He doesn’t like cabbage. Doesn’t like the smell of it, either going in or going out, he says. I can persuade him to taste a really excellent Olde Scots Colcannon (NOT just cabbage and potatoes, but a hearty meal with lots of other ingredients), but cabbage is not his thing AT ALL.

So Corned Beef And Cabbage has never been a celebration of Irish for him. And he CELEBRATES his Irish. Every Thursday we hear Irish Music when he is home, he loves the plaintiff melodies, the rolicky tunes, and the humor and grit. We sing along.

I have made Corned Beef And Cabbage for the family, when all the kids were home, eating everything. But he would not eat it.

I bought a corned beef a few days ago, and this time we are having the OTHER Irish Corned Beef dinner. With Potatoes, and Carrots, and little green peas on the side. Gravy, made with the drippings and with some butter and bacon grease. Tastes very like Ham gravy, as long as you don’t leave it too salty.

If there is leftover, you make Hash, which is as American as it is Irish, and a lot English too. In fact, every country that EATS corned beef eats some kind of corned beef hash. Just don’t forget the onions.

This time I cooked the corned beef in my instant pressure cooker. It did it quickly, and tender.

Corned Beef And Potatoes really are traditional Irish, along with the gravy and fresh peas.

It’s Mumps. Oh, I want to say a naughty word. This is the second time in six months that I’ve had mumps.

I also have Rheumatic Fever. This is a stubborn type of Strep that just hangs on, and when you treat it, it rebounds within 48 hours. The more you try to subdue it with antibiotics, the more it just rears up and fights back. You can die from this, just by continuing to up the dose on antibiotics.

You can also just live with it. Mostly. I treat it when it flares, with herbal antibiotics (works well with ordinary Strep types, but not with this one). I treat it when I have to treat something else nasty. I haven’t learned how to really make it go away, but one day I will. Doctors don’t have any better options for this particular type, either.

So when you get Mumps, and you have Rheumatic Fever, things get nasty. Mumps invades the lymph system, and some Types go straight to the ears, some to the lymph nodes, some to the liver or spleen. Last time it was the kind that goes to the ears – where it sets up a nasty infection from the Rheumatic Fever. The Mumps cause swelling that constricts bloodflow, so the Rheumatic Fever bacteria gets trapped and festers wonderfully. Painfully. If you don’t treat BOTH, the infection returns to haunt you for a few months instead of just a few weeks.

But I weathered that one. I treated it with herbal antibiotics (calendula, hops, echinacea, black walnut, bacopa, uva ursi, and others), and with herbal antivirals (linden, elderberry leaf, mulberry leaf, magnolia bark, passion flower, graviola, apricot leaf, and more). If you get the right ones for the thing you have, they work. I am living proof. I cannot tolerate pharma medications well, and only use them when I have no alternative. They are simply too high in chlorine.

No, I’m not to the demons yet. They come later. Right now, we are just covering the necessary backstory so you know where the demons originate.

I also have some lower body paralysis, fairly mild, from spinal fractures. It is enough that if I take painkillers my digestion slows to almost nothing. Stool softeners are a necessity. Even then it can get pretty ugly.

So this time, the Mumps are the kind that attack the lymph nodes in the neck. VERY PAINFUL. I started using Pan Galactic Antibiotic Sugar Extraction (a combination antibiotic of my own decoction) as soon as I knew I had the infection. I also started on some antibiotic and antiviral herbal capsules (individual herbs – I don’t buy those mixtures out there, most of them are pretty useless).

But I had to use Naproxen also. And a decongestant (helps reduce the swelling some). I have a method to avoid the hellacious constipation that can accompany slowed intestines with the use of painkillers. So I take 1 stool softener for every Naproxen. Decongestants also reduce fluids in the intestines, but not strongly, so this strategy generally works nicely.

The illness progresses as it usually does, over about a 10-15 day course. You can treat the bacterial infection more easily than the viral. The antivirals help diminish the intensity, but I can’t quite just shut it down.

Day 2 hurts more than Day 1. I have to go from 1 Naproxen to 2. Around the clock. This is very bad. But I’m taking the Stool softener so everything is supposed to come out all right…. Right?

