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Health and Healing - a short version of my
journey
THE DISEASES
I must admit I've been avoiding this page. Chronic disease still seems to be a terrible stigma in the professional world. However lately I've spoken to so many old colleagues from Harvard to Albuquerque and so on that I feel obligated to set the record straight. I think that my reputation sounds must worse than it is now. We all know how gossip is. It's like little children playing telephone in the circle.
I was born with a disease known as Sjogren's Syndrome according to the eminent Dr. Bevre Hahn at UCLA and author of one of the books on lupus. Sjogren's is in the class of connective tissue diseases and the medical experts who treat it are rheumatologists. In Dr. Hahn's opinion I could work as long as I wanted. I would simply always need a certain amount of the steroid known as prednisone and more rest than most people. She was quite correct for many years. Below I present some banners on lupus as I do have some of the characteristics of lupus - mainly extreme photosensitivity and allergy to ultraviolet light. And lupus is much more "popular" than Sjogren's. I have no lupus markers so I leave the doctors in a quandary unless they simply say it really doesn't matter because all these diseases overlap and we just treat what what we see. In addition I have tests positive for rheumatoid arthritis, and anti-phospholipid syndrome which few people have heard of and doctors don't seem to agree upon how to treat. Then there are the migraines, allergies, fibromyalgia and I few others. Again we treat things as they come along. I'm quite good at diagnosing these ailments and nipping them in the bud.
Sjogren's is characterized by very dry eyes with no tear production in my case. This is treated by eye drops. It also involves a dry mouth which I have. This leads to problems like cavities with the teeth. I also am beset by this problem but it is treated as well. Finally many people have what is referred to as "non-deforming arthritis" and I am very lucky not to have this. I take other medications to prevent arthritis pain. I've had many back injuries which required surgery. However these were probably due more to my insistence at maintaining my athletic hobbies after I should have retired.
Finally what people probably most remember about me is that I had a freak ruptured intracranial aneurysm when I was a graduate student at Harvard. For those interested, it was in the PICA, a very critical place. I was extremely lucky to have an excellent neurosurgeon who clipped the rather large bleeding artery without causing any neurological deficits other than headaches. And frankly I would assume everyone who has someone messing around in their brain would have headaches. These are now pretty much gone and my head is back to normal. My biggest problem is keeping doctors from sticking me into an MRI with a magnetic clip in my head. That would surely kill me.
Over the years I have discovered all the triggers that make me sicker than normal. These are generally easy to control once they are identified. Stress is the worst trigger. And it is common trigger for almost every other disease in the world. The stress can be emotional or physical. The other triggers are heat and sunlight. This was never a problem until we moved to Texas where we lived on Galveston Island. It is incredibly hot and humid. I was "sick" almost constantly and retired from science for the first time. That is when I began to paint.
- Examples stresses in the last few years which caught me
off guard are:
Having the house robbed several times and my web site destroyed maliciously as well as everything from my paintings, jewelry I'd made, beadwork I'd made to antique furniture and crystal and gifts from friends. Stolen items pretty much gave away the identity of the thief but this didn't help in having anything returned. Having ones homepage changed to say that they were dead in a horrible accident would be shocking to anyone. - Being exposed to large amounts of an unknown pesticide or herbicide in a neighborhood where the use of these are prohibited. Basically this falls under suddenly living in close proximity to rather ignorant people and having to tolerate unexpected bizarre behavior.
- Suddenly living in a climate almost intolerably hot (up to 110 F) and dry where I can't go out in the daytime at all.
- Lack of a family support group
THE "TREATMENTS" - ALLOPATHIC AND COMPLEMENTARY OR ALTERNATIVE
There is only so much that traditional medicine can do to help people like me. Thus I looked into alternative medicine. I found three methods that worked quite well, Reiki, naturopathy, and spiritual healing. I describe them in the order in which I discovered them.
REIKI
SPIRITUAL HEALING
NATUROPATHY - ALSO LIFESAVING
07/06/2009 14:15:00 -0700
