March Went Out
Like a Lamb Who Escaped Firey Wind Fueled Flames
I’m a western girl living in a southern world. In other words, I’m a light weight who pretty much had it made in the comforts of western shade, a land where a swamp cooler is about all that you needed to be comfortable most of the time and clean, warm, natural gas was piped into just about every home. I had no idea how extremely dangerous things like heat, cold, humidity, wind, thunder and lightning, snakes, biting bugs, blood sucking insects, wreck less drivers, dogs who don’t seem to understand leash laws, and rural living without fire hydrants could be.
My husband was away from his southern roots for quite a while and with his southern homecoming, he has rightly decided that the south is most likely the proving grounds of hell. In other words, there’s no shortage of life transforming character opportunities. I didn’t even know what scabies were until we moved down here. As you can see, we did not move here seeking political asylum from the D words of the world. We have roots down here, because of his parents. If the tyranny escapees who moved to the southland in recent years had asked me before making life changing political moves, I would have asked them about a few things, things that might have given them pause, questions like- are you sure you want to learn a new culture only to find out later that corruption pretty much lives everywhere? And, I would have painted pictures for them that look like something from the horror movie, Snakes on a Plane. But down here there are also green and beautiful pastures that are full of nice people, so there’s hope for a southern life that’s worth living. Chuckle, chuckle, snort, chuckle, giggle, giggle, snort.
For example, I think the March I experienced in 2024 didn’t quite fit the traditional coming in and going out trope i.e. the blustery lion going out like a gentle lamb.
March in my neck of the woods came in like a sleepy lion who ate lunch and then took a nap under a wet tree in some damp grass- cloudy, misty, and with enough humidity in the air to make 44 degrees feel like needing a light jacket to keep the chill off my skin.
March in my neck of the woods went out “Like a Lamb Who Escaped Firey Wind Fueled Flames”.
In case you haven’t heard the story yet, here’s how things burnt down the other day-
The winds were pretty bad (30 MPH+ wind gusts) blowing in some needed rain which I was happy to have, but I saw smoke as I looked out my kitchen window the other afternoon and got a bit worried about the blustery Pooh like day, so I went outside and saw fire coming out of an old dilapidated neighbor’s garage in the field below our woods, but I also heard sirens roaring down the highway, coming in their direction. As I watched the fire grow, I also heard things exploding, and the wind whipped flames started to move toward our house. I saw the police arrive first and then a couple of fire trucks pulled in across the way. I kept watching and waiting for the firemen to come down the dirt road near our back woods with their trucks and quickly found myself wondering why they didn’t seem to be coming to stop the fire from spreading up the hill toward the houses in our neighborhood. When the fire fighting heroes didn’t come fast enough for my comfort level, the only thing left for me to do was to cry out to God, very loudly, in prayer. Eventually, the wind shifted. It seemed like it took forever for those wind whipped flames to change direction, and it also seemed as if our property line became a boundary the fire couldn’t cross. While this was happening, another fire truck arrived and pulled into our driveway. I ran to the fireman and gave him a piece of my mind about the fire trucks at the bottom of the hill not coming down the dirt road to stop the fire from advancing toward all of our houses while also telling him that they needed to get down to where the fire was by way of the house next door. As I was doing that, our neighbor pulled up in his golf cart, and I told him that the fire was moving toward his house. He then showed the fire men, who came with a fire bulldozer, how to get down to the fire, through his yard, to where the fire was headed, and they were then able to get the fire put out. The fire chief told my husband, the chicken whisperer, that they don’t take the fire trucks down old dirt roads anymore because they have had problems with some firetrucks sinking under their own weight and getting stuck.
Praise God! He heard my cries for help.
*No people, dogs, chickens, or houses were harmed in the fire.
Sometimes, it is hard for independent Americanoes to learn the fine art of asking for and receiving help, and sometimes it takes things like fires, and help not coming in the way that we think it’s supposed to come, to help nudge us into asking for help in places we should have been asking for help from in the first place.
Sometimes the healthcare system just can’t do everything we want or expect it to, and I think that it took a long illness and the chaos of the Covid pandemic to remind me that as wonderful as modern medicine and science are, they are not perfect and can’t quite guarantee us everything that we would like them to. Looking to the healthcare system first and foremost has become almost automatic for too many of us, let’s not let it take God’s place as first and foremost in our lives. Pray first.
If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at our prayer page, I would like to encourage you to do that, and I want you to know that I am praying those prayers that are shared there for each of you - for the Holy Spirit to show you what you need to discover and do for your own healing. As Dr. Elizabeth pointed out on a recent episode of the Long Covid Podcast, Covid knows how to target chinks in our armor, weak places in our own health that need to be strengthened up. I never would have thought I could praise something as terrible as covid or cancer, but I’ve found myself doing that this week because we can get stuck in the cog wheels of auto-pilot complacency living and need something to shake us up and wake us up every now and then.
Covid has been a much-needed teacher in my own life, it has taught me how to better listen to My Creator and Sustainer and how to listen to my body telling me things that it needs from me in order to be a healthier human being. If you are finding that the things you have done in the past to help yourself be well, or achieving your best life now health goals are just not working anymore, I don’t think it’s a coincidence because the things we have been getting by on just don’t seem to be working the way they used to. We are in a season of seeking and finding and of learning and healing. As Wim Hoff would say- “Be aware of your body.” Not easy, I know, because being aware of our body means that we are going to have to learn how to deal with the bitterness of life and death and the associated pain that comes with it in better ways than we may have been doing it in the past, so that, we can come to a better understanding of just how meaningful life really is and, so that, we can more clearly see what our purpose in living the precious life that we have been given is i.e. you are a buried chest of treasure that needs to be found and fully opened.