I go to my herbal stocks, and put together an antiviral elixir – this is just another sugar extraction, but with much more sugar. Certain combinations need more sugar to both extract and metabolize the medical elements. I use Linden, Pansy, Siberian Elm Leaf (NOT Slippery Elm, they do two different things, and Slippery Elm is a blood thinner, dangerous if used wrong), Marshmallow Leaf,  Rose Petal, Sunflower Petal, Ginger, Orange Peel, and Rooibos. This is a combination of antivirals, soothers, healers, and some antibiotic. It tempers the Mumps within 12 hours, but I still cannot turn my head very much, too painful.

Day 3, the lymph node ruptures about the time I go to bed. There was an abscess in there, and when it goes I can feel it. The node softens and the swelling sort of mushes out around it. I had begun to feel somewhat better, but now I hurt all the way to the top of my head, and down my neck, around the back. The other side is starting to hurt also, and it is so very painful to lay down, and I can’t lay on that side at all.

Three Naproxen are now required. Sleep evades me until the pain dulls to a ribbon on my neck, and a patch behind my ear. I take an extra dose of Pan Galactic, and an extra 3 Calendula capsules. I only need the ONE dose of 3 Naproxen, because the extra herbs head off the threatened septicemia from the rupture, and the pain decreases rapidly after I take the extra dose.

By morning I’m feeling much better. It is diminishing so nicely that I feel better than I did the day before, though I can’t turn my head or tip it back – makes it hard to empty a glass of juice, or to kiss my husband.

A few interruptions in my med schedule result in a few relapses and flares, and I take an extra dose, and it backs off.

But I’m still on 2 Naproxen around the clock. But I am down to 2 Decongestants at night, and only 1 in the daytime. Progress!

It is about Day 5 when I know I am in real trouble. Enter the Demons.

Nothing is moving anymore in my intestines. Getting it to do so has been a real battle for the last several days, and I wonder why the Stool Softener is not working. I up the amount, and it is STILL not working. No effect whatever. Hence, the wrestlings.

Day 6, no joy. I am slightly bloaty and not feeling well. I don’t feel like eating, and I’m even having trouble getting fluids down. Not good. I don’t know what kind of cement is plugging up the exit at the end of my colon, but all my efforts fail to move it. I am otherwise progressing and in less pain, but this new problem MUST be solved, because when you are this bound up and things stop, it can send you to the ER.

Kevin comes home from work, and we go to see if we can get something to move the unmovable obstacle. We get to the store, and happen to walk through the aisle with the herbs, first, and I spy Cascara.

Now I’m a born and bred farmgirl who grew up on a tree farm, and my father is a logger. We peeled Cascara trees and then dried and packed the bark for sale. I’ve been warned all my life to NEVER EVER lick the bark of Cascara, not even a little bit. It can tie you in knots and leave you bleeding in the bowels. So I know it works, when the dosage is not too high. It is still one of the primary sources of laxative ingredients in the world.

I buy the bottle of capsules. I am confident this will work.

I take one.

Two hours later I take another.

Four hours later I take two.

No effect at all.

Whatever is in the bottle, it is NOT CASCARA. Maybe it is Timothy Hay.

I am still wrestling with Demons that have taken the form of Phantom Turds, apparently. Because all my efforts produce nothing.

I have even stopped farting. This could be considered to be an epic event in itself. Farting is something I never seem to run out of. But not even air moves in my gut. It is silent… no gurgles, no signs of movement.

I am worried. I am worried with the worry of a woman who knows full well she is unlikely to just swell and swell and then explode, but who worries anyway, because there are all kinds of ugly things that happen BEFORE that happens! I do not want to have to go to the ER to have to have them surgically remove the thing that blocks the bottom.

My husband is now engaged in the battle. He makes helpful comments now and again, and laughs gleefully at the dramatic phrases I use to describe my anguished wrestlings.

My efforts have dislodged a rib in my back, which has rebroken in the struggles. This, I do not need.

Day 7 is a little better. I stop taking Naproxen entirely that morning, because I have so much less pain in my neck. I took only 1 the night before. At noon, I stop the decongestant. I am feeling MUCH better – so much better, in fact, that I feel better this day WITHOUT Painkillers, than I did the day before WITH painkillers.

Some time in the early afternoon I labor to produce one little turd, the size of a great big glassy with an American Flag in the middle.

