Deb decided that she no longer wanted to be dependent on drugs. Sure, the drugs were prescribed by doctors, refilled at will at any pharmacy and came in neat little identifiable bottles with the name and dosage instructions. But it was still drugs! Believe it or not, one of the doctors told Deb the first time she was in the hospital that the key to controlling the spasms that came along with her condition was stretching and range of motion. Yet they proceeded to prescribe several medications for it over the years.
There were drugs for pain, drugs for spasms, drugs for bladder control, drugs for constipation caused by drugs for pain and drugs for depression for having to take all those confounded drugs! Deb had enough when it was found that a prescription she had been given for acne was linked to several suicides. That was it.
She had always been both encouraged and intimidated by the time she had gone cold turkey with the pregnancy of my son. Encouraged by the fact that she had survived nine months without any prescription medication, intimidated because of the physical suffering she had endured. Now she was homeschooling and working from home and didn't want to risk bed rest and debilitation that her withdrawal had caused during her pregnancy.
She decided to investigate every natural remedy we could afford, and a couple we couldn't. There was massage therapy, reflexology, herbalists, a doctor of nutripathy, aroma therapy and prayer (there had alway been that, but now maybe a little more specific to the task at hand.) We built up a fair amount of debt because, of course, none of this is covered by insurance, even though it might prevent an awful lot of 'covered' medical bills. However, we had to narrow down her choices to the most beneficial.
Most of these were helpful to some extent, except for one herbalist who felt her wrist and said that her nervous system was dead. [Give me a break, he was scared to deal with anything more than arthritis!] Fortunately, there was Susan Deng. Susan operates a very popular, though very quaint herbalist shop that is as full of charm as it is herbs, teas, roots and supplements. She very professional, in a Western sort of way, while maintaining the quiet, spiritual demeanor of her native China. She was actually a neurosurgeon in China, but did not get certification here in the states. In the "greater good of the universe" sense, that was probably a good thing!
Susan prescribed for my wife an herbal potion that was primarily to help her get over her withdrawal from medication and to relax her muscles. It was a combination of at least 15 exotic looking ingredients (one looked like snake skin, but was actually some sort of bark). Her assistant would take about 1/2 hour measuring out the recipe using a delicate hand-held scale. When boiled, the concoction smelled awful and filled the house with a pungent smell reminiscent of crushed weeds pulled from a garden. The drink actually worked well in controlling my wife's spasms and other assorted aches and pains.
Deb has narrowed her focus of treatments to Susan Deng's treatments (she gets varying mixtures for a variety of internal needs) and her own use of herbal extracts that she has learned from books like Back to Eden and 101 Natural Cures. I've become her massage therapist, working her over like kneaded dough, (she needs deep tissue stimulation, not just relaxation).
Anyway, its been over a year since Deb has taken any medication stronger than Ibuprofen and that's few and far between. No more prescription bottles all over, no more remembering what to take when or what's good for what and best of all, no more side effects. Nothing is making her hair fall out, her skin break out, her digestive system to stop, sleeplessness, drowsiness dizziness, nausea, fatigue or paranoia. She says that even what pain she feels lets her know that she is alive in places she thought she had lost forever. YEAH!!!
