Finding My Identity

by Christina Routon

Two years ago this month, my husband and I divorced.

Yes, you read that right. At the end of February 2011 I sat in a lawyer's office and signed divorce papers. It was one of the hardest and most painful things I'd ever done in my life. It was also a wake up call from God, and through this day He's led me on a journey of discovering my identity.

Ending up at the attorney's office wasn't an overnight decision, of course. And God had been working in me for some time, nudging me, inspiring me, to do certain things, to change certain things. And I ignored the nudges. I turned away, I disobeyed, I flat out said, no, why should I change? HE should change. Other people need to change, not me.

And the result was a broken marriage and a broken woman, crying on the floor of my bedroom, feeling more alone than I'd felt in a long time. And it was there that I submitted to God, that I begged for forgiveness from a God I truly believed was fed up with me and who hated me. And I asked for healing, for myself and my marriage, even though in my heart I felt it was too late.

Instead, I felt a wave of peace wash over me. There was no hate, there was no anger, there was no bitterness. There may have been some frustration, but He never pushed me away. Instead, He said to me, "Finally! Now, we can start over." And little by little, he began to rebuild me.

This started with my self-esteem. As my husband shared in his post, my self-esteem had been shot for a long time, mostly over my appearance. I hated my body. I hated how I looked and how I felt. Now I was in a position where I hated my character. God began telling me and showing me how much I was loved, how nothing I could ever do, say or feel could separate us. He had to start with my character because I felt unwanted and unloved at that moment. I didn't feel worthy of love. He led me to music, He led me to books, He led me to movies, and spoke through them each time.

I began to write affirmations on index cards. I put them on a bulletin board and read them every day.

I am an honored child of God.
I am a beautiful, sexy woman.
I am living a wonderful, beautiful, abundant and creative life.

He sent me the song "Beautiful", by Mercy Me, and I still play that song and listen to it almost daily.

So what does this have to do with lipedema? All of this happened before I discovered lipedema. But I was on a quest for answers. It started with Who am I? God answered this, and continued to tell me and show me how important I was to Him over time. Then it changed to What am I called to do? And he answered that as well, and I finally submitted to the call to be a writer. It's strange when life throws you a curve ball and you end up where you never expected. You no longer have any fear. I stopped being afraid to go after a dream, and I just did it. I was inspired to write a short story, so I did, and sold it within a month. I was inspired to start a website about running a transcription business, so I did, and after a year and a half it's started to gain a following and make money. I finished a book I'd been working on since 2003 and self-published, then I started writing another book.

God began working on my ex-husband as well, and our son, and issues we had as a family. Six months later, in October, 2011, we remarried, and we're more in love now than we were at 18.

Then it was time to get back to work on my health. I'd been working out and dieting already for two years and hadn't seen any real results. My legs were still large and I'd only lost thirty pounds. Since the divorce, I'd been working two jobs - a full-time job during the day and in the evening I'd come home, eat a bowl of cereal, then work transcription jobs until 10:30 or 11:00. I wasn't taking care of myself anymore and after a couple of months it was time to start again. So I made my doctor's appointments and started using my insurance benefits. I continued to ask questions, I continued to search for answers, until last June I got my answer. I had a condition, with a name, but no cure and no treatment. And it broke me.

Once again God had to rebuild me and remind me of my identity. As I left the pharmacy after picking up the medication the endocrinologist had prescribed, I was almost in tears. I clutched my husband's hand as we left the grocery store and the song on the PA system changed - Lionel Richie's "You Are So Beautiful."

I stood in the parking lot of the grocery store with my husband and cried. I cried for the lost hope, the lost dreams, the possibilities of a future filled with pain and loss of mobility. Never wearing dresses or skirts again, never wearing a pair of boots. A lot of that seemed silly, but these were things I really wanted and hoped for. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be on the outside the person I was on the inside. It's taken some time, but I am finally learning - and believing - the truth, and not the lie.

Our identities are NOT this disorder or any other medical condition we may have in addition to lipedema. Our identities aren't our large legs or arms or butts. Our identities are not our jobs or our families or our social status. Our identity is this, and this alone:

You are an honored child of God.
You are here for a purpose.
You are loved.
You are beautiful.

Healing in Community

by Maggie McCarey

Terms; Contemporary medicine applies health science, biomedical research, and medical technology to diagnose and treat injury and disease, typically through medication or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints & traction, prostheses, biologics, ionizing radiation, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine)

Herbal medicine (or "herbalism") is the study and use of medicinal properties of plants. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbalism)

HEALING IN COMMUNITY

Many of you have read our book Lipedema: Help, Hope, and Healing and know that in 1992, while I was on sabbatical, my immune system went through an almost irreversible shut down. The medical profession could not find the root cause of this illness: I was tested for MS, Lupus, parasites, allergies, metal poisoning, Lyme’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and so on. Each test came back negative.  I lost sixty pounds in a few months.  Doctors gave up on me and I was left to lay on a porch by day and to sit in a chair by night, unable to sleep more than an hour before jolting awake and in racing gear for the next 23 hours.

Because modern medicine failed me, I was led back to the teachings of my early youth, my grandparents’ penchant to heal their own, and in the present to an Amish healer who first treated me with herbs and then taught me how to use them.  At that time, I began online course work at The Herbal Healer Academy and studied every herb book I could get my hands on.  When I finally healed from what I now know to be an inflammatory cascade brought about by lipedema, I was also left with an interesting gift.  One afternoon, my husband said, “I have a blinding headache.”

I said, “I can fix it,” and for some inexplicable reason, I held my hand over his head until I felt his pain, and I drew it out into my hand.  His headache was gone.