I know this is a bit too much information… But there were moments of hilarity in it, and something else worth sharing about it all, in the end, so I struggle on to describe the episode, and say the unsayable anyway.

I tell Kevin. About the turd.

He is laughing as he tells me that is probably more information that he needed.

I know. But after so many days struggling to produce ANYTHING toiletable, I do have a sense of satisfaction. Who else am I going to share it with?

(It occurs to me that I may not get out enough. That I may be turning into the old lady who obsesses about bowel functions. Who reports to her children the size of the poops in the toilet made by her grandchildren. GEEZ! I cannot be THAT woman! It is my MOTHER-IN-LAW!)

After Kevin comes home I manage to achieve a bit more success, but the effort is so massive, and the results so small, that I know I need something more.

I find two cans of prune juice lost in our food storage which has not all been properly put away since the move. I’m not sure if they do anything more than produce a foul miasma that lends additional hilarity and the need to escape it, for the rest of the evening. But they do at least prove that SOMETHING moves in my bowels.

We go shopping. We buy strawberries, prunes, grapes, and laxative. I want to buy all the laxative in the hope that ONE OF THEM will work. I just buy the one that looks like it might. I also buy prunes. I am out of prune juice, and the fury of the stinky sulphury, skunky gas has not yet fully set in, so prunes still sound like the easy option. But I’m also thinking about eating tuna WITHOUT the pickles, and eggs without the ketchup.

I am also having much less pain. I can actually turn my head enough to kiss Kevin. He’s had a dry week. He likes this better.

It is before bedtime when I know two things.

NOT ONE OF THE LAXATIVES had ANY Laxative in it! NOT A SINGLE ONE! I don’t use laxatives much, so this is relatively new territory for me.  The stool softener that I had hanging around for years, and only just recently had to replace with a new bottle, worked. It DID something. The new bottle of the same thing, same brand, does NOTHING.

I hear from various relatives that this phenomenon occurs periodically, the pharma companies stop putting laxative into the laxatives, and none of the major ones work. It becomes almost impossible to find one that actually produces a laxative effect. It corrects, eventually, because people stop buying them, and start buying lots of fruit instead, Except bananas. They don’t buy bananas.

So beware… Your laxative may not have any laxative in it! If you get bound up due to an illness or injury that requires painkillers, you may really get into trouble.

The second thing I know is that I am going to survive anyway. That I AM getting better, I don’t need the painkiller anymore, and the infection is slowly improving. I am going to win against the Mumps.

Not only that, but I am going to resolve the constipation. After dinner I holler, “Bombs Away!”, and make for the bathroom. Kevin laughs.

I can tell that the condition is going to resolve, MOSTLY because I just stopped the painkiller and decongestant – THAT was more effective than anything else, and the other stuff SHOULD have helped me avoid the misery that precipitated my quest for additional laxative medication. I’m still very constipated though, and if ANY of the laxatives worked I would not be still. But at least now my determined efforts do move something. And sure enough, the next day, things start really moving out. Not like I took a laxative, more like I ate prunes and strawberries, and they are somewhere up there shoving everything else out.

So sorry about the bathroom humor. But honestly, in this last week of intermittent hell, bathroom humor was the only thing that was funny most of the time. And then it was pretty grim humor.

I had these thoughts about how to write this, this morning, in the shower. I know, right? And it seemed so stinking funny.

Writing it out has so many explanations that it isn’t as funny. But according to Robin Williams, “Turd” is one of the funniest words in the American Language. And a few other languages that borrow it.

I promise I will start paying attention to OTHER things in my life that are actually worth laughing over, ok?

Meanwhile, Kevin laughs every time I head for the bathroom today. I’m there a lot… I have four days to catch up on.

Just a note… I am a skilled herbalist, and can treat Strep, SARS, Polio, and many other illnesses, with herbs. If I could not, I’d have died of something long since.

I mean, really, who has bedbugs? Nobody I know. Not in my whole life. That particular scourge had never visited upon us. Not even when we traveled and stayed in motels or the homes of other people. Not ever.

And then there were bedbugs, in MY bed. Itchy things. Just like a mosquito, with a swollen bite that itched. A cluster of them, actually.

They don’t last long, those bumps, by morning they are gone. Not even a red rash where they were, just gone. You mighta dreamt it but it was too itchy to be a dream.