In case you missed it, here’s that link again-
Long Covid Podcast: 124 - Dr Elizabeth So - East Asian Medicine & Acupuncture on Apple Podcasts
and my own experience is documented here-
Acupuncture for the Win! - by Stephanie.
There are quite a few resources on the complementary medical benefits of acupuncture for cancer. I can’t speak of this personally, but if you would like for me to do a write up on this or provide you with more info, please refer to your subscription benefits on how to access my research skills.
Prostate cancer seems to be going around, so I’m thinking I may do some more research on that, especially since it was a prostate cancer survivor who gave me a lot of hope when we received Dad’s dismal stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
None of us were really excited about waiting that long for any of this to take place. The next morning after that phone call from my dad, in which he told us that we were going to stay positive, I turned on the interwebs while my husband and I drank our coffee. The first video to pop up in my recommended watch list was about a man named Tenenbaum who was told he had stage 4 prostate cancer in 2018 and was sent home to die, but he wasn’t ready to die, so he learned everything that he could about beating his death diagnosis, wrote his own cancer protocol, healed his cancer, left death in the dust (for now), and is still alive at the time of this writing. What really struck me about all of this was the focus in his protocol on inhibiting SCOT which also just so happens to be my dad’s name, Scott, and, that the name Tenenbaum means Christmas tree which is the time of year that dad would be starting his cancer treatment. These 2 key words, SCOT and Tenenbaum and their respective associations with our particular situation caught my attention and gave me Hope. Hope that we would not have to sit around for the next 6 weeks wringing our hands and doing nothing, except swim around in our fearful thoughts, while we waited for the healthcare system to work.
For the skeptics among us, remember, what you believe about your healing and treatment plan matters. Once you pick one, you probably had better believe in it because what you believe about something matters!
I recently picked up a copy of the book, Lessons from The Miracle Doctors: A Step-By-Step-Guide to Optimum Health and Relief from Catastrophic Illness by Jon Barron. In it, Jon describes the case of “Mr. Wright” a patient of Dr. Bruno Klopfer who had a tumor riddled body and was expected to die, but Mr. Wright heard about an experimental drug called Krebiozen and demanded to be put on it. Miraculously, the tumors “melted” away. Several months later with his cancer still in remission, Mr. Wright saw a news report declaring Krebiozen to be a worthless cancer treatment and his tumors reappeared, but his doctor did something unusual and injected Mr. Wright with water while telling him that he had received a double dose of Krebiozen which resulted in another remarkable recovery. He remained in remission until he again saw reports declaring Krebiozen to be an ineffective cancer treatment, he died 2 days later. Words do have the power to kill, but when Hope is communicated, people are more likely to respond to treatment.
“it’s not simply mind over matter, but it is clear that mind matters.”
~David Spiegel, Healing Words: Emotional Expression and Disease Outcome, 281 J.A.M.A. 1328,1329 (1999).
To end the month of March, I am going to introduce you to another long hauler who we can look up to, her name is Dr. Liisa Selin. Liisa is a scientist and post-viral long hauler who is doing some interesting work in the post-viral fatigue ballpark which is something she has experienced herself. I hope to do a breakdown of her work soon and maybe even put together some research notes on what’s in this video for you and share what she has been working on that looks interesting. If you are as impatient as I am, here’s a pharmaceutical sneak peek and the video interview link-
Inspiritol Effective In COVID-19, Long-COVID And ME/CFS Patients (prnewswire.com)
I will leave you, and the month of March, with these Spring thoughts from my neck of the woods.
Those of you who have been around a bit longer may remember last year’s surprising lemon balm failure and bountiful surprise. The lemon balm has kept on giving as I’ve found some growing in my wormy compost pile along with some green onion scraps that I threw out, which decided to grow into something other than worm food. I also received a Johnny Jump Up surprise in the lawn where I did not plant it, after the seeds I tried to plant over winter did not germinate.
I usually like to grow evasive, invasive herbs, nicely contained in large pots where they will grow where I want them to grow and not where I don't want them to grow. However, due to the “unprecedented” cold weather we had this past December, a lot of plants did not live to see spring, my lemon balm included. I was patient with my lemon balm, more patient with it than all of the other shrubs in my garden which thankfully came back to life. I waited and waited for my lemon balm to give me some indication that it was still alive, but time seemed to be running out on me, and the desire for something beautiful to grow in that now empty space found me giving up on it, so I headed out to our local big box hardware store, that starts with the letter L, less than hopeful that I would actually find a lemon balm plant or seeds there and since the hive mindset these days is fixated on scarcity and bound and determined to create it, I was happy to go along with scarcities thoughts, which by the way, has not proven to be good for humanity in the past. Scarcity and fear and panic can make people do bad things. Choose wisely.
Remember what SP said, it went something like this- we are souls, spiritual beings having a human experience. What’s in your fire extinguishing health care plan?
*Leaving Death in the Dust is a newsletter and is not a replacement for professional, regulated, medical, healthcare. This is informational and educational. Some of us in this community may have worked in the healthcare system, but we are not your medical provider and whatever you find here is not the establishment of a professional medical relationship or medical advice. **That is an MT behind my name not an MD.
Best Wishes,
Stephanie