Homeopathy

A friend of mine took me to a documentary last year about homeopathy. I had heard the word homeopathy but didn't really know what it was. I really liked the show about it and learned new things. I'm somewhat open to alternative medicine. After the movie, there was a guy that's a homeopath that talked a little. He has a store and does appointments for anybody that wants to see him and it's less than our co-pay to see a doctor.

I don't trust people usually and I trusted him right away. I went home and looked up his store and kept a bookmark but I needed time before I was ready to really go. Now that we're to May, I finally talked myself into taking my boys in. I have a son that's been on Zyrtec for allergies for too many years now and Dave, the homeopath, was great with him. He talked about a lot of details about his personality and I couldn't believe how good he was at getting it right.

My other son has been throwing up for months and is sick all the time. I've recently watched him struggle more than I can handle. He's been to the doctor, been to a specialist, had a scope done with anesthesia, been put on different medications. Nothing seemed to help or explain the problems or why they're getting worse and the doctors just keep doing ineffective things while our medical bills are mounting. My son throws up so much and his whole life is affected all the time and nobody can give me any answers. That's what made me finally call Dave. He was brilliant. The appointment was about 15 minutes and he said, "You've got a parasite in your large intestine" and gave us some treatments we can use to get rid of the problem, which will take about 6 weeks to be certain.

I didn't know what to think but decided we'll try the treatments. It's far less money for them than we've been spending. When I told my husband the diagnosis, he said that makes a lot of sense. He had a friend with the same problem and he just kept getting really sick. Parasites weren't on the doctors' radars but I read up on it and it does make sense. It seems a little crazy to me that we spend months seeing medical professionals and they just draw a blank but we see this guy for 15 minutes, he never even touches my son, and figures out the problem. Because of such a good experience with both boys, I had to come back the next day for something and called to see if they had an appointment for me to see Dave. I've been wanting to and they did. At my boys' appointments, he talked a little about personality but it was more medical. For my appointment, he figured out early on that it's my gallbladder that's the problem.

That wasn't on my radar but I read about it afterward and once again, it would put all the pieces together and make the most sense. However, Dave brushed that aside relatively quickly and wanted to talk more about emotional health. It's probably what I wanted (not so much from him but just in general) and what I needed but I wasn't expecting it and found it quite embarrassing. I'd barely sat down with this guy and he just knew personal things about me.

He asked if I'm a people pleaser and then started going into great detail as to how I function in life. I wasn't prepared for it! I felt really uncomfortable but that was yesterday and as I digest it, he's right about most of what he said and I want to take the treatments and see what happens. He's giving me something for my gallbladder issues and something else for my emotional issues. He told me to warn my husband that I will be changing a lot in the next few weeks. It seems crazy to me but kind of exciting as well. This is all new & drastically different and it seems to be impressively effective but time will tell. This is the start of our journey toward more enjoyable health.

Down the Toilet

I faced a difficult modern challenge this week that involves mourning the loss of all the items I had saved electronically over the last 20 years. I was starting to not trust my computer so much 2 years ago so I got an external hard drive (because it was WAY more affordable than a new computer) & transferred everything to it since it was a TB: pictures, journals, all of my music, and I had started writing a book I kept on there, the book I've been wanting to write for years. I'm not sure why I didn't keep my files on both the computer and the external hard drive. No explanation is good enough now but I guess part of the reason is that I'd never lost electronic information before so I didn't realize just how devastating it could be. I didn't think of it as a likely problem. I downloaded a few high-rated recovery programs & got nothing. I took the drive to Best Buy-couldn't fix it. I found a high-rated affordable place in California to send it and they said it was over their capabilities but referred me to another place that is crazy amazing. I had to spend $300 for damaged parts for them to try but ultimately, nothing could be recovered and I'm out of options. I found out the final call yesterday. This process took months and I didn't allow myself to think much about losing everything. I clung to a kernel of hope until now there is none. I can't even describe how upset I am.

I keep relatively detailed journals that I referred to for a variety of things over the years. Family would sometimes ask when certain things occurred and I could go back & find accurate answers. The last journal I printed was halfway through 2009 so 10 years of details is gone.

Pictures from the last 20 years are gone.

I keep wanting to hear songs, some of them a little obscure, and all of my music files are gone. I have accumulated a good deal of free music, when what I want is available through the library free downloads but over the years, I've probably spent a few hundred dollars on mp3s that are gone.

Starting over feels daunting. There's a part of me now that thinks, "Why put in the effort? It could just disappear for good anyway." The part of me that realizes that life must go on sees it a little bit another way. I try to be clean and organized but life gets crazy and stuff gets scrambled and sometimes I think I'm not doing as good as I'd like with getting rid of as much as I should. However, if there were some kind of emergency and our home or stuff got ruined, it would be hard but it would also be a clean slate. I guess I should think of electronics the same way. I just electronically got a clean slate. The little thing that upsets me most though is that I don't think I was sold a legitimate product in the first place. It was a Seagate brand drive. I ordered it off Amazon and made sure to buy it directly from the real company itself. I thought this was how to make sure I got the product I thought I was getting. I got the product & used it and everything was working for a while. There were no red flags that there was a problem. I never opened the enclosure to the drive, just for kicks or anything like that. I had never opened one before & didn't believe I had any reason to. When communicating with recovery companies, they asked for the serial number & then sent me pictures of the serial number sticker on the same kind of external hard drives but mine had none whatsoever and had never had one while in my possession. Also as recovery professionals handled the drive, they found it had been opened aggressively & they found fingerprints all over it.

I hadn't even ever opened the enclosure before it crashed so clearly, I would not have handled it in a way that would have resulted in fingerprints. It was past the warranty period so I didn't have that on my side but I contacted Seagate because I believed they had sold me a product that had been compromised from the beginning. Contacting them was a nightmare, especially since the most efficient method required me to put in the serial number, which was missing from my product so I could never complete that method. They just sent me some generic e-mail about sorry for my experiences. We learn from our mistakes faster than our successes & I can promise I won't make the same mistake again. It's just felt like a very big loss to me, so much of the details of my life have just been flushed away.