I’ve gone from not wanting to use conventional medicine at all- to I can only use homeopathy. And now I’ve kind of, like, come back more of a balance where I’m not strictly only homeopathy. I’m still very anti-conventional medicine for not emergencies. You know, when Beckett had RSV, and they put us in an ambulance because he was struggling to breathe like- that’s a time that you need to use emergency medicine. Absolutely. And I have no problem with that.
But most of the time, the acute illnesses that our kids experience are not emergencies. I want to keep my kids from hopefully suffering the way that I have with chronic illness.
Marie was about 18 months at the time, and she had this respiratory virus that she initially got over the bulk of it, but she was left with this wheezing for like, six weeks where it was loud, like, you could hear her across the room breathing. And I kept thinking, ‘it’ll go away. It’ll resolve. It’ll go away. It’s fine.’ And six weeks later, we still were wheezing. So [for two weeks] we were just a revolving door in and out of the pediatrician’s office doing breathing treatments and Albuterol and all sorts of things to try to get the wheezing to go away. Her oxygen levels were fine. She was acting fine. She was not sick. It just had this sound to her breathing. And at the end of that two weeks, after several more breathing treatments, and we had spent hundreds of dollars on all this medicine and stuff, they were like, well, it’s not resolving, so you probably need to maybe look at going into the ER or the hospital.
And I’m like, “what? No, I am not okay with that.” And I had heard and joined a group about Homeopathy on Facebook, and I had bought my first homeopathy book- The Complete Guide to Homeopathy for Beginners or something like that. And it has what’s called a repertory in the back of it where you can look up symptoms and it will give you the main remedies for those symptoms. So I looked up wheezing and a couple of the other things that she had going on and came up with this remedy called So I deep dived and started listening to all of the podcasts that I could get my hands on and reading all the books and trolling all of the Facebook groups. That was one of the most helpful things, was being in the Facebook groups and reading what people had going on and what they were treating it with and how they were treating it and just learning from there. And it has literally changed the projection of the health of my family.
One of the Homeopaths has a great podcast, Joette Calabrese, and she talks a lot about ear infections. And I was like, I can’t wait for my kid to get their first ear [infection] so I can try this out. And Marie finally did. She didn’t have an ear infection until she was three years old. Incidentally, it was right after we introduced gluten for the first time. She had three or four ear infections back to back. But the first one, I didn’t know what was going on. She had never had one before. She spiked a huge fever. She got a rash all over her body. We took her to urgent care because I was like, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, so I want to find out. And the urgent care doctor looked at her ears, and he’s like, they’re nine out of ten double ear infection. You have to treat this with antibiotics. You don’t have a choice. And in my head, I was like, ‘watch me.’
I went home, and I was like, okay, give me 24 hours to see if I can get improvement with the homeopathy, and if I don’t, we’ll move on to the antibiotics. But let me try. And so the first thing I did was do, like, the classic remedy. It’s one called And so I’m like, okay, let’s back up and look at instead of going with, like, ear infection, let me look at: how is she acting? What are her emotions? And she was really weepy and clingy and had a high fever. She had bright red cheeks and glassy eyes with the high fever. So the weepy and the clingy, blonde hair, blue eyed girl is the kind of the classic Belladonna“>Belladonna picture. So I rotated between those two remedies, and 24 hours later, she was better. [It] was gone. And I took her to the pediatrician on Monday to make sure that I was on the right track with this. And they’re like, yeah, they’re maybe like, a two or three out of a ten. She’s on her way. You don’t need to worry about antibiotics now.
If they have an ear infection, I’ll add stuff in, like, garlic drops or lymphatic cream down the neck to get the stuff to drain. I’ll take them to the chiropractor. It’s like, I don’t feel bound by one modality within the holistic realm of treatment options. I have in my head when people are telling me about what their kid is going through [that] if they’re not asking for my advice, in my head, my tune is- not my kid, not my kid. I don’t want to offer unsolicited advice, but I always try to give the knowledge that I have when I am asked, and sometimes when people will look up, or their husbands will look up the medicine that I’m recommending like, “okay, give them Belladonna. If you google Belladonna, it’s a deadly night shade. But Homeopathic Belladonna is not a deadly night shade.