More bugs, bigger clusters of itchy bumps. More bugs, more clusters… On the arms, the neck, the feet. Wherever you are not covered by clothing, or wherever the bugs can get under the clothing. Sometimes along the waistline where they crawl under your clothes.

We caught them from someone else. We were living in someone else’s house when HE bombed his bedroom. Our bedroom was across the hall, and I’m sure some of those bugs just packed their suitcases and moved across the hall to our bedroom. We moved out a week later. A week after that, we had bedbugs in the new house, only in our bedroom. No other bedrooms were occupied by people.

First a few bites, then the insanity of too many bites to even sleep!

So we did the logical thing. We washed everything we could. Sheets, pillow cases, and blankets. Can’t wash our pillows, wrong kind to wash.

It got somewhat better, but didn’t stop them entirely. And when you wash your sheets, the bugs retaliate and bite you more the first few nights. No idea why they do, but it is a confirmed phenomenon.

So we bought flea powder. This, my friends, is the thingamabob that does the job. Or so they say.

We dusted between the mattress and the box spring. Just lightly.

We dusted under the mattress pad. Just lightly.

We still had bedbugs. For six more days. They got less and less.

We laundered again, and sprinkled a little more flea powder on – between the mattress pad and the mattress cover. We keep the mattress pad in place with a mattress cover.

No bedbugs. Just a little mild wandering itchiness (no bumps) from the flea powder. Zyrtec to the rescue.

I am chemically sensitive, so we used a type labeled as “natural”. Smells of chlorine (I’m terribly allergic to chlorine), but did not irritate me very much.

But the bedbugs were gone…And then they weren’t. Sigh.

We are told they have a long life cycle. I begin to doubt this. They just reappear too fast after eradication, and they bloom too fast.

We are told that they disappear if you launder weekly… or even once every other week (we always have, but not the entire bedding, just sheets). We are even told that laundering frequently is enough to get rid of them, but it does not appear to be, even when washing in hot, and drying long.

The bedbugs got worse a month after we dusted. I could not dust again, too much chance of anaphylaxis if I do.

But I have learned some things about them.

Flea powder really DOES kill them, IF it is really flea powder. Most of the garbage out there today is not really flea powder, and the stuff labeled for bedbugs is actually WORSE. Some is just diatomaceous earth (which only works on munching bugs, does NOT work on sucking bugs). You’ll read online that bedbugs feed on dander and mites and other things in your bed, but if you LOOK at the body of the bedbug, depicted in so many images, it has ONLY a proboscis to feed with, which is ONLY useful for sucking blood. They HAVE to suck blood to LIVE, and that, pretty much DAILY. They can’t eat any other way, just like a Mosquito.

You need something with pyrethrin, or malathion, or diazinon in it to really kill bedbugs. Or fleas. There are, of course, other chemicals, some as effective, but most completely INEFFECTIVE.

Flea powder today is not what it was 50 years ago. Or even 30 years ago. It is FAR LESS EFFECTIVE, while having overloads of things that do NOT kill bedbugs, but which ARE dangerous to people. Some also have deadly fragrance components (can cause deadly sleep apnea, and even sudden neural death) which you can smell THROUGH the sealed container.

Light colored sheets help you spot them more easily. But light colored sheets also get STAINED by bedbugs. Little blackish to dark brown spots. Bedbugs are little reddish brown spots, so it makes it hard to SEE them once they’ve been leaving droppings on your sheets. Too many spots – you have to look for the ones that move.

They stain the sheets…. and blankets. It does not seem to wash out, even with bleach, though bleach does lighten them some. We keep the lighter colored sheets and blankets though, in spite of the stains, because we can SEE the little bastards and grab them off into a tissue and send them floating out to sea in the flusher.

BTW, Cockroaches also stain sheets. Big dark brown spots. Very nasty. And it is a stubborn stain. Cockroaches just pepper your sheets in certain travel pathways (right between your pillows), whereas Bedbugs tend to dot and streak more randomly, and in SMALLER stains.

Now, I have also learned why bedbugs chomp on you twice as much right after you wash the sheets.

They hide in the folds of the bedding. They hide in the crevices of the mattress. They burrow wherever they can in the daytime – they don’t like light, so when daylight comes, or when the lights go on, they head for the deeps, and disappear. Even when you have a lot of them you may not SEE them when you remove the sheets and blankets. Very mysterious… but they are still lurking.

