HW 19

Everyone wants to be healthy, weather its most important to you or not. Even if you don’t take great or even good care of your body, it’s a natural human instinct to keep healthy. The dominant social practices around illness and dying in America subdue this instinct into a consumerist coma.

I remember running around the isles in the health food store with my sister as a little kid. And today I take care of my self in even more wholistic ways. My mom is as always a huge fan of homeopathic remedies, herbal teas, vitamins, and sleeps, taught me these ways from the beginning. As I grew older and began to take care of my self I kept that natural health ways I had learned and also expanded on them ever more, with yoga and meditation.

As someone who has spent a great deal of time in hospitals and with doctors, burses, and other sick children, I am very appreciative of medical advances that have been made. With out them I might be alive today and I certainly would not look the way I do. Sometimes science does have the answers. But it will never have them all. In my opinion a wholistic way of being healthy is the best way to stay in touch with the earth, your soul, and the sprit world, and being in touch there is the best way to stay healthy and avoid illness. While antibiotics can cure your cold, emanation and yoga could keep you from ever even getting that cold.  Threes a scientific cure for almost everything, but why would you want to bring your body even further form nature. Well, that’s just not natural!

I am medical-breakthroughs. Everyone diagnosed with an AVM (Arteriole-venous malformation) before or in the same year as me, is dead.  I don’t think ill ever know for sure but maybe it was my wholistic upbringing that saved me, or my contact with the spirit world. Ill never knows, but ill continues to live this way and hope I continue making breakthroughs. Over the years I have watched the treatment methods get better. But science still has no answer for me. Im not saying im a religious person at all, but in my soul I know I will be all right.

About three years ago my grandpa sustained brain damage. The doctors told us if we took him off the feeding tubes he wouldn’t last the week. Everyone knew he didn’t want to live like that, and no one wanted to subject him to that kind of pseudo-life.  We decided to bring him home. Not only did he live the week, he lived for almost two more years. When he got home, he got better. He was able to join us at the dinner table, and even if he could barely remember out names, he could still brighten our days, and we his.

I remember in the weeks before he dies, all he could talk about was going home. His usually mostly incoherent and constant talking began to feature his mother, and lost war comrades. My grandpa slowly began to slip away into the world of the dead, and just like that, he was gone.