in school for almost a full year and I finally got to needle my first person! Mind you, it was only one point, but still it was exhilarating. So much of what I have learned this year is the theory behind the points and where the actual points are and human anatomy that you need to be careful of. We literally "don't want to strike a nerve!"

We started out by practicing on inanimate objects- an orange, a piece of foam, a bunch of paper towels folded up into a block- which by the way is IMPOSSIBLE to needle. I started on the orange and felt like such a stud. "This is easy!" But then I moved on and I couldn't even get the needle into the folded paper towels, it just kept bending. Apparently there is a teacher at the school (that I haven't had yet) who is from a foreign country and she had to be able to get the needle thru the block of paper towels in 10 seconds or less before she was ever allowed to needle a human. That's old school.

We got to move on once we decided we were comfortable. First we needled our non-dominant arm and then we needled our dominant arm. We only did one point- Large Intestine 11 (which is halfway between the lateral epicondyle of the humerus and the lateral end of the cubital crease.) I totally almost passed out when I first needled it on myself. Oops. I don't know why, it just freaked me out. Receiving acupuncture doesn't bother me. But the fact that I was doing it to myself (or maybe it was because I was sitting up??) just got me all light-headed. You put the needles in far enough that you get a "qi response" which either the patient reports or you the practitioner can feel. I could strongly sense the the qi getting activated. Anywho, I did some breathing exercises and calmed myself down and was fine.

Then came the big step... needling someone else. My partner, Jenny, decided at first that she wasn't ready to needle someone else, but she was willing to let me try. It was so scary!!! But then I took a deep breath and just did it. And it was totally fine. And I liked it. I wasn't sure how I would feel about putting needles in someone but I didn't mind it- especially when I know how beneficially it can be.

And Jenny was encouraged by my success and worked up the nerve to do it to me. And that went well too!

One of my classmates did manage to bruise their partner when they needled them. Oops! Soooo glad that wasn't me!

A year from now I will probably have put 1000 needles in people and I won't even remember how scared I was and how proud of myself I was for sticking one little needle in. But it was pretty awesome.