Some bedbugs live downstairs permanently, in places they don’t get disrupted from. Or try to. Some live upstairs, in the folds of the bedding, snacking and enjoying entire meals at the buffet each night – a little leg here, a little wing there, some neck, a little back, sometimes chest at the neckline… These are the foodies of Bedbugs.

The downstairs Bedbugs are less choosy, and generally more hungry. They live on their upstairs neighbors, who come downstairs to hide in the daytime. The nasty little beggars are cannibalistic. If they can’t eat YOU, they will eat each other, sucking YOUR blood out of their own kind. Letting someone ELSE do the foraging.

A friend of mine says she loves this description because SHE KNOWS THESE KIND OF NEIGHBORS!

Another says her ex husband was definitely a downstairs bedbug. But that is another story.

Back to the science…

So when you launder and kill the upstairs bedbugs, the downstairs ones have to come up to feed on you personally. And they are hungry. Viciously so.

The downstairs crews are also the reason why laundering alone is often ineffective at eradicating them.

We finally took our mattress pad off, and the mattress cover also. Too many layers for those downstairs bedbugs to hide in. The bed is not so comfortable… but then a bed full of biting creatures is not so comfortable either, and this is WAR after all. I have to sacrifice to win, I guess.

I went to bed sick one night (nasty case of mumps, very painful), and was just too cold. Put a light blanket on top of the blankets already on the bed. Slept fairly cozy most of the night. Woke in the morning and turned on the light, and there on the fresh blanket was a big bedbug, like he had always owned that fresh blanket. He went swimming for breakfast.

Point being, they love layers. Layers of everything. They use ALL THE LAYERS.

Now, when you don’t have a lot of bedbugs, you NEVER see them. If you have dark colored sheets or blankets you may never see them anyway, so switch out to lighter colors and you’ll find those little beasts.

When the weather warms up, they just SWARM on you, and you’ll be bit so bad you won’t be able to sleep. You may be bit so much you get a systemic reaction – it can happen. This phenomenon lead us to a great discovery.

One night I could not sleep for the itching (It was about 75 degrees in the house.). So I got up and turned on the Bathroom light. If you turn on the bedroom light, bedbugs run for cover. The bathroom light (or a hallway light) lets YOU see, but is not quite enough to send them running so fast.

There on the top blanket were bedbugs, running around very fast. Usually they are slower, but heat makes them more energetic. So I got some tissue and pinched them up in it, and threw that in the toilet (move fast, you have to in order to catch them before they hide). I got six in the first wad.

Got some more tissue and lifted the sheets apart – more bedbugs. I caught another few there, and then lifted the covers far enough to see some beside my husband. I went to his side of the bed and lifted the blankets and sheets beside him and caught something there also.

Threw two wads of them – the catch was pretty light, we have been battling these things and there aren’t very many of them anymore, many beds have FAR MORE.

So about an hour later I did it again – turned on the bathroom light and went hunting. Found a few more.

The next night I found five on the first exposure, and none afterward, though I checked twice more later in the night.

What I learned is that some time between midnight and 3 or 4:00 am, you can go hunting for bedbugs under an indirect light, and catch a lot of them. We flush them in the toilet so they can’t come back. Doing so really diminishes the numbers, and you sleep better that night for the rest of the night.

I don’t know yet what the end is, but the battle is ON. I am researching herbs that might be an asset if the linens are washed in them. So far the commercial solutions are all stupidly ineffective. The ones for bedbugs are LESS effective than the ones for fleas.

Something about snuggling under the covers and getting all warm and drowsy without thoughts of creeping things waiting in your bedding to feast on you as soon as you drop off… I long for that. It almost seems strange that I do – because all my life I never thought about sleeping WITHOUT bugs as being a privilege – it was just the norm. Now it isn’t, and I want it back.

We are making enough progress that I get peaceful sleep once in a while. But not nearly enough. I want MY BED BACK.

I ate some chicken. It doesn’t matter WHOSE chicken, or where, probably ANY chicken would have done it. (A few months ago the water went off here – smelled of chemicals, badly. I’ve been having severe allergic reactions ever since. Necessary backstory, I suppose.)

