The Process: Elaine Gottschall, Onions and Zebras

I have had many health issues over the years, some major but most pretty minor. Or so I thought. As I have worked through these symptoms one by one, though diet, herbs, chiropractic, and other approaches, I have learned that most of my issues, even the minor ones, are related. And therefore, they are not as insignificant as I had imagined (or had been told, by doctors, among others).

What's a concerning "minor" symptom? Really, they are legion, but let's start with heartburn (a sign of gut dysbiosis, food sensitivities and lack of--yes, you read that correctly--stomach acid). How about foot pain? Plantar fascitis is treated as a management problem, with the recommendation to change your footwear. But it can be a sign of metabolic disorders, like thyroid issues. Tinnitis? That super-annoying ringing in the ears can be a sign of allergies, which in turn are a product of both gut dysbiosis and adrenal insufficiency (and that pesky thyroid again).

I could go on, but I think the point is clear: minor problems are often (usually?) signs of something going wrong on a deeper level. I wish I had known that when each one of my kids developed eczema as a baby. Even my naturopath didn't seem all that concerned, suggesting things like borage oil, but no overall changes in our diets or other approaches (in retrospect, I don't think he had any idea what to do. He was a vegetarian, skinny with a bloated gut. That should have been a tip off--except those were my veggie days...) We were using Bandaids to fix trickles that were later to become hemorrhages...

Over the years, I have had to become educated about each issue we faced. Because no one practitioner seemed to have all the answers, and because some of the answers we were given were not only wrong, they were damaging. I learned about lung function when 3 kids developed asthma. I studied the blood when one developed ITP (a condition where the body destroys its own platelets). And I delved into digestive disorders when one developed ulcerative colitis.

A mom will do anything for her kids, right? So I stayed up at night researching--night after night. I tried different things (sometimes all at once, which I don't recommend--very complicating). And I eventually found a path that resonated: The SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet). At about the same time, I discovered Nourishing Traditions. Suddenly, and it really was like being hit by lightning, I got what was wrong: we were eating products. Processed food. Organic vegetarian junk food. And it was gonna kill us if we kept doing it for much longer.

So I dumped the junk (well, being a miser and a bit of a skeptic, I put it into our utility closet. I threw it out some years later when I found the bags full of cockroach-infested containers. Ugh.) And went whole hog into the world of grain-free grass-fed goodness. We did dabble with soaked grains and we drank our fair share of raw milk, but eventually we found our way to GAPS, where Dr. Natasha teaches the same marrying of the SCD and traditional diets, with emphasis on food quality, digestible preparations and ferments. That is what I had been trying to figure out myself! I was thrilled.

Well, now I should be writing about the Happily Ever After part, no?

Life is never that straightforward, though. The day I spoke on the phone with Elaine Gottschall I shook as she told me "your daughter is very sick. It took a long time for her to get that way and it will take some time to heal her." She was one tough cookie.  She wasn't going to waste a second allowing me to be emotional and indulgent. She wanted me to roll my sleeves up and dig in, for the duration. For my daughter. And as it turned out, for us all.

I wish I knew the date of that call. I'm going to guess it was in 2004 or 2005, not too long before she died. She shored me up when I was wavering---albeit in her gruff, no-nonsense style. When I asked her a specific question she barked, "didn't you read my book??" (yes, of course I had, but I was still confused, and scared, and...) G-d love her. She helped so many.

I started down this path to find answers for my kids. But I am the one who really benefited. I had had more years to get sick than any of my children, so I am still working it all out, but the changes have been enormous. I liken the whole process to peeling back the layers of an onion--the Health Onion. Each step gets us closer to the core, but you have to be patient. And, for sure, we will shed tears in the process.

As I have mentioned previously, to unravel these health mysteries we must be methodical and analytical, like scientists. Keeping good notes helps, taking baby steps helps, keeping the variables simple is essential. And yet, sometimes things are still murky. What to do then? Different situations call for different approaches. I read a lot, looking for clues (that's how I figured out I was hypothyroid). I talk to people about their experiences (always keeping an open mind and a grain of salt handy). I do things like Intro which give me a lot of insight, if done carefully.

And still things may be unclear. For example, in the last week my lower legs have been swelling every night, filled with fluid that goes away within a few hours after lying down. I have had this before, when pregnant and when my hypothyroidism was at its worst. But neither of those conditions apply now. So what's going on?

In midwifery school we were taught the common medical aphorism "when you hear hoof beats, don't look for zebras (look for horses)". Which means that the common explanation or diagnosis is more likely than the rare, odd, dramatic one. This is meant to keep med students from assigning the disease-of-the week to every patient they see. It's a useful guideline for us too.

I saw my chiropractor yesterday and asked her about my legs. She reads my blog (hi Dr. Jody!) and suggested that perhaps I am sitting for longer stretches of time than I had been accustomed to because I have been writing so regularly (and reading everyone else's blogs) She showed me a few stretches and recommended that I take frequent breaks to get my lymph flowing (by walking and doing the movements she showed me). I am writing this lying down, with my laptop propped on a pillow. I am also trying to create a standing workspace. Varying my movement has already improved the situation--tonight my legs feel pretty normal.

Learning what works is like that: use all of your resources, experiment with different approaches, go back and learn some more. Try it again. Each time you will dispatch another layer of that onion. And just when it seems too confusing, remember the zebras: they live in Africa, not in your backyard. What makes the most sense in your world? Look there, because there might be your answer.


