Offer Up Your Best Defense

I think it helps that I think of myself as a healthy person. And that I like being strong, physically and in every way.

I am a healthy person. I value health. I have a lot of thoughts about and approaches to being healthy.

But I believe in healing.

Healing is getting better. Not masking symptoms. Healing is physical and mental and emotional and spiritual. I had a green-stick fracture of my collar bone once (broken when a horse fell with me when jumping a ditch in the rain when I was 14). There was nothing to be done except to wear a brace to hold my shoulders back to stretch the bone out as straight as possible for it to heal. The doctor said, “Well, when this heals, it will never break there again.” That is healing.

And that is why I don’t particularly believe in allopathic medicine -- too often it doesn’t heal. Here, allopathic medicine says, take this pill for the rest of your life. Never mind the side effects; we have more pills for that. I’ll use allopathic medicine when it’s approach is healing . . . or as a stopgap when I haven’t figured out a healing approach yet.

For the past several years, I’ve had horrid allergy problems. The problems came and went and coincided with a lot of different things and I tried this and that and the other thing to no avail. I tried convincing my body that pollen really didn’t want to kill it. When that didn’t work, I’d resort to allergy pills. When that didn’t work, I’d go back again, trying to figure it out. It was really this chronic thing that I sort of got used to and sort of thought was just my normal. Hell, I deserved it anyway since I smoked for fifteen years and was raised in a pill family with antibiotics and antihistamines as the norm.

For Christmas, husband got me a neti pot. I have to say, it has been a miracle. Am I healed? Well, time will tell on that one, but I’m so much better that I have to put it in the miraculous healing department. I sleep. I don’t snork. I’m even coughing less. I don’t have to buy tissues every single time I find myself in a grocery store (because as we all know, toilet paper is never soft enough, and hankies are just too gross). I honestly expect it will continue to improve for months to come.

Most of what makes us sick, or makes us better, is in our minds. Or maybe we’re possessed by an incubus but that’s the same thing, just a different viewpoint. Maybe the neti pot just washes out my nose and sinuses. Or maybe it purifies me spiritually. Or both. Or something else.

I’ve been healed before, and in various and sundry ways. I broke my little finger and it healed crooked. So I thought it straight. I just used the idea that we replace every single cell in our bodies and thus, with intention, I should be able to talk my body into replacing those cells in a more orderly fashion. And it worked after a fashion in that my finger is not perfectly straight but it has full range of motion and is no longer so crooked that anyone would notice if I didn’t put my hand flat on a table and point it out to them.

The worst thing I ever had, probably worse than the sinus/allergy thing, was TMJD. And it was bad. I was in pain a lot, my jaw locked closed rather regularly, and I often quit eating in the middle of a meal because my jaw hurt too much to chew even soft food. The dentist I had at the time recommended an oral surgeon and said I’d have to have my jaw broken. That was not an answer I took kindly to, so every time I had my teeth cleaned, I went to a different dentist and had a TMJ consultation. They all said different things, mostly horribly interventive things, like get braces again, reset the jaw, put teflon in the joint. I would just pay them then go to a different dentist next time.

I do not know why I thought there was some other answer. Probably because I continued to hurt but I wasn’t about to let them do something, yet again, that they couldn’t undo if it didn’t work. Finally I went to a dentist who I really did not like. I mean, from the start, she and I took a dislike to one another. But when I described my problem and the solutions suggested, she said she knew a physical therapist I should go to, then she just showed me the one single exercise I should do, relaxing and opening my jaw without thrusting it. She told me to never ever pop it (why didn’t I know that already? and why hadn’t any other dentist mentioned that every time I did that I was injuring it?) and to pay attention when it hurt and to stop doing what I was doing to hurt it.

I never went back to her but she healed me. I’ve never again had a serious issue with TMJ, and I've never met another dentist who knew that exercise much less who thought it would work (most of them insist I never had TMJ since I got better).

Healing requires to keep asking the question, to never take no for an answer, and to be open to what you never even considered a possibility (which honestly most often means changing what your question is because you rarely if ever start out with the question that will lead to healing).

Without being stupidly gullible about it.

The Cat's Tale

“Meow, meow, meow, meow,” she said to her brothers. “You wouldn’t believe the adventures I’ve had today!”

“Meow, meeeep, meow,” her brothers said. “What what what what? We’ve been worried since we hadn’t seen you. Where have you been and what have you been doing? And why are you walking funny? Purrr.”

“I’m walking funny because that dang door hit me. I don’t know what happened exactly. I was following the small human around and I was almost through the door when everything went black. When I woke up, they were all looking at me, even the biggest ones, and saying disturbing things like ‘she’s not dead yet’. Oh, I hurt so bad. Something in my neck and shoulders got hurt and for awhile I couldn’t move my front legs at all and oh, it hurt so bad. But they put me in a soft place and held me and talked to me and sang to me and never left me alone so that if I woke up and was scared because it hurt, they were there with me and they were nice to me even when I bit them and I slept and slept mostly and when I woke up, it was morning and my front legs worked just a little bit and then I wasn’t quite so scared.

