As the attending psychologist at a large teaching hospital that is also a Level 1 trauma center, I work with many people experiencing severe and often multiple injuries. I use hypnosis and various other pain management modalities, and have found these techniques to work quite well. However, when I myself became injured, I learned about other ways of healing. One is what I fondly refer to as magic. The other is a deep level of understanding that things can happen despite what we have been taught to believe.

I needed to undergo surgery to remove a damaged nerve in my left foot. When I walked, the pain was excruciating. It began in the ball of my foot, feeling like a bolt of electricity, and would go all the way through my foot and into my leg. I drove myself to outpatient surgery. Despite the fact that I was to have local anesthesia, an IV was inserted into my arm in order to tranquilize me. I suddenly realized that I would have to negotiate with anesthesiology about this. They finally agreed to cut in half the amount of medication they would ordinarily give, after I explained my wish to use hypnosis in conjunction with the local anesthetic. Looking back, I wish that I had protested more strongly and not received any mediation at all.

The surgery went well and I drive myself home, after "strong-arming" the nurses to "look the other way." I refused the pain medication and anti-inflammatory medication my Orthopedic surgeon wanted to prescribe. He said, when you have pain…to which I responded, I will not have pain. He said, when you have swelling… to which I responded I will not have swelling. We compromised. He wrote the prescriptions and I never filled them. Both of us were happy.

When I got home, I began my hypnosis work to reduce pain and swelling. As the local anesthetic wore off, I worked harder. I was able to reduce the pain to a very small area, yet, when I stepped on my foot, the pain was still there, although not as bad as before the surgery.

That night, my massage therapist came to work on me. She plays New Age music, and when she finishes, she remains quiet for a period of time to allow the experience to continue and to penetrate even more. This time, beneath my heavily bandaged foot, I suddenly felt the sensation of cool electricity. It was like penetrating pins and needles traveling through my foot. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. And when it did, the pain was gone.

My first thought was, when I get up from her massage table and stand on my foot, the pain will return. It didn’t. Twelve hours after the surgery, I was virtually pain-free. All I felt was a little pressure at the sight of my sutures. Jennifer, my wonderful massage therapist, never having done this before, had placed her hands around my foot without touching it. And I felt it. Obviously, my initial question was, What is going on here?

A week and a half later, I returned to the Orthopedic surgeon to have my sutures removed. When he saw my foot and incision, he remarked that it looked like I had been operated on four weeks ago. He mentioned something about me being his "poster child." He said that I must be a "good healer." I had never been told that before. Much to my surprise, I had healed differently from any other time in my past.

It was my intention for this healing to be different. After all, this is what I was teaching the people with whom I worked. I did not want the standard rules about healing to apply to me. Yet, at the time, I continued to be amazed, not totally understanding just what was going on.

Wheat did this experience teach me and where did it lead me? I think that one important lesson is that pain does not have to be associated with healing, and healing does not have to occur in linear time. Another lesson is that, truly, there is magic in the world. And it is the magic of energy given from one person to another that really does change the course of healing. That has certainly proven to be the case in the work I have done with others since my own experience.

by Judy Lasher