Once it’s prepared homeopathically, all of the toxicity of it is gone, and all you have is the healing properties of it. Of course, you have to know how to dose it right, but generally speaking, it is extremely safe. And if you start to what’s called “prove the remedy”, you either stop giving it or you give them camphor or something minty and it cancels it out and you’re good to go. It’s not this dramatic, “oh my gosh, I’ve ruined my child!” type of thing.
Some of the other pushback that we’ve gotten is like, it’s not approved by the FDA or whatever. And that here’s the thing, is it is regulated by the FDA. All of these homeopathic medicines are made in pharmacies that the FDA regulates, and it is very strict how they do it. And even more, I would say more so than your standard drugs.
Proving remedies is essentially what it sounds like. It’s how they prove that a remedy works. So if you talk to people that go to Homeopathic schools or when Homeopathic remedies are being developed, they basically give the remedy on repetition to somebody who is not sick and that doesn’t need it and see what symptoms develop. And so that’s how they know what symptoms that remedy will treat. For example, if somebody isn’t sick, doesn’t have a fever, and they are repetitively dosed Belladonna, they would develop the glassy eyes and the red cheeks and the high fever. Because the whole premise of homeopathy is that like cures like.
You want to give the remedy that would induce those symptoms. If you have those symptoms, it will cure it. I would say in those other moments would be like when there is true emergencies, that it’s been kind of important for me to kind of let go of what I can’t control and not worry about the consequences. I can fix stuff later. There’s been one time in their childhood where Marie and Thomas both had ear infections at the same time. But Blake and I were out of town. It was my mom taking care of them, and she was newer to Homeopathy. I wasn’t there observing the symptoms, and they ended up on antibiotics for that one. I can give them gut repairing probiotics at some point and it’s going to be okay.
I just refuse to have my kids be the ones that are on 17 rounds of antibiotics by the time they’re 18 years old. And that’s what happened to me, too. We grew up [when] it was a pill for every ill, and you got sick, and you went to the doctor, and you got antibiotics and you got better, and round and round and round we go. And it’s like, I can’t blame my parents because you don’t know what you don’t know. But I think that has a huge amount to do with my gut health and developing an autoimmune disease, at least on the path. I don’t think it’s what triggered it, but certainly you don’t develop autoimmunity without gut problems. That’s a known fact. I think it has a lot to do with that. That and vaccines and processed foods and food dyes. We just products of the American cultures.
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s January 2015, but I had been symptomatic for two years before that. And by symptomatic, I mean, like, I would have heart palpitations. I would have tachycardia episodes, or my heart would be beating 150 beats a minute, and I’d be at work doing lashes in a spa. No need for my heart to be beating at 150. I could not handle the least amount of stress. Anything that was a little bit stressful would make me violently ill, like throwing up and unable to get off the couch and super nauseous; started developing food intolerances to stuff that I had eaten my whole life, had no idea what was going on. The heart stuff is what sent me to the doctor, because at the time, I was, like 24 years old, but this is not normal.
And then other stuff, like, I couldn’t travel up to my parents house in Oklahoma without being ill for two days before it because of the stress of- what, packing for a weekend? It was like, stupid stuff. Like, this is ridiculous. I can’t get off the couch because I’m going on a road trip? Not normal, and something is wrong with me. I went to the doctor initially and as the story goes, Blake and I got married and missed the mark to be able to get on his insurance because Oklahoma took forever to get us our marriage license. So I had to get on Obamacare and got sent to the lowest denominator doctor, and he wanted to put me on SSRIs immediately and did a very simple thyroid panel and initially diagnosed me as hypo.
I was like, look, I’m, like, the least depressed person. There’s no way I’m going on an SSRI, and I don’t want to be on Synthroid because I had done at least enough reading at that point when I kind of suspected what it might be, that I knew I didn’t want to be on Synthroid. And he argued with me about that, but he didn’t argue with me.
I would ask a question, and he would answer to Blake. I was like, yeah, we’re finding a different doctor. So I went to a family clinic and I found this doctor’s name on a Facebook group somewhere that he was a doctor that would prescribe the more natural desiccated thyroid stuff. And he happened to be Catholic, and so I figured he probably would know a little bit more about cycles and fertility and how that was playing into my thyroid stuff than your average doctor who was going to assume that everyone was on birth control.
