I once sought her assistance for a severe headache that I had right before an exam. She was on her break in between clients and only had about five minutes to help me, but during that five minutes she got rid of my headache entirely. Another time I saw her for a badly sprained ankle. I walked in on crutches, and walked out without them. And I didn’t need them again.
For the better part of a decade (before I started having babies anyway), I didn’t see any actual doctors. Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one time when I went to see my healer with a bad bacterial infection (it was strep throat if I remember right), and she actually told me to go to the doctor for antibiotics. She knows her limits, I think.
I went to see her while I having my miscarriage, years ago. The doctor had told me that miscarriage was inevitable (there was no heartbeat anymore). And since I had refused the vacuum extraction, they expected it to take between seven and ten (and possibly longer) excruciatingly painful days to complete the process.
I went to see my healer the following morning, in a great deal of pain. And I asked her to save the baby (even though the heartbeat was gone – I’ve always had a real gift for denial). She did a reflexology treatment, after which the physical pain was relieved a great deal. Then, a little over an hour later, my uterus gently expelled the remainder of its contents all at once. Sorry to be so graphic here. The bleeding stopped immediately, and I had no more physical pain.
I went to the emergency room anyway and demanded that they do an ultrasound. I was having a very hard time letting go of that baby, and I secretly hoped that everyone had made some sort of terrible mistake and that the baby was still there. But my uterus was completely empty, and the doctor seemed a bit baffled. I didn’t ask him, or care actually, why he seemed baffled though, no doubt because I was too caught up in my own sadness at the time. And strangely, it took several years, and hearing about other miscarriages, for me to come to understand and appreciate what my healer had done for me.
When my daughter Isabel was about four months old, I took her to the doctor for a chest cold. They did a chest x-ray to see if there was an infection in her lungs, and found, instead, gas bubbles. There were so many gas bubbles in her abdomen that they had actually expanded up into her chest cavity (yet she hadn’t cried or been upset or anything). So I called my healer, who came over to my house and did a reflexology treatment on her. She relieved so much gas from my daughter’s tiny body that the whole living room stunk! The next day, the doctor took another x-ray, this time of Isabel’s abdomen, and found no gas.
My healer suggested to me, on the night that she relieved Isabel’s gas bubbles, that I stop eating wheat and dairy products while I was breastfeeding Isabel. I thought this was ridiculous, and I didn’t listen. Two weeks later, Isabel was hospitalized for constipation because she hadn’t pooped in two weeks. They gave her an enema and ran a bunch of tests, but they finally released her without having figured out what was wrong. After that, I stopped eating wheat and dairy for the remainder of the breastfeeding. And later, when I switched Isabel to formula, my healer suggested that I only give her soy (not milk) based formulas. She couldn’t tell me why though. All she could tell me was that Isabel’s body didn’t like wheat or dairy.
I continued the soy formula up until Isabel was eighteen months old (at twelve months old I made sure to switch to a soy based formula that was specially designed to meet the needs of older babies – twelve to twenty four month olds to be exact). Up until that point, Isabel was a happy, chubby, and really easy baby. The only problem was that she hadn’t started to walk yet.
Naturally, the doctors became concerned that she was eighteen months old and not walking yet, so they sent her to a developmental pediatrician. This developmental pediatrician (oh, how I’d dearly love to give you this idiot’s name, but it would go against every one of my self-imposed writing rules) told me that Isabel hadn’t started to walk yet because she hadn’t been drinking whole milk, but that other than that she was perfectly normal. If this doctor had noticed the Autism, I could’ve gotten Isabel early intervention. And I would’ve seen the Autism much earlier in Cale. And I could’ve gotten him early intervention. But I had no idea what I was looking at, thanks to this developmental pediatrician.
Feeling like a terrible mother, I put Isabel on whole milk immediately (and since I was giving her milk, I figured I may as well give her wheat as well). Then we moved to Arizona, and within two months Isabel did start to walk. But she also started getting skinny. AND she started slamming her head onto the floor.
By this time I had had Cale (my third baby), and I had fallen out of contact with my healer. At first I thought Isabel was just jealous of the new baby, and she may have been but that still didn't explain the extent of it. She started to scream and bang her head onto the floor over any tiny confrontation (if I told her “no” about something, or to be careful, etc.). And she wouldn't do it on the carpet. No. She'd go over to the tile and bang her head on it.
She did it EVERY time I sat down and started nursing the baby. As a result of the constant interruption, my milk dried up early and I had to put Cale on formula. And before long, Isabel’s head banging became head slamming. She started slamming her head onto the floor repeatedly with no confrontation of any kind. And she'd start it so quickly and so unexpectedly, and slam it so hard so fast, that I'm simply amazed she never split her skull open before I could get over to her. It was absolutely terrifying.
I told the pediatricians about this repeatedly, but since Isabel had already seen a developmental pediatrician (oh GOD I want to give the name!) they figured it was just the “terrible twos.” Still, I prayed every day for God to protect her head long enough for me to get over to her. We had a lot of very hard ceramic tile, so I stopped showering before Shane got home at night because I didn't know if Isabel would survive it.
