Madison F. answered • 10/22/19
Expert Proofreader, Editor & Writing Consultant
I used to be a skeptic of all things that struck me as hippie-dippie, mystical, spiritual, anything that a shawl-wearing, self-identified metaphysics enthusiast might buy into. This included homeopathic remedies, let alone ones infused with so-called powers, until I came down with a seemingly incurable splitting headache on my sixteenth birthday. I blew out the candles on the cake and everything went sideways. The pain was incredible, the kind of sensation that makes you forget you ever felt healthy and normal. My parents, alarmists by nature, called up my doctor and begged him to come to our house and see if I was alright. He told them that he had appointments lined up all day, and anyhow, that he wasn't a visiting doctor. If he was going to perform tests, they'd have to be at his office. My parents hung up, vowing to switch doctors, and shortly thereafter I collapsed. Blurry patches of memory follow, wherein my parents prayed beside me for a miracle, checked my pulse to make sure I wasn't dying on them, checked to see what the co-pay would be for an E.R. visit, and (when the answer was not to their liking) finally carried me to the car and drove to the local witchdoctor. My friends and I had biked past her place of work– her witch's den, we called it– a few times before, craning our necks to peer through the windows, in hopes of catching a glimpse of potions, cauldrons, jars of mice or eyeballs. In reality all we saw was a partial list of services on a small sign outside: ENERGY THERAPY, HEALING SESSIONS, HERBAL TINCTURES AND REMEDIES, TAROT READING. When I woke up, groggy-eyed but mercifully pain-free, I was in the witchdoctor's house, covered in bundles of lightly smoking herbs. She was humming from the corner, watching me. When she saw I was awake, she grinned. "Not such a skeptic now, huh?" she said, and winked.
