Adventures in Energy Healing

Do all mother's of children who can not walk injure their backs? I want to know. Many of the mothers I know of kids who can not walk and are total care and are over the age of 5 have bad backs.  UGH! 

This Monday I bent down to pull a teeny tiny weed in my garden and stood up again and felt a horrible burning pain in my lower back. An hour later I hopped in the car to get Ellie and after the 25 minute ride could not get out of the car without great difficulty. One ER visit, MRI and CT scan later I found out I have three, not one, not two, but three bulging discs in my lower back. Gahhh!

I am not happy about this at all. 

It has been a trying 10 years of knee issues and now this.

In total desparation have finally gone over to the other side of medicine and started to study the effects of energy on the body and using energy to heal it. So for all of you people out there in the blogosphere who have been patiently telling me to do this for so long, I am looking into it and have had amazing success healing my knees (with help). They are now tip top (well still have some crepitus) but my mobility is nearly 100% (am still afraid to try a full squat but may have to now) and am running up stairs and my knees are not swelling and unstable anymore...  Don't get me wrong, I am keeping up with my physical therapy - and will do that for the rest of my life. BUT, what started all of this was that about a just over a month ago I was having an "acute arthritic flair up" that was so painful not only could I not move my knee, or put any weight on it, but even the sheet touching it was painful. I was in agony. OK, I am only 41 and having a "severe arthritic flair up" is the term my Ortho Doc used...see anything very, VERY wrong with this picture?

A couple days before this flair up, I had seen amazing changes in a friend (who was suffering from Lyme Disease for a decade and now she suddenly looked 10 years younger and all her symptoms gone). I have known her since we were in college so I know what she looked like back then. Just amazing. Turns out she has started doing energy work on herself and with the help of an energy practitioner so I called her to find out who her person was. I called Carla and by the end of the hour+ session my knee was out of pain and the swelling receded and by the next day I was up and walking. On top of that the lack of stability in my left knee was gone as well. I have not had any issues with either knee since. 

I know if you follow the links and read all that stuff some of you out there are going to think I have lost my marbles. I am a sceptic for sure. A prove it to me type of person. But Carla's rates were so reasonable and I was in such agony, I said, I am willing to gamble on this small amount of cash because working with someone over the phone to heal my knee sounds nuts but a whole lot better than UFlexa Injections and total knee replacement surgery ... I was totally desperate. It was a fantastic gamble. 

Even after my knees felt better, I followed the medical route - my MRI showed severe arthritis in my right knee and moderate in my left, so I was referred to a knee surgeon to discuss knee replacement. My appointment was a week after I had my session with Carla. I went to see the doctor and he said, "Hey you are not walking with a limp." I said, "nope" and then he examined my knees and said, "You have full range and no swelling. Are you sure these are your MRI results?"  I said, "Yes, I am sure"

He said, "Come back and see me when you are 60"

OK, of course I didn't tell him I was doing energy healing on my knee, but you know maybe I should have...I work in academia now as well as with Executives. All of this is really hard to explain...I am of course worried about my credibility, which is obviously why I am blogging about it...or maybe it's the pain meds talking...

Now my knees are working great for the first time in a decade, and I mean GREAT. I feel strong in my whole leg again like I did before I smashed my right knee into a bar under a table in 1999. I have 33 inch legs and used to competitively race bicycles so that is what I am comparing this to. Strong!

I am not dissing regular medicine in any way. It saved Ellie's and my life. I am also not advocating for anything, just sharing my experience over the last month, which to my rational, overly educated mind, has been quite bizarre but wonderful in the results.

Yet within a month of this discovery of energy as medicine and having taken an intensive workshop to learn the techniques of that with some German New Medicine thrown in, now my back decides to act up.

I am doing both things again, working using the new methods I have learned that include the emotional work of healing one's negative mental patterns(i.e. how we think and feel about ourselves, self talk) as well as going the medical route. Though in regards to regular medicine, there is absolutely NO way I am letting them do surgery! I will do aggressive PT. I will do this energy and emotional work.

This is a rant in all the most classic ways. There's really no point. Just that, it sucks when your back goes out. The very, very cool thing is that for the first time since Ellie was born there is enough help. There are people who are going to help me for Dave's entire day of work when Ellie is out of school. She has 6 weeks off in 2 weeks. In terms of shifting my consciousness to one of abundance versus poverty, this is a good sign. 

The good news, in the philosophy of German New Medicine, my back injury means I am healing from something physical and something emotional (an old wound). It is also good that Ellie, though she had a small fever last night and this morning, has been doing great and Dave too (no more severed digits so he is doing well!). One of my favorite moms used to ask when determining if it was a good day or not, "Is everyone still breathing? Yes? Then it was a good day!" I hear ya sister!

***I woke up this morning (July 13th) and had no back pain. My back is still a little stiff and I am going to the spine clinic to learn the exercises today...but there it is.