Somewhere  in the middle of the night I wake, and my lips feel funny. Sorta like the novacaine is wearing off, only fat and puffy. It happens sometimes, and it is never even. Various parts of my face swell up and itch – it isn’t hives, this is LOTS of swelling, and a little bit of itch. It hits one side of my lips (never the same one twice in a row), one side of the top lip, sometimes the other side of the bottom lip, sometimes my chin, sometimes my cheeks, occasionally under my eyes.

This time it is everything. But not on both sides. One side has more than the other, and it isn’t balanced at all.

I look like a dog.

A sad dog.

A St. Bernard.

I’m not quite drooling. Small blessings.

I take the Zyrtec. It isn’t quite up to it.

Oddly I can breathe through my nose for the rest of the night. The swelling doesn’t go down, but it doesn’t go up either. It does not progress to congestion and severe asthma. But my whole face has lumps and distortions.

I wake in the morning and it is still very swollen. I know how this one goes, as I move my face, the swelling will go down. Takes about an hour. This time it takes three… four. Geez. After about two hours I still looked like I had Bell’s Palsy on one side, sorta saggy. It isn’t that my face is saggy, more like there just isn’t room for it all up higher.

My lip still doesn’t FEEL normal, but my upper lip on the left, the last place to resolve, is finally NOT looking like a middle aged man who just shaved for the first time in 10 years and everybody can see how much his lip has grown.

I’m no longer a St. Bernard though. So that’s good.

I grew up in Washington State. I was an avid reader, and I had read references to the smell of rain, but had never experienced it. Washington, you see, was always wet where I lived, so it never smelled of rain. It never even smelled wet. It just did not smell at all. Where I lived, nobody EVER prayed for rain, let alone held Ward Fasts for rain.

But Yakima smelled of rain if it had been dry for a while. The smell of wet dust. It happened just as the rain started. Or sometimes JUST before the rain hit.

Wyoming is where I really knew what rain smelled like. It isn’t rain, it is the dampening of layers of dryness. An earthy smell that rises as the dirt first gets damp. It happened a lot, because it rarely rained back to back, it almost always really dried out in between cloudbursts.

There are so many things like this in my life now. I know what they are. I have a metaphor for them. But most people have never smelled the rain I am talking about, so the metaphor does not work, except for THAT conversation. The one where the other person is experiencing a thing, and is not certain whether ANYONE else will get it. Then the metaphor works. The smell of rain is a thing they know I know.

It does not mean Ice Cream, it means “Of the trend”.

I don’t know what made my mother make creamed peas with dinner, she was never that ambitious about the vegetables. Oh, some scalloped corn now and again (and not even any bacon in it), but veggies were usually straight out of the can.

But she did. We ate them. We were like that. All six of us kids, and Pa too.

Pa finished dinner and left the table, and there were just a few of us left at the table. I think just April, Ma, and I.

I moved around to the end where Pa sat, and Ma was on the other end. April was right next to Ma, there were three seats on each side of the table.

I’m not quite sure what preceded the incident, but April apparently had it coming, at least a little. I must have been in Jr. High somewhere, to have the nerve, I guess.

She annoyed me some, and I was in a good mood. Decided to take my chance.

Loaded the tip of my spoon with ONE PEA. A saucy one.

Fired that pea, catapult style, at April.

That pea had no sense of proper direction, and hit my mother right in the middle of her forehead, just above where her eyebrows considered meeting up. She sat there stunned as that pea stuck, and then slid slowly down her nose, right between her eyes, and then took the slope to one side of her nose.

She didn’t say a word, she just got up and left the table. I was never sure if she went to laugh herself to tears with my dad or not… She does insist that I was the one who ended up doing the dishes that night. But I suspect it was my night anyway, she wasn’t the type to let someone else off the chore roster to punish another.

I don’t know how I escaped the wrath of mother wronged, but somehow I did. I remember that as well as I remember that pea sliding down between her eyes, and my own sense of horror at the retribution that I KNEW absolutely MUST follow such a thing! Food fights in our dining room were SIMPLY NOT DONE! No one would DARE!

April got off Scot Free, and seemed to do a lot of smirking that evening. I never again attempted such a thing, I knew that if I did, Ma WOULD NOT HOLD BACK! The shock that held her helpless this time simply would not be THERE a second time.

I remember telling this story to my own children. I had no fear in doing so.

You see, I NEVER made creamed peas.