Wrestling With Demons Of Darkness

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.