I practiced then on children when I substituted at the local school and on neighbors who sought my help.  One evening after hours, frightened parents brought their son with an infected spider bite to me. I applied a poultice and the redness began to disappear within seconds.  His father had been suffering from a sinus infection for months.  He had recently gone to a specialist who put him on a high-powered antibiotic and pain medication and scheduled him for endoscopic sinus surgery three weeks hence.  Within a few days after the spider bite, the father retuned to my home begging me to relieve his pain before he took his own life.  I brought him to my sink and instructed him on how to use a netti pot.  I filled the pot with warm salt water and a bit of colloidal silver.  He did as I instructed and instantly massive amounts of mucus left him.  Within seconds, his pain was completely gone.

I could get side-tracked describing the numbers of times people have been cured in the most simple of ways like this but the point of the above story is to illustrate the difference between the two healing methods.  I am not interested in debating which method is better.  The world is consumed with competition.  Obviously, accessing both disciplines to achieve optimum health would be an ideal world. Unfortunately, in this imperfect world, that isn’t what happens.  Like placating divorced parents, you are sort of forced to choose between them.

I would like to suggest and emphasize in the writing of this blog that we are all genetically programmed to be healers.  Our bodies are their own healers.  Good doctors will tell you that healthy people die sometimes over the slightest invasion to their bodies while others who should be dead many times over survive one illness after another.  The latter carry the memory of how to heal themselves in their DNA.

Dr. John McKnight, professor emeritus from Northwestern University, is a social scientist and community development expert.  He argues for the community to be the most developmental aspect of society.  He says:  As institutions gain power, communities lose their potency and the consent of community is replaced by the control of systems; the care of community is replaced by the service of systems; the citizens of community are replaced by the clients and consumer of institutional products. (http://www.cpn.org/topics/community/regenerating.html)

           

McKnight says the more we institutionalize our humanity the less we remember how to be human. For example, people once knew how to offer condolences to others when a loved one dies.  Now we leave that uniquely human compassion to counselors train in grief.  We no longer feel adequate to express grief properly.

McKnight gives the most powerful example of how seven Chicago women banned together to save breast-feeding as a human endeavor.  The almost single-handed institutionalizing of bottle-feeding by the medical profession became a reality when Dr. Spock promoted it over breast-feeding in the 1940’s. Doctors convinced mothers that breast-feeding was unhygienic. Mothers were often coerced into taking shots to dry their milk up within hours of delivery. Somehow, the medical community was so powerful in its capacity to minimize humanity’s collective wisdom, it actually convinced us that mothers were jeopardizing their children’s health with their own milk. The Le Leche League was founded in 1955 when one of its seven members could find no one who could teach her to breastfeed her child, one year before breast-feeding in America dipped to its lowest level of 20% in 1956.  Since then, it has taken an international movement to keep breast-feeding a part of being human.

           

In America, there were as many as 98,000 preventable hospital deaths recorded last year. In England, there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals; 3 died of starvation; 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds. (www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9591814/Patients-starve-and-die-of-thirst-on-hospital-wards)

Even so, we are programmed to believe that practicing herbal medicine is far more dangerous than traditional medicine, even fatal. Do not try to confuse us with facts! The American Association of Poison Control Centers' report utilized the data from 60 Poison Control Centers. They handled 2,479,355 human poison exposures of all sorts. Analgesics, all Big Pharma products, accounted for 11.7% of all poisonings, the largest percentage, followed by cosmetics/personal care products at 7.7%, household cleaners at 7.4%, and sedatives/hypnotics/antipsychotics, another Big Pharma group of products, at 5.8%.The category Dietary Supplements/Herbals/Homeopathic/Amino Acids, which starts on page 1138 of the report, indicated a single death, but even that one can be discounted because it's listed as "Unknown Dietary Supplements or Homeopathic Agents". There wasn't a single death from any product in this category

Vitamins, which start on page 1146, provided the same results—not a single death. However, pharmaceuticals were the cause of 497 deaths, out of a total number of 718 from all causes of poisoning deaths. Pharmaceuticals were responsible for … 69.2% of all poisoning deaths in the United States (in 2009) http://www.gaia-health.com/articles401/000412-poison-control-report-herb-vitamin-deaths.shtml

Now, I will eventually get to lipedema and the herbs that work for those of us who have lipedema and why they work, but we must begin with the war between healers and doctors and how that came to be.  We will have to ask ourselves how we got to a place where we line up for shots and drugs with mile-long adverse reaction warnings, and savage surgeries that serve as starvation aids when we cannot properly starve ourselves; and how as members of a community we stopped knowing how to care for ourselves and each other.  Otherwise, we will never find the courage to seek the path less taken, that is, to exercise our ability to lay hands on each other to take away pain or to accept alternative healing for our lipedema. 

           

All of us with lipedema know a lot about pain medication and we know that it doesn’t even begin to touch our pain—and we know that all of it has egregious side effects, including addiction.  Yet, we take it.  Let me leave you today with one small counterpoint to what you may not know to be true about pain relief as a way to help you see how institutionalized beliefs, rather than knowledge, lead us to irrational conclusions regarding our own health.

It is now generally proved that massage is the best pain reliever known to humanity.

"Basically we have found massage to be effective in chronic pain syndromes in arthritis and diabetes; in depressive disorders such as ones that autoimmune disorders -- HIV-associated diseases, too.… We    have looked at the A-to-Z of medical conditions, and we have not found a  single condition massage has not been effective for.”

Can we change towards that healthy news about the power of laying on of hands?

           

When we discuss herbs and alternative healing we are really discussing what it means to remember being human in community with other human beings who both heal and are healed by one other.  How many of you who have found your way to a lipedema forum cannot agree that simply being with others who care about your health has made a greater change for the better than most of your doctor visits.

 

Next blog on herbs:  How hundreds of thousands of herbalists were killed in conjunction with the invention of modern medicine.