So my first appointment with him, I brought my Creighton NFP chart and we talked about all my symptoms. And he looked at my chart and he was like, yeah, it looks like you might have Hashimoto’s. The possibility of that had not occurred to me. And so we did the testing for it and sure enough, like, came back and my antibodies were high. And then we did genetic testing and I came back with the MTHFR mutation and he was not so far crunchy into the Holistic realm to suggest other things before just putting me on a desiccated thyroid. Which is unfortunate, because looking back, I wish that I had done other things, because once you get onto the thyroid medication, it is much harder to get off of it. Symptom wise, your life can be pretty miserable for a while and it could be dangerous to just point blank stop taking it. So I wish that had been different, but I am grateful that he was open to the natural desiccated and he was the one that suggested certain food sensitivities, getting off gluten, getting off eggs. Eggs seemed to be a really big trigger for me, dairy, for a while, but I knew when I was diagnosed with Hashis, and he’s like, you’re probably going to be taking this medicine for the rest of your life. So that didn’t sit well with me.
There’s got to be something else that I can be doing. But here I am, seven years later. I’m still on the medicine, but I’m a whole lot better. I’m a whole lot better than what I was. And Homeopathy has been a big part of that because I’ve been able to avoid a lot of those allopathic drugs that can drive stuff deeper. So I have worked with a homeopath myself for about the past year and a half, and we have worked through a lot of anxiety. She helped me with getting through the initial postpartum kind of anxiety depression era of this last baby and before that, the anxiety of being pregnant and all of the what ifs that can go wrong with that, since I’ve had three what if scenarios happen.
She’s helped me with yeast infections and she’s helped a lot of the gut stuff. The thyroid stuff is a much longer term treatment with homeopathy, so I haven’t seen real improvement in that area. But just in terms of other symptoms, like, for example, postpartum all of the up and down hormone stuff. I was starting to get like I would wake up in my hands and be like, really stiff, and they get better throughout the day. And of course that freaked me out because my mom has Rheumatoid Arthritis and she has since I was six years old, so I know what that life looks like. And I have done a lot to prevent, hopefully developing farther autoimmune diseases. And so when that started happening, I freaked out and she recommended a remedy. And within a couple of days I was waking up, my hands were fine.
She’s kind of a mix. She is not classical homeopathy. She follows the Banerji’s, which are a group of homeopaths out of India who have come up with protocols. And so she kind of blends the two. She takes kind of what the name of the disease that you’re working with is and what the Banergi remedies for that are. But then she also considers your family history, what homeopathy refers to as miasms, which would be like epigenetic stuff that is presenting through different generations of your family and blends the two of them. When you’re working with her specifically, and most homeopaths work like this, you have an initial intake appointment, and then you continue to meet every eight weeks, every twelve weeks, something like that. So for her, you’re taking remedies and then when you meet with her, it’s your progress.
Other classical homeopaths usually work with only one, maybe two remedies at a time, and they use what’s called the law of minimum dose, which is you take one remedy that is hopefully encompassing all of your symptoms together. You dose that and wait to see what happens. And I tried to work with the classical homeopath at one point, and it’s frustrating for my overanalyzing brain to sit there and be like, do I feel less anxious today? Do I feel more anxious today? And I’m super psychosomatic. That’s one of the things that I’ve struggled with, especially with postpartum stuff. What else is going wrong? How am I feeling today? Does my incision hurt? Is my incision red? Is it raised? On and on and on and on.
She absolutely helped with that kind of circular thinking. Before I started working with her, I would have a really hard time, anxiety wise, going out in large crowds with my kids to the point where I would be nauseous, going to a baseball game, going to the zoo, going to the fair, whatever it was. It was like, are my kids going to get lost? Am I going to lose track of them? Can I see them at all times? That’s normal motherhood stuff, but this is like next level. I was sick thinking about this type of stuff.
I think a lot of that probably stems from the fact that with Marie and with Thomas, I could have died in both of those labors, and so could they have. And so the thought of losing them in some capacity was, like, overwhelming in one form or another, whether that’s them getting lost in a crowd and I never see them again, or the fact that if it had been 150 years ago, we would have died in labor. There’s always that wonder, like, if I had known [homeopathy] when I was in labor with Marie, would my labor have gone differently? Or if I had known this when I was in labor with Thomas, would that have changed things with both of them?
