“I can’t believe what just happened,” she said breathlessly, as she repeatedly raised and lowered her arm, free of all pain and limitations.

A few weeks ago, Sydney Coates, a 67 year-old advocate for the elderly and the dying, called me to ask if she could be seen right away, saying that she had torn her left rotator cuff tendons.

While squatting on the floor to remove a stain, Sydney reached her left arm around to pick up a large bowl of water. As she brought her arm back, she felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. After standing up, she discovered she could not lift her left arm above her waist due to pain and weakness. She waited a few days to see if the symptoms would improve, but they got progressively worse.

One evening while sitting in a movie theater, Sydney moved her left arm to pick up her purse. The movement resulted in such excruciating pain, she thought she would either vomit or faint—or both. The next morning she phoned me for an appointment.

She came into my home office and sat patiently in the living room, waiting to be seen.

“Sydney, I can see you now. Come on in,” I called out to her from the hallway that leads to my office.

I watched Sydney walk slowly down the hall toward me with her arm in a homemade sling. In the office, she carefully removed the sling at my request, taking care not to move her arm.

She cautiously extended her arm by her side. I asked her to slowly lift her arm until she felt pain. She protested, “I can’t lift it. It’s too painful and the tendons are torn.” I persuaded her to lift the arm an inch or two, then a few more inches. Ever so slowly, inch by inch, Sydney extended her outstretched arm above her head.

“Oh my God. This is unreal,” she said, her face flushed with excitement. “I’m in no pain. Something must have happened while I was waiting in your living room.” Sydney continued to raise and lower her left arm with a look of disbelief on her face.

“That’s amazing, Sydney,” I responded. “Do you actually think all that healing happened while you sat in the living room? Where exactly were you sitting?”

We walked back to the living room; she pointed to the end of the couch closest to the hall, next to a potted Norfolk Island pine tree. I said, “Oh, that’s where the head monk sat for the healing ceremony.”

“What healing ceremony?” she asked.

After a young snowboarder crashed into me in 2007, I developed one serious medical problem after another, one of which was a severe autoimmune reaction to the nickel in the stainless steel plate that the orthopedist had screwed into my leg bones to hold the shattered pieces together. After I eventually identified the cause of my autoimmune problems, the orthopedist reluctantly removed the plate, but not before massive damage had occurred to my body.

One of the fallouts from the nickel in the stainless steel plate was an autoimmune thyroid “storm” (thyrotoxicosis). The too-numerous-to-count thyroid antibodies attacked my thyroid gland, causing a massive release of thyroid hormones into my blood stream. It felt like I had drunk over one hundred cups of coffee.

The medical emergency occurred while I was on a rafting trip with friends in a remote part of Utah. My blood pressure and heart rate soared to alarmingly high levels. Instead of rupturing a cerebral vessel and dying of a hemorrhagic stroke, my body dealt with the excess pressure by making hundreds of fistulas in my brain. I could hear the sickening sound of the fistulas forming—a popping noise, like the sound of gunfire in my head.

Fistulas are abnormal connections between two structures. In my case, the fistulas occurred between the arterial and venous blood vessels. The high-pressure arterial blood in my head got transferred prematurely through the fistulas to the low-pressure venous system. The veins accommodated the transfer of the high-pressure blood by ballooning out. The expansion of the veins left me with painful pressure and pounding in my head with each beat of my heart. My swollen right eye bulged out of the socket and the left eye deviated inward as though constantly looking at the bridge of my nose. I was not able to fall asleep for more than a few minutes at a time for well over a year.

I could not go on living in this endless state of siege— night and day—without a single moment of reprieve. I barely hung on.

None of the neurosurgeons I spoke with said that they could operate on my brain because the fistulas were too numerous and that I would most likely die on the operating table.

As I began to seriously contemplate my exit from the world, one of my dear doctor friends contacted neurosurgeons around the country and finally found a neurosurgeon at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who agreed to perform the surgery. He said I had a 50:50 chance. That meant I had a 50% chance of dying on the operating table and a 50% chance of getting well. Those odds sounded like a win-win situation to me.

