Real Magic

 

Gods, dragons, pegasi, and anything else you want to throw in, I love homeopathy.  I was going to tell you this story tonight anyway, it having happened late last night, and then today as it happens there's been another outburst of bleating from the so-called quackbuster gang about what dangerous lunatic rubbish homeopathy is.  Siiiiiiigh.  I'm not a good debater;  I get angry too quickly.  Listen:  Homeopathy works.  It doesn't work for everybody or everything—but then nothing does, most emphatically including standard doctor medicine.  And sometimes, when you manage to take exactly the right homeopathic remedy at exactly the right time, the effect could very well pass for magic.  Last night was one of those times.

            I tweeted yesterday about the morning hurtle being through clouds of grass pollen as we swished through the edge of a long field.  If I'd known, we'd've gone some other way, but by the time I realised, I figured we might as well keep going as go back.  Hellhounds, who were meeting it at face level, prudently dropped behind me, so I was swathing through it.  My black jeans were straw-yellow with it by the time we reached the road, and there was a fair amount of it on my shirt front—and of course it had gusted freely into my face.  All three of us were sneezing.

            Hellhounds had pretty much stopped sneezing by the time we got home (I had brushed them off before I let them in the car).  I had not.  I think I've told you that one of the clear gains of menopause is that my beyond-description-life-destroying hay fever is about 98.5% gone.  I don't like the wrinkles, the falling chin line and the weird flesh, but I'll take it all like a shot over wondering if I am going to live through another summer.  When I was first living in England twenty years ago . . . well.  Gruesome.  Hay fever doctor drugs make me sick or crazy.  But I started eating local honey* and I still had hay fever, but it dropped down to stupid-nuisance level.

            Fortunately menopause has mostly finished the job, because menopause has also bestowed upon me the unwelcome gift of Zero Metabolism.  Zero Metabolism means that thinking about lettuce makes me gain weight.**  One of the things that got subtracted from my daily intake was the local honey.  Which, most of the time, is okay.  But my elderly hormone-deprived ME-distracted*** immune system will still react to extreme provocation.  I spent most of yesterday sneezing and grumbling and watering at the eyes, but it didn't get really grisly till I went back to the cottage and tried to go to bed.  YOWZAH.  I felt like hell, I couldn't breathe, my ears, my head and my throat hurt, and while there was no visible rash, I was savagely itchy.  But my eyes were the worst:  the lids were so swollen they only opened about halfway, and when I looked in the mirror—AAAAAAUGH—both the lids and the whites were bright red.  Fiery red.  Which is how they felt.  And haemorrhaging tears.

            I have no good excuse for not having hit the homeopathy hours before.  But I'd learnt to be stoic decades before I discovered homeopathy—the occasions I do myself serious damage now tend to be when I'm so busy being stoical I forget to take the arnica right away.  So yesterday I was close to the life-threatening edge before I finally remembered . . . well, in this case, allium.  It was looking at my red eyes in the mirror that did it:  if hay fever is making you miserable but the worst thing is your eyes, the first thing to try is allium cepa.†

            I tottered over to the chest of drawers where I keep my remedies and fished out the allium.  Homeopathic remedy bottles are little, and the labels on them littler still, and I could barely read.  But I found what I was looking for, tipped a little white pill into the bottle cap and then into my mouth†† . . . and it began working instantly.  Contact with mucous membrane and it starts the business.  My eyes stopped burning.  I stopped sneezing.  My head cleared.  I could breathe.  I stopped itching.  I could open my eyes more than halfway.  When I opened the kitchen door to let hellhounds out the last time a few minutes later, I was fine.  I slept—slept!—with the window open.  I've been fine today, although it's been drizzly, so you can argue that it's damped pollen and other evil floating substances down. 

            Homeopathy works.  Placebo effect?  Eh.  Sure, sometimes.  You get the placebo effect with doctor drugs too, sometimes.  But homeopathy works on babies and animals—and I think the argument that your dog or your child gets better because it wants to please you is just silly.  And I've dosed myself—and not got the desired reaction;  I was already figuring out what I was going to try next, last night, while I was unscrewing the lid on the allium.  I'm a rotten debater, as I said, and I'm not interested in arguing—homeopathy works.  There.

 * * *

* And if anyone either wants to try this or has tried it and thinks it doesn't work . . . in my experience it has to be really, really local.  'Hampshire' honey isn't good enough.  It has to be within about five miles of where you live.  I used to get my therapeutic honey from our next-door neighbour at the old house, and honeycomb to chew as well.  You also have to eat it faithfully, beginning several months before your hay fever season starts.  If you're careless and keep missing days, it doesn't do much–and you need a good-sized, calorie-laden blob, not just a thin scrape.  I'm sure this is another of those things that doesn't work for everybody, but it worked amazingly for me.  And you don't have worse hay fever than mine used to be, and live.  It's one of the reasons I ended up back in Maine;  I couldn't take the summers farther south—although it's also part of the reason I liked Manhattan in August.  Less pollen there^ than in Maine's brief, ferocious summer.  Lush southern England was walking into Smaug's lair without a Ring or a sword.   

^ But stay away from the 843 acres of Central Park. 

** Menopause may have got hay fever right but it got chocolate wrong.   My chocolate craving is waay worse now than it ever used to be.  I've always loved chocolate and I've always had a serious sweet tooth, but I only morphed into a 'just hand me the chocolate and nobody gets hurt' megabitch with menopause.  This is an interesting situation with Zero Metabolism.  But I've been thin for nearly forty years, and I'm not giving up without a struggle.  Not to mention my ridiculously flimsy, non-weight-carrying knees, which are a cheap Gflytchian knock off, and not made out of real human bone and sinew at all. 

*** It would be interesting to know what input the ME has had on my no-longer hyper-reactivity to a very long list of allergens.  

† One of the reasons, I think, that there's so much bad press about homeopathy is that it is such an individually-tailored system.  That's its strength, but also its weakness from a public-relations viewpoint:  you can rarely prescribe for anything, even a lot of minor things, without knowing rather a lot about your patient, or trying several remedies before you find the right one, or both.  This makes it look haphazard or inadequate, when—say I—it is exactly the opposite.  But think of how vastly complicated and unique each individual human being is:  you've got to get every symptom, every clue, every trait in the right place, or the jigsaw doesn't fit together.  Even arnica, which has probably converted more people to homeopathy than every other remedy combined, doesn't work for everybody.  And allium cepa works for most hay fever sufferers whose burning, tearing eyes are their worst symptom.  But it doesn't work for everybody.

 †† You don't touch the pills if you can help it.  You tip one into the bottle cap, toss it into your mouth, tuck the pill under your tongue and let it dissolve.