Colorado Cowboy Country says Hello!

On a plane heading home from a last summer weekend hurrah. I hear that my 2 and your 4 were texting about their respective trip to CO and OH – proof yet again that houses with children have no secrets. I never let people know when we are going on vaca: I don’t post every plate of pasta we eat, every mountain we see or every Clark Griswold activity we engage. It’s like an invitation for someone to rob your house. We used to punish people by looking at family albums, now your nonplussed for not posting every right turn. Wish we could have coordinated on this trip though because Colorado is fun, but unfortunately your family does not live here, so O-H-I-O! (Must chap the go blue contingent in your house just a little to be that close to OSU? Call it the Big Ten Heebie Jeebies).

Bought this card at a farmer’s market art stand. I’m not sure why there is an astronaut reference to the west as we were hundreds of miles from oceanic anything. Maybe it is because most folks east of the Mississippi that I know think of anything west of Philadelphia “so far away” flyover territory that it may as well be on another planet. Glad our east coast upbringings have not acclimated to that thought process. Perhaps part of a marketing hoax to prevent the inevitable exodus of reason-minded people from moving someplace as beautiful as the ski towns we just witnessed? Next to the art stand section of the farmers market was the holistic ayurvedic healing stands. the phrase “hippie witchdoctor” was used on more than one product. Wonder if that’s effective branding?

I’m all for mindfulness and mind over matter (example: when I( was 8, my great Grandmother “bought” the wart of my hand for a penny and I’ll be damned if my psychosomatic belief didn’t make that thing vanish within days. But – not that it’s any of my business or my call – I also equally promote modern medicine and am uber glad you are opting for the wrenching but scientifically proven effective chemo over some alternative like shooting jellyfish piss into your veins hack theory. Anybody who uses phrases like “used by the Mayans” (or “hippie witchdoctor”) as a basis for modern medicine should explain just why we do not still have any Mayans around today if their medicines are so great? Civilizations with proper immunization protocols do not just go the way of the Dodo.

I can personally attest that the holistic alternative does NOT work as a surgical alternative. About 7 years ago, I had bursts of debilitating fetal position on the floor for thirty seconds episodic type pain, followed by hours of feeling okay. Which was AWESOME because the pain only lasted long enough for me to question reality if I was really dying, think I was absolutely dying when it did happen, and wonder if my mom was right: watching MTV all those years ago maybe did fry parts of my brain leaving with me with a one way ticket to Certifiable, USA.

Turns out, I had been unwittingly collecting marble sized gallstones for decades. So my gallbladder was retaliating and fitzing out. I saw my internist on Friday. She scheduled my surgery with the specialist the following week. Except first she got a pretty good doctor dig in by saying I fit the stereotype while sharing the “typical gallbladder surgery 4Fs”:

1. Fat (c’mon now – I take a pass on that one; skinny fat and not signing up for any decathalons, but no muumuus yet for this chic);
2. Fertile (despite having my tubes cauterized when Julian was born, so that one’s a biological technicality);
3. Forty (ies); and,
4. Female (which seemed unduly redundant to point 2 of “fertile” unless I slept through that part of health class).

Ironically, Nisha (our beloved nanny of nearly a decade that I think of like a holistic sister) had her gallbladder out a few years prior. Her family is WAY into eastern medicine, and I’m terrified to get surgery next week, which created the perfect storm for Hurricane Gullible. Nisha’s mom is 60 but looks 35, which I (wrongly) attributed to lifestyle and medicinal savvy over genetics. We Earnhardt women rely heavily on comedic timing as we do NOT age gracefully: so we have to be funny or we get relegated to the crabby old Grimm’s fairy tale part of the nursing home.

When Nisha says she wishes she knew of “the cure” before her surgery, I’m all ears. The ayurvedic gallbladder surgery stone cure requires you to drink a cup of olive oil and 1/4 cup of lemon juice every hour for four consecutive hours while lying on your left side. It’s all over the internet, so it must be true. I guess the promise is that gravity will just eek out your olive oil lubed digestive tract plumbing while zapping the stones to extinction with the acidic lemon juice.

Let me tell you. I did it. I watched two movies while lying on my left side and drank that awfulness. I went to bed feeling like a wrongly inverted piece of focaccia bread. But I slept all night and woke up feeling GREAT! For the first five minutes of my morning. UNTIL I found myself hurtling my body to the bathroom praying that I would make it to the water closet without erupting. By the time I got to the john, I swear to god that even my actual flesh buttcheeks were full motion gurgle quivering. I sat down, certain that the sheer force of olive oil propulsion being jettisoned out of my backside was gonna lift me off of the commode and send me flying like an Apollo missing into the ceiling. I’m not sure how long I was in there, but it was a LONG WHILE and I was EXHAUSTED by the time I felt safe enough to stand. Somehow it seems like a lot more olive oil came out of me that morning than I’d ever ingested in my entire 40+ years, but my skinned looked RADIANT for weeks.

Moral of the story, it is acceptable to sell your minor health maladies to elderly relatives for chump change, but stick to the MDs for the big stuff (defined as anything requiring more than a bottle of peroxide, tube of Neosporin, Preparation H or Compound W. All else = See. A. Doctor.).

Hang in there. xoxox love ya’, Stormy