Isabel did this whenever we had people over too, so we stopped having people over. And she did it in public places too, so we ended up avoiding public places. If I did have to take her to the grocery store, I would run to grab everything we needed because I knew that it was coming. Some well-meaning person would inevitably look at her and say, "Hi sweetie," and give her a little wave. In response, she would scream at the top of her lungs and start slamming her head into the bar on the front of the grocery cart.
Every day, when I would take Alden to pre-school, Isabel would scream and flail and slam her head into the back of the stroller the entire way through the school, into Alden’s classroom, and all the way back out to the car again. And when we’d go to pick Alden up from pre-school, she’d repeat the process. One time, I made the mistake of trusting her to get out of the stroller in Alden’s classroom. Well, she got pissed about who knows what, and slammed her head on the floor so hard that she didn’t get up right away. It gave Alden’s teacher and me a terrible fright.
This behavior went on for nearly three years straight (we had the terrible twos, and then the terrible threes, and then began the terrible fours – there seemed to be no end in sight). The most terrifying times for me were when she’d throw herself onto the ground in the middle of streets and parking lots to slam her head onto the ground in front of moving vehicles. I would have to drop my purse, grocery sacks, and anything else I happened to be carrying, and try to wrestle her, while holding the baby, into the car.
At three and a half years old, Isabel still couldn’t point to body parts when asked to. She was seriously behind in both her receptive and expressive language development – specifically, she could only imitate. If you asked her a question, she could only recite short lines out of Dora The Explorer. She also hadn’t gained any weight (not one pound) since the age of eighteen months.
At four years old, Isabel still couldn’t tell us what her birth date was. And when asked questions, she still could only give short, pat, imitated answers. She was finally evaluated by a pre-school team, who referred us to another developmental pediatrician. This time, Isabel was diagnosed with Autism. But the only treatment options the doctors had to offer were speech and occupational therapies (which our insurance company wouldn’t cover and we couldn’t afford to pay for out of pocket) and psychiatric medication.
This was big. This was really, really big. So naturally, I thought of my healer.
It had been years since I’d talked to my healer, and I called, from Arizona, fairly late at night. Thankfully, she took my call. She tested a bunch of foods (don’t ask me how, I’m already having trouble straddling my own credibility here:) for Isabel over the phone and finally said, “I’m so sorry, but there aren’t any foods at all that are good for Isabel right now. I’m sensing that it’s her liver. Does she have any anger?”
Envisioning fresh incidents of Isabel pulling her own hair out, vomiting on the dining table simply because she was pissed, and slamming her head onto the ground, I answered, “Why yes, she most certainly does.”
My healer suggested that I start giving Isabel 125mg per day of Magnesium (since Isabel had suffered severely from constipation ever since I’d put her on the whole milk because of Dr. wooops, that was a really close one) and 750mg per day of MSM (Methylsulfonylmethane). I started giving Isabel these things right away, and I also remembered what my healer had suggested on the night that she relieved Isabel’s gas bubbles – to not give her any wheat or dairy. So I stopped feeding her wheat and dairy as well.
Isabel stopped banging her head onto the floor (in fact, she stopped tantrums of any kind) immediately. And, shortly afterward, we made a trip to Montana for a visit. I took Isabel to see my healer, and she immediately tested a bunch of foods again (a bunch of which were good for Isabel by then, with the exception of wheat and dairy). In fact, I had her double check wheat, barley, rye, and dairy, just to be sure. They were all still bad for Isabel.
By this point, I had read a bunch of studies regarding the effects of gluten and casein on children with Autism. So, while Isabel was having her reflexology treatment, I told my healer about these studies. And I told her that she was right in telling me, when Isabel was just a baby, that Isabel’s body didn’t like gluten and casein. It had been years since Isabel had been a baby, however, so my healer didn’t remember having told me that. She reminded me that she sees a lot of clients and that she can’t possibly remember everything. And then she asked me, “What in the world is gluten anyway? And what’s casein?”
“Wheat and dairy,” I answered.
“Oh, Isabel can’t handle wheat or dairy right now,” she said.
“Yeah. She’s never been able to. And you, whether you remember it or not, have always known it,” I smiled.
She had absolutely no idea how big of a deal this was.
In addition to following this healer’s dietary suggestions, I also started doing a simple massage on the area of Isabel’s liver at bedtime every night (a massage this healer had shown me how to do). And within just a few months, Isabel had done a complete about face. Not only did her entire temperament change, but her language (both receptive and expressive) improved dramatically as well. She went from simple imitations to full-fledged conversations. And by the time she turned five, not only could she tell you what her birth date was, but she could tell you exactly which items she wanted for her birthday and what colors they should be.
Isabel never has gotten much therapy (other than the minimal amount of speech and occupational therapy that she’s received at school, and about two months of in home therapy right before we moved to Montana and lost the state insurance coverage) and she hasn’t yet had to take any psychiatric medication. She started kindergarten in a self-contained classroom designed specifically for children with high-functioning Autism, and ended the year in a regular education classroom full time. She’s in the first grade now, and the school is actually afraid to test her again for fear that she might lose her eligibility for special education services altogether.