“The big ones said not to worry and that they’d just take me with them today. That’s when we got in that big blue thing out there and it was weird, moving without moving but they seemed to think it was alright and nothing to get excited about. Then we stopped again and they put me with the littlest one in the shade of an apple tree while they took buckets and went away and when they came back they had blueberries with them. They kept doing that until they had eight buckets of the things but I just sat there and the kids would bring me food to eat and milk to drink and there were even two kids I didn’t know who held me and petted me and everyone was paying attention to me and it was like I was their queen.

“Then they said we were going home but we didn’t. In fact, I’m not sure where they went. It was just a short way from the blueberries and the moving without moving stopped and they all told the old one what kind of sodas they wanted and he went in by himself but he came back without the sodas and told them he was treating them to dinner. They were all very excited about it. I don’t know what kind of place it was but it had a snake on the sign and at least twenty motorcycles sitting out front and lots of people dressed oddly in black leather and our people seemed very excited to be able to eat there and left me and the camera and the phone all sitting there in the unlocked car with all the windows down.

“They were gone a long time but the girls came out to check on me several times and even brought a wet towel to lay over me to make sure I wasn’t too hot but we were parked in the shade so I was fine. I was tired anyway from all the excitement so I just slept mostly.

“Oh, but when they came back, they brought me the most delicious thing to eat! It tasted like some of our cat food but not dry and not milky. It was smooth and crunchy at the same time and they called it catfish! Fish just for cats, if you can imagine that! So, I’m not sure what they ate but that’s what they brought to me. Then it was that sickening motion without moving thing again, and then we were home.

“I’m glad to be home, boys, but that was quite the adventure. Maybe if you get your head smushed in the door sometime you’ll get to go on an adventure too! Meow meow purrrrr.”

daring to be the control group

Scratching
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

My horse had a major injury. Not something like a broken leg or anything, but something that anywhere else anyone else would have called the vet and the vet would have sutured it, at least, and probably started systemic antibiotics and likely analgesics and put on stall rest and who knows what else.

When I saw it, it scared me. If this became infected, it could become life threatening. And it was in a bad place, just under the flank, in such a place that there was air under the wound. The hole, scratched in there by a horse in love with scratching himself after he’d managed to break off the top of the tree, was about the size of a quarter. There was already a small edema under his belly.

The wound was draining serus and blood, mostly serus. It was not infected. I disinfected it but with some caution too because I didn’t want to introduce infectious agents where there had been none and I didn’t want whatever I used to disinfect it to then inhibit the healing of the wound. For example, do you know to always rinse off hydrogen peroxide because the same oxidation that disinfects the wound also inhibits healing. Of course, you have to rinse with something sterile. Boiled water works. That’s what I used, H2O2 and then boiled H2O. I wondered whether I should even have done that. Then I applied black salve (ichthamol ointment) generously. Then I watched and waited and took his temperature (to check for infection) and his pulse (to check for pain) twice a day and watched some more.

He never moved any differently because of the injury, never showed any sign of pain or infection. He was outside in his field the whole time. The wound wept for several days. The edema grew. His temperature and pulse and attitude and appetite never changed. Then the wound started filling in, just a little bit. And the edema didn’t change. Then, one morning, about a week into the injury, the edema was smaller. The horse had been laying down and I thought maybe that was why it was smaller. But it never increased again so maybe that pressure is one way that edemas under the belly are reduced.

In two weeks the edema was gone. The wound had been closed for several days at two weeks and at three except for a slight star of scar tissue you couldn’t tell it had ever been.

Here is the thing -- people in general, and doctors/veterinarians in particular, don’t know what the natural course of an event, a pregnancy, a wound, whatever, is anymore. I came right up against that with my pregnancies, where an OB insisted that just about every woman he attended would have died without his intervention but when quizzed it became painfully obvious that he’d never seen a natural labor. To him natural labor meant induction, pitocin, epidural, episiotomy, traction, hemorrhage and everything else. Intervention is so common that it is the norm and there isn’t a control group of natural healing to compare it with.

What I did to the horse was intervention and honestly might not have been helpful intervention. I tried to use my judgment and do my best at the time but it might have been that I interfered as much as a veterinarian would have. And it might have been that a veterinarian’s care would have sped the wound’s healing by . . . a couple days maybe. Stitches would have meant it was closed sooner, but perhaps it being open wasn’t a bad thing. Do you see the assumptions that get made when we take over the role of the body? We don’t really know any of it.

There is a place for alopathic medicine. There is a place for holistic medicine. But there ought to be an even bigger place for allowing what will happen to happen. Including, eventually, death.

Where the line is is always the question. And it becomes a question of where we put our trust -- outside or inside?

Like so many of my posts, this one is really a question, not an answer. But my bias is always for the inside job.


My creation
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

These are wound photos at about 2 days, about a week, and about 2 weeks from date of injury.