Marie turned posterior and transverse and got stuck in my hip, and I had back labor. Like, if I had had the right remedies, would my body have been able to relax enough for her to turn and come out? Would I have been able to emotionally relax enough to allow that to happen? Because there’s a book called I didn’t get my first book about homeopathy until after she was born. She was probably like a year old when I first got it, but I was with midwives and stuff. But they’re hospital midwives. They don’t use homeopathy. They’re more natural minded, but not that naturally minded. Like, amazing for clogged ducts. And I have never had mastitis because of homeopathy because I’ve always been able to land on the right remedy and flush it out, which is awesome. And I’ve been breastfeeding for the last seven years, so to never have mastitis in that time is pretty awesome.
Homeopathy has definitely helped me through the grief of never being able to have a natural birth, because now I’ve had four c sections. There is not a doctor that will touch me with a ten foot pole to have a fifth baby naturally. And honestly, my trauma from the first ones is such that I don’t want to even try. Definitely want more babies, but I don’t have any desire at this point to try to have a vaginal birth. Risk and trauma. But that doesn’t mean there’s not grief around the fact that I will never have a natural birth. There’s a lot of grief there. I think it’s just part like an innate part of womanhood of motherhood to want that.
And part of my Hashi’s journey and part of the C section journey is and part of what I’ve worked on throughout the past couple of years is working through the feelings of ‘my body is broken.’ Which I think a lot of women struggle with. It’s like my I’m 24 years old and my body is broken and like, my heart’s not beating the way that it should. I’m having palpitations. My digestive stuff is not going the way that it should. This isn’t normal. And then you add the C section stuff on top of it. My body can’t birth a baby the way that it should be able to. And not only that, but twice that happened.
I did everything right. I took the Bradley classes, I did the breathing, I did the hypno babies stuff. I had a doula, I was with midwives. I did everything twice to have a baby the natural way and I couldn’t. And that just leaves you with like, my body betrayed me. My body is not working the way it should. My body is broken. I’ve worked really hard over the past couple of years to shift that mentality. And homeopathy helps a lot with the emotional side of things. My body is giving me signs and symptoms as a gift to help me figure out what is wrong. My body is trying to survive. It’s not broken, it’s surviving. But symptoms are a gift. They’re not a betrayal. And that is that can be a hard pill to swallow sometimes, especially if you don’t know what is wrong. It’s not like taking a Tylenol and your headache goes away. It’s a gradual, like, oh, I’m not struggling with that today. And then it’s like, oh, I haven’t struggled with that in a week. It’s a gradual, gentle shift.
The faith portion that kind of comes in with that helps with the healing too, is the acceptance of it. There’s grief there, but this is the cross that I’ve been given. And when you are having a C section, you are literally in the cruciform, like, your arms out, feet down, cannot move, giving your body up for your child. With Beckett (number four), he was by far the most traumatic of all of my births. And I say that because of the way things happened.
A lot happened during my pregnancy. I tell people the only part of Beckett that was planned was the conception, because everything else was like, what is going to be thrown at me today? I lost my midwife. I had to go with an OB. I will say that he is a fantastic surgeon. He cares about his patients very much, but he just didn’t know me the way that my midwife did. And so some of the questions that he would ask me, like, do I want to get my tubes tied? My midwife would know better than to ask me that. It was just kind of hurtful for the vulnerable state that I was already in. It was kind of a whirlwind pregnancy. I got COVID at the beginning of it. They thought that Beckett had uterine growth restriction stuff at the end of the pregnancy. So I was doing weekly ultrasounds and all of that while being with a provider that I didn’t love. It was a lot.
His c section got scheduled for September 12. And I went into labor the night of September 5, unexpectedly. And we didn’t have help. It was early in the morning. The cousins that we called to come help us were out of town. My parents live 4 hours north and couldn’t get a hold of Blake’s mom. His dad’s in Florida. So what do we do? We wake up all the kids, and Blake drives me to the hospital. And I walk in by myself.
Sorry. And that’s the trauma is- doing it alone and getting out of the car and getting saying bye to my kids and just sobbing, gosh, he’s seven and a half months old now, and I still can’t. Thomas actually asked me the other day. He said, mom, “why were you so sad when we took you to the hospital for Beckett?” I was like, “I was not sad because of Beckett coming. I was sad because your dad wasn’t going to get to meet him when I did.” And I felt like as I was walking down the hallway, that I had, like, this banner over my head that just said, like, more birth trauma, please!