The only thing she still struggles with is social communication. She probably always will though. After all, she does have Autism. She’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but she is waaaayyy better than she used to be. With the exception of some social deficits, and the fact that she has no stranger danger (she’s such a little love that she’d go home with some hairy guy from the gas station if you weren’t looking), you’d never know that she had Autism to the extent that she didn’t speak functionally until she was nearly four and a half years old.
It’s kind of funny actually, because we were in Arizona for the worst of Isabel’s early behaviors. My family and friends here in Montana never really saw Isabel like that for any length of time. In fact, it’s hard for them to even imagine it. I’ve had many, many people say to me since we’ve been back in Montana, “Isabel has Autism? Really, are you sure?”
I’ve told my healer this story. In fact, I’ve given her a copy of this same basic blogpost. She refuses to accept credit for Isabel’s healing, however, insisting instead that my daughter has unusual healing abilities of her own, and that she has actually healed herself. But I have to wonder if my healer doesn’t simply sense that my expectations are awfully high, since I’m taking Cale to her now. I’ve told her there’s no pressure in seeing Cale. But let’s face it. My heart is in very real danger here. Cale’s been off of gluten and casein for the past three years now. And even though this diet has been nothing short of a miracle for Isabel, it hasn’t done shit for Cale.
When this healer first tested foods for Cale, the results made no sense to me at all. She tested all of the gluten/casein free breads (white rice bread, brown rice bread, tapioca bread, amaranth bread, kamut bread, corn bread – homemade without the wheat in it, etc.) that we could possibly think of. And finally she tested “any kind of bread” as its own category. He can have no bread at all. No grains. And no fruits or vegetables either. And remember, she doesn’t know why. We were both baffled. And then she said to me, "Sugar is bad too. In fact, sugar is pure poison for Cale."
"What the hell am I going to feed him?" I asked. And she sent me home with two books, both about some old psychic named Edgar Cayce.
“I don’t know why,” she told me, “but there’s something in these that you need to know.”
Since she’s a friend of mine, I tried hard not to roll my eyes at her. And since she’s a friend of mine, I decided to try and stomach a few pages of one of these books. This man healed literally thousands of people, people with very complex diseases and disabilities, during the course of his lifetime. But that wasn’t what did it for me, I’m afraid. Do you know what did it for me? In this book, there’s a remedy for how to enlarge your breasts. Yes. That was definitely something that I needed to know! I’ll let you know if it works.
After this, I devoured both of the books. This psychic was the first to place the root cause of digestion problems in the bones of the spine, specifically in the neck (dorsal 7, or something, is the one that’s out in Cale’s neck, but my healer says there’s one out in his lower back as well). This led me to another book, which led me to another book, which led me to the book “One Cause, Many Ailments, The Leaky Gut Syndrome” by John O.A. Pagano, DC.
The piece of the puzzle that I was missing was yeast. It’s the only thing that explains no breads and no fruits or vegetables (sugar of any kind feeds yeast). There are better ways of healing the gut besides cancelling out vegetables though.
So here’s the whole puzzle that I know of so far (and I could be so totally wrong about all of this – just keep that in mind). The bones in the spine are out, which pinches off or in some other way restricts the nerves that feed signals to the digestive system. The digestive system doesn’t develop and/or function properly as a result and the results of that can vary, but may include an unusual build-up of yeast in the intestines.
The yeast is the reason that nutrients (of all kinds) don't get absorbed properly, which I would assume could affect development (among other things) all by itself. But it's also the reason that gluten and/or casein in particular don't get broken down properly in the first place AND the reason they “leak” into the bloodstream. The yeast has roots, which poke through the walls of the intestines as the yeast takes root. The partially digested gluten and/or casein proteins (along with other toxins that would, in a healthy system, be eliminated) leak straight through the yeast and its roots, directly into the bloodstream. These partially digested gluten and/or casein proteins are then carried, by the bloodstream, into the brain. They then mix with the dopamine in the brain, and this creates the opiate that affects development and causes an intensification of Autistic (neurological) symptoms, and causes my kids to crave gluten and casein. But, come to think of it, they’ve always craved sugar as well.
“It’s yeast!” I said to my healer during our next appointment.
“Oh,” she said, “Of course!”
“I think my kids have Leaky Gut Syndrome!” I continued.
“That’s exactly what they have,” she said, “but they're also geniuses.”
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," I thought, “Leaky Gut Syndrome. Now we’re finally getting somewhere.”
“Listen,” she said, “I meditated on this last night, and I’ve decided to stop charging you (she charges $50. per hour).”
Silence… as I thought, “Oh shit! She’s going to try to get out of working with my kids!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well,” she answered, “for two reasons. You are very, very lucky to have these two (Isabel and Cale) in your life.”
She must've seen the look on my face, because she said, “I know it doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but you are. You’re very lucky to get to be with them, and I’m very lucky to get to help them. The other reason I don’t want to charge you anymore is because you and Shane are already burdened enough. I cannot imagine how hard it is to be raising these beautiful children, and I don’t ever want money to stop you from bringing them to me.”
I cried. How could I not? But I’m paying her anyway, just in case.
No comments:
Post a Comment