Ellie's first time seeing fireworks

Awakenings and Weaning Off Depakote

This post is about weaning Ellie off Depakote and has a metaphysical edge to it. So for those of you who are not philosophy fans this post is not for you. Just skip it. I however have my Bachelors degree in philosophy and ever since getting that education can't see the world without it - so bear with me.

I am weaning Ellie off Depakote against doctor's orders.

There it is.

The question that is torturing me is why didn't I do that as soon as it started making her sick? In 2007 when she was four and a half in April she started to have seizures. Small ones. I took her to her Neurologist who put her on Depakote and told me that someone with Ellie's history, I believe the technical term she used was "these kids", if they are gonna develop seizures do so between the ages of 3 and 5. And there Ellie was at age 4 and having these small absent seizures. She did throw up if she was eating and then she would sleep for 40 minutes. You can read about that here.

Within two weeks of medicating her, on Depakote liquid, she refused all food. This was a huge blow. We had worked with her for thousands of hours to get her to eat. No small task with someone with the level of dysphasia that she had out of the gates. And I mean we worked with her right in the NICU. At the point of the seizures she was eating ALL her purees (4 different meals) per day and that was about a cup and a half of pureed food in 15 to 20 minutes with us feeding her. This was a HUGE accomplishment on all our parts and was 4 solid years with over 8 hours a day, 365 days per year, which calculates to roughly 3,000 hours per year for over four years which is about 12,000 hour plus of working with her to get there. That's a lot of effort, heart and soul going into getting her to eat by mouth. Can you feel my pain when it was all swept away in a two week period?!!!

For her to just refuse food was a hideous thing. It had such a huge effect on me that I lost my objectivity and a little of my logical reasoning skills and my energy was deflated. I asked her neurologist about it of course and was told, no Depakote does not affect appetite other than to increase it. (so I must be crazy right?). No you should not try another drug, because Depakote has the least side effects. 

I kept trying to get Ellie to eat for months. And was told, now she has a sensory aversion to food. She is trying to control her environment. It's become behavioral...

Ugh. And all this time I wasn't listening to my inner voice. Actually that is not true, my inner voice was going crazy, shouting "This is wrong! All these explanations are WRONG! Get her off that crap!!"

Now, in 2009, 2+ years later I was told that the Cisipride she WAS on causes seizures. She has been off that since January roughly - see here.   I have recently met a couple of adults who are on Depakote who do report that it makes them dizzy, tired, and nauseous.  Hmmmmm dizzy and nauseous and tired?  Go figure - if I felt all those things at once I wouldn't be eating either.

This realization hit me very hard this week. What the f*&% was I thinking leaving Ellie on the Depakote this long? I should have fought harder with the doctors to get her on a different drug. The Cisipride study showing the link to seizure activity was only made known to my by my Doctor in December of 2008. And back in 2003 when we put her on it Ellie's reflux was really horrible, so not sure I would have taken her off it had I known. Because she used to vomit 30 times or more a day.  But I should have used my logical reasoning better and worked harder to preserve her eating. 

I feel like I lost my mind a little over this one. I feel that if Ellie had NOT had a G-tube all the doctors and everyone else would have been supportive of figuring out a better med for Ellie. I would not have been alone asking these questions, knowing something was very wrong but not sure what.

Now it seems so obvious. Now her eating issues MAY be behavioral.   

She is on half of the Depakote dose she was and she has grown. I am sure that her level is way below therapeutic. I am weaning her very slowly to let her system adjust. She is less tired. She is enthusiastic at the table now and want to touch the food and feed us and she will sometimes actually taste it. She thinks meal time is fun and funny. That is progress and maybe she is feeling less nauseous.  

Regrets are unproductive. There is no question of that. When I work on teams if something goes wrong my approach is always, ok, let's fix it and then figure out what happened so it doesn't happen again. There is no blame. But in the Mama role, I do feel like I let her down and that is a heavy burden. The me of today is like, What were you thinking? to the me of 2007, who was a very different person (that is the metaphysical part, in case you were waiting around for it). 

I know I am on the right path now with Ellie and the Depakote and that it was right to take her off the Cisipride. Her scope 6 months ago was proof of a very healthy esophagus and digestive track which the Cisipride, Slippery Elm, Zantac and Protonix and food combining diet were responsible for.   But man I wish I had figured all that out before now. Eating is one of the things that gives us something in common with everyone else.  Chewing food in the mouth is so important to digestion because there are enzymes in the mouth that are not in the stomach. It's healthy to eat by mouth. 

I am hoping that once she is fully off the Depakote she won't feel so tired or dizzy or nauseous. I look at pictures of her when she was three and see this bright eyed girl with eyes aligned. Then pictures of her after show a blurry eyed Ellie. I want my bright eyed girl back. And for the record I am really sorry that I put her on a med that made her feel so exhausted and sick.