Breakdown to Breakthrough…
Home, happiness, and health — these are 3 subjects I love. You've read about feng shui, the power of intention, the daily practice of de-cluttering and organizing, and simple gratitude if you have been following this blog. What I haven't spent much time on is being healthy. And it is equally as, if not more, important. You can make all the right changes to your environment, but if you are not physically healthy, it is hard to attain emotional peace and overall contentment. Likewise, you can read every self-help book available, but if you are not taking care of your body and living space, the process of becoming happy and secure is challenging.
I remember being on bed rest my entire pregnancy, fraught with concern over whether my babies were going to survive. Nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING you offered me would have distracted me from having 2 healthy babies. And after they were born, again, nothing was more important to me than seeing them thrive…
…which is how I ended up on this holistic, natural medicine path. Being that my daughters were born at 30 weeks, we knew the lungs were not fully developed and there could be some challenges along the way. Let me just say, I did not quite envision what soon became our reality. Pneumonia in our house was like a cold in yours. All too commonplace. Yet, unlike a cold, our bouts of pneumonia were severe and required medical attention, x-rays, hospitalizations, breathing treatments, steroids, and round after round after round of antibiotics. This cycle happened several times a year. It was scary, disheartening, and overly frustrating.
About 3 years into this emerging pattern, I began asking the medical doctors, "Instead of treating the pneumonia every year, is there something I could do to prevent it?" And, of course, I was told, "No." More than once, more than twice…how about every single time?
By the fifth year of this nonsense, I had a break-down. One of my daughters had a severe allergic reaction to one of the many drugs she had been recently prescribed. Standing in the ER, I honestly could not answer the question, "What medications is she currently taking?” She had been put on so many, and they were all new to me.
I realized this was no longer a solution for me…and certainly not her. I took her off everything and we finished the medication to clear up the reaction. It was at that moment that I knew I was done with the doctors’ version of treatment for good. That breakdown was my break-through.
I went to a natural health conference the next fall and hope surged through me immediately. I had been taking my own supplements for years, but I walked away with a few simple herbal recommendations for my daughters along with some fierce determination. And this year, well, we have been 100% pneumonia free! There were no ER trips, no hospitalizations, no steroids, no x-rays, and only 1 round of antibiotics (for a bad case of strep going around). Happy day, happy year!
I find that many people come to natural health when standardized care fails. The problem, in my mind, is we overuse doctors for everything. I remember Dr. Oz saying, “You don’t call an electrician if a light bulb burns out.” And I couldn’t agree more. Prevention is key – it is less expensive and easier to fix the problem yourself. The same holds true for your body. Small adjustments create dramatic results.
I have spent the last year studying, attending workshops, completing classes, and learning everything my brain can hold about natural health. I have barely scratched the surface, but I have the confidence that I know we will prevail anything, anything, that comes our way. And I look forward to sharing some of the wonderful remedies and alternatives I have discovered…