Blake is my anchor. Lucy was the least traumatic. She was planned, and everything went according to schedule, and it was easy, and postpartum was hard, but we got through it. But Blake was there with Thomas and Marie and he was the anchor. And I looked over in the C section [for Beckett] and I had no anchor at all. I called my midwife who had moved away and we talked for a bit and I cried for a bit, we prayed for a bit and I was on repeat saying the surrender Novena which is, “Jesus, I surrender to you, take care of everything.” And “Jesus, I trust in you the Divine Mercy [prayer].”
And the whole time crying and my OB walked in and he asked where Blake is and I just [have] like tears rolling down my face. He’s not here. He has to be with the kids. Somebody has to be with the kids. Blake actually got to see him on a video chat before I even did because they took him away and they held him up and they went over and the nurse took my phone and video called Blake.
I’m just praying over and over again because that was the only anchor that I had and it wasn’t physical. But in my heart, in my head I could hear the Holy Spirit like, why is this happening? Why am I having this birth trauma again? This is worse. Jesus, I surrender to you. Take care of everything. The only answer I got was “embrace the Cross.” And that came to me like as soon as they put me on the table and I’m in the cruciform. And that’s what I heard was “embrace the Cross.” So that’s what I did. Literally, that’s all I had was, okay, I surrender, I trust in you. I trust in you. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, I surrender to you.
I have on my phone my background on my phone- “So for to this you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his footsteps.” And then below that I just have “embrace the Cross.” When you’re Catholic at the Good Friday service, there’s a portion of it that’s called the veneration of the cross. And it’s where they bring the cross or the crucifix, either one, and you line up almost like communion, but instead of receiving the Eucharist, you venerate the cross, which means you can kiss his feet or you can kiss his hands or you can touch his side, or you can simply bow or genuflect or whatever. That is a way of saying thank you.
But also when you touch somebody that is suffering, you share in their suffering. And so you’re almost physically, in that moment, embracing the Cross of Christ, and he asks us as Christians, as followers of Him, as Catholics, to take up our cross and to follow Him. And each one of us has been given something that we struggle with, something that causes suffering in our life, that is a thorn in our side. And to embrace the cross is to embrace the thorn, to offer it back up to Jesus as a way of sanctification.
Because unlike the whole, like, ‘Jesus will never give you more than you can handle’… That’s a bunch of bullshit. [He] will absolutely give us more than we can handle, because if we could handle it, then we wouldn’t need Him. And he gives us stuff so that we need Him, so that we realize our own humanity and our own sinfulness and our own shortcomings and our need for Him. And I honestly could not imagine having to get through that four C section without my faith. There’s no way, because I didn’t have a physical anchor at all.
I often wonder, what do people do that don’t have this hope in their suffering? Because otherwise, what is the point of suffering? That’s got to be so despairing. And despair is a nasty place to be. It’s a nasty place to rest your head. But if you have hope in the Cross, and if you embrace the cross and embrace the suffering, that hope is a light. And that light towards Christ walking, that is your salvation. Walking with Him, walking towards Him, and suffering is the only way that that happens. I mean, there isn’t a resurrection. There isn’t an Easter Sunday without a Good Friday. There’s no such thing as a life without suffering. But that doesn’t mean, like, you can’t use what is God given on this earth to help you through it too- like Homeopathy.
Mount Sinai has an informational overview on Homeopathy.
Complete Guide to Homeopathy is the book this mom mentions that got her started on her Homeopathy journey.
To find the podcast by Joette Calabrese on Apple podcasts, Click Here.
The FDA website describes their methodology on approving Homeopathic products.
Here is a short paragraph that talks about the link between Autoimmune disease and gut health from Harvard University.
For more information on Tachycardia, Click Here.
The Mayo Clinic has an overview of Hashimoto’s Disease.
To learn more about the Creighton Model of Natural Family Planning, Click Here.
Amy Myers MD talks about the MTHFR Mutation and it’s implications.
To learn more about the Banerji’s group, Click Here.
All content and information on this blog is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your doctor for advice on your particular medical situation.