What tools do you use to problem solve? How are you working on your "health onion?"

What I Have Been Learning These Last 18 Months

I have been doing, rather than writing. I have apologized enough for my absence; what I really must do is try to convey what I have been learning.

I have learned that if we have grace enough to accept the discomfort, the unfamiliarity, we can find bounty in what we otherwise might have seen as limitation. We can insist on a lettuce salad in January and find blandness, or we can instead find the song in the celery salad with a tart and pungent mustard vinaigrette. If we eat apples and bananas in June, we will miss the impossible perfection of a tiny scarlet strawberry.

We have chosen more work, more change, much training in new skills. We have given up bland, predictable, empty. In the small amount we now take, utilize, receive, we now have true abundance. FULL. We are full. We experience change, seasonality, lack of things we once depended upon, as the fullness of possibility. Everything is available to us if only we accept what is here.

So last year we bought a cider press. A strange thing for those who live full time on a boat perhaps. We tasted one glass of the nectar of this contraption and, like Rapunzel's mother, knew that whatever price, however foolish the quest seemed, we MUST do this. So we did. We asked the man who built the press, lovingly, with local woods and inlay suited to fine furnishing, where we would get apples, since we live in the middle of the water. He laughed. He told us all we had to do was ask. And indeed, all we had to do was ask. We gleaned about 1000 pounds of fruit last year--apples, pears, plums. Most were fermented into wine and cider, some we drank fresh and canned for eating throughout the winter. There is an abundance--just ask.

This is not a good apple year, though we have found some and currently have two carboys fermenting. But we learned something else this Spring, just as our patience with apples and cabbages was wearing through. I must be channeling Rapunzel's mother, because I had the most intense craving for nettles you can imagine. People say cooked nettles resemble cooked spinach, but to me that is only in the way that a McDonald's burger is somehow teasingly related to a grass-fed burger off of a live fire. Nettles are so alive, so green, that they dance on your tongue. And, as it happens, they make a beer that will blow the winter cobwebs out of your nooks and crannies. So not enough apples for a year's worth of wine? No matter, really. This year we will make more nettle beer.

And we will make more spruce tip beer. More like a porter, almost chewable, this is the antidote to no oranges. Because, how ridiculous is it really to eat citrus at 48 degrees north? Spruce tips, and all new evergreen growth (those soft yellow-green ends on each branch) are not only edible, they are highly antiscorbutic. That is, they are high in vitamin C and whatever else prevents scurvy--because I don't think we really know what does that, not completely, or else the traditional Northern peoples who at times of the year only ate fat and flesh (think the Inuit) would have perished from scurvy long ago. That's too long for me to discuss in this overview, but clearly they weren't getting ascorbic acid. And we are told this is something we need daily, because it is water soluble. But I am wandering . . .

For sour, because we do need sour, we eat sauerkraut and season with apple cider vinegar. I do hope to get enough apples for cider this season to devote a carboy to vinegar--something I really don't want to buy if I can make my own.

Funny how we have to meet the tastes' needs with what we have at hand--sweet is easy, from our berries and stone fruits, apples and pears. And many things have parts with different tastes . . . one-stop shopping of a different sort.

Bitter, for me, is dandelion greens, another deep need that has flourished. Other greens, of course, will fill that need. But dandelion is king. And, if we miss the moment for the greens, we can make wine, dig roots, come at the greens again in the Fall.

Pungent has shifted though. Somehow the hot peppers that seemed right in Miami are not the thing for me here. Instead, we have fallen in love with horseradish, buying whole untamed roots that look like small heads streaming gnarly dreadlocks, grinding them and submerging the mass in brine. Horseradish with shortribs, horseradish with shrimp, horseradish to clear the sinuses. Horseradish is as sweet as it is spicy, sometimes catching me when I am not paying attention, because I am tasting sweet then get sucker-punched by the sharpness underneath.

Umami, meaty, savory--the meat of our land. Brothy, like a winter's warming soup. No challenges here, with wild and farmed within minutes of our home. New tastes, like elk and geoduck keep us moving and flexible. We eat meat, we flavor with meat. It is the anchor of the meal, even if you can't see it. The serendipitous effect of last-night's salad mingling on the plate with this morning's fried eggs--that is our Umami.

Salt, well, we live in salt, we breathe it. We eat oysters and glasswort and kelp. Salt is our blood. Maybe even more so for living on a boat, but I would venture that most of us on the Peninsula are replete with salt . . .

People have asked me if I am going the Weston A. Price Foundation conference this year. I have learned so much at the ones I did attend, and I would go again, but life is keeping me here. The land and the wind and darkness are my teachers here. This winter they taught me a big lesson, a hard and necessary one--they whispered (I hear Miss Clavel here . . .) "something is not right." I looked inward, past the melancholy brought into painful sharpness by the grey of the sky, and saw what I have been skirting for years, a metabolic imbalance that I could address, would address. Letting most things unfold, allowing change to grow out of new circumstances allowed me to see what I could exert my will upon, indeed, that it was appropriate to do so. For the last nine months I have been learning everything I could about thyroid and adrenal (and other hormonal) issues. I have been experimenting with herbs, glandulars, foods, more sleep. I have kept careful notes. And I have been getting better. There is more clarity and evenness in my days, my skin, hair, nails and weight are happier. I keep at it.

Who can say what the dark of the coming winter will bring? A new test, I am sure. More learning. Who knows? The shadows? We shall see . . .