One of my long-time patients, Barbara, (R.I.P.), feared that I would die during the upcoming surgery. She and I had a deep bond, not to mention our shared day, month, and year of birth. Unbeknownst to me, Barbara had contacted a group of the Dali Lama’s monks who had been visiting Santa Fe on a mission to raise funds for a Tibetan orphanage. She paid ten of them handsomely to hold an evening of prayer and chanting for my healing. She made sure I would be home at the designated time—not a difficult task since I stuck close to home in my impaired and limited state of existence.

When the day arrived, I got a call in the late afternoon from a neighbor saying that men in robes and sandals were walking in single file around the Commons, the co-housing community where I live. The neighbor talked to one of them and discovered that they were looking for me! I looked out my window and saw a sight from another world—ten maroon-robed monks walked solemnly down the path toward my house.

My sister, Veet, had known of their coming. She greeted them in Hindi and invited them into my home. Having lived in India many years, she conversed with them and made them at ease in the living room while she served them homemade chai she had been brewing for the past few hours.

The head monk sat at the near end of the couch. Two more monks sat at the far end of the couch. I sat wedged between the head monk and the second monk, with my shoulders touching their shoulders. My breathing synchronized with the rise and fall of the head monk’s chest, helping me to keep my mind focused.

Three monks sat on the opposite couch under the tall windows framing the fading light of evening. Two monks sat close together on the piano bench, and two in folded chairs. All of us together formed an imperfect circle.

Several neighbors snuck into my living room and sat on the floor cross-legged, not wanting to miss the ceremony. Someone lit beeswax candles and turned off the lights—except for one soft light in the kitchen where the chai brewed in the pan, sending waves of exotic aromas throughout the house.

After all the monks had finished drinking their chai, the head monk turned to me and spoke in rudimentary and heavily accented English. He spoke of sickness being like clouds in the sky that hide the sun. Behind the clouds, the sun still shines brightly. As he spoke, I slipped into an altered state of consciousness, no longer able to focus on his words. I floated on waves of peace, as tears from my opened heart dribbled down my cheeks.

The healing ceremony began with prayers spoken in Tibetan. When the chanting part of the ceremony began, the deep, low-pitched guttural vowel sounds created an almost palpable vibration in the room. My body began to vibrate with the vibrating chests of the monks on either side of me. I entered another world where there was no pain and no suffering. I lost all sense of time.

The most miraculous part of the ceremony was when I actually fell asleep as I sat upright between the two monks, something I hadn’t been able to do since the fistulas formed in my head—other than for a few minutes at a time.

I woke up when the head monk stood up which I assumed meant the ceremony was completed. He stood in front of me and, with his palms pressed together, he bowed to me, then put his hands on my damaged head and said in his endearing accent, “You will not die. You will be all right. The surgeon will do a very good job.”

Sydney listened intently to the story, visibly moved. She said, “Ah. So that’s what happened,” as she wiped some tears from her eyes. After a few moments of silence, she said that she had already made an appointment to get physical therapy the following day and wondered if she should just cancel the appointment. Although she had no more reason to go to PT, I encouraged her to keep the appointment simply to make sure she had healed completely.

Sydney left her appointment with me in a state of bewonderment. For the next few days she left messages on my answering machine, letting me know that she was still free of pain in her shoulder and still had full range of motion—and still incredulous. The physical therapist said that there was nothing wrong with her shoulder and that there was no need to return.

Many times since that ceremony, patients have said to me that they feel exceptionally peaceful sitting in my living room. About two years after the ceremony, a woman said, “There is something about your living room that makes me feel really peaceful. I feel a healing presence in there.”

I told her about the ceremony. To this day, as I walk downstairs in the morning and look out over the living room, I can still see all ten of the monks in the exact places where each of them sat. And I smell the chai and I remember.