Why Follow me? Part #1

The Healthier Chapter

I was sick for the first five years of my life.

Not dramatically, with a single diagnosis that explained everything. Chronically, persistently, quietly sick, the kind of sick that becomes the outlook of a childhood. Respiratory illness that wouldn’t clear. A body that reacted to mosquito bites so severely that my mother wrapped my arms in gauze at night to keep me from scratching open wounds that would turn into impetigo. I barely ate. The food tasted wrong to me, rotten somehow, and swallowing felt like a project. I’d sit alone at the table long after everyone else had gone, not from stubbornness, but from some wordless body-knowing that none of it was right.

Six weeks of missed school in the first four months of first grade finally pushed someone to look more closely. The culprit was my tonsils, badly decayed and quietly poisoning my whole system. Five years of it.

In 1949, they used ether for anesthesia to remove them.

I still remember what it looked like going under: thick swirling liquid, orange and yellow, filling most of my vision. Above it, dark churning clouds. I felt violently nauseated. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t wake up. I was somewhere I had never been and did not choose, and the spinning just kept going.

When I came to, I was in a stark hospital room. My parents soon had to say goodbye and left, and a nurse checked in occasionally. This was before children’s wards with soft lighting and stuffed animals and someone to answer when you called. I was utterly alone, in a body that had just been operated on, in a room that offered nothing.

Two days later I went home. A week after that, I woke my mother in the middle of the night, vomiting blood. Back to the hospital. Ice chips in water and probably some meds. I don’t remember. Then the snowstorm hit. One of those northeastern Ohio storms that drops two to three feet overnight and shuts down every road in the county. Our house was on an isolated farm miles from town, and there was simply no way my parents could reach me.

I lay there for hours needing desperately to use the bathroom, too shy to call for the nurse. The hours moved like something thick and cold. The abandonment I felt in those hours, the particular ache of being sick and small and unreachable, is not something I ever entirely forgot.

My throat healed, eventually. But it left a mark. I have a damaged throat to this day. Don’t ask me to sing.

What I carried out of that hospital was something more than a scar. It was a decision, formed in the wordless logic of a five-year-old, that I would never go back. I would not be a hospital patient again.

I have kept that promise in the ways that matter. I had my two children in a birthing center, without anesthesia. I have had cataract surgery, a colonoscopy; a couple unavoidable procedures. But each time the fear that rises in me is the same: please don’t let me see that swirling orange-yellow mass again. That is also, by the way, why I never once experimented with hallucinogenic drugs when everyone around me in the 60s and 70s was doing exactly that. I already knew what it felt like to be trapped inside a vision you couldn’t exit.

That early terror sent me somewhere unexpected and good.

But it took a while. And it took people.

In my late 40s, a friend referred me to an energy healer she trusted — a woman who had trained at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, one of the most rigorous programs of its kind. I went initially because I was processing some difficult emotional things. She was also, as it happened, an attorney. Sharp, grounded, not someone inclined toward vague spiritual theater. I saw her every few months for a couple of years. She eventually drafted the wills for my husband and me.

What she opened up in me was a way of understanding that I hadn’t had language for before — the idea that we are not just physical beings, that the body keeps score of things the mind hasn’t consciously registered, and that working with energy directly was a legitimate form of care. When she retired, I found another healer trained from the same school. I still work with her, twenty-five years later.

Then came 1996. Everything accelerated.

My husband had a heart attack. He was eighteen years older than me, and he had been carrying an extremely high-pressure sales career for years. When he came home from the hospital, he simply didn’t want to go back to work. I understood it, but our children were eleven and thirteen. I didn’t say much about it, but the panic I felt inside was real and pressing.

Months earlier — before any of this — I had asked my lawyer-healer friend about doing an energy clearing on our house. We had a pool company doing work in the backyard, and they were dragging their feet endlessly. I thought maybe there was something in the property’s energy that needed attention. She said, “Actually, I have a friend who does feng shui. Let me have her come instead.”

We made an appointment. Then my husband had his heart attack, and suddenly I had a recovering spouse at home and an appointment with a feng shui practitioner on the calendar. I called to cancel. She wouldn’t hear it. You need this more than ever, she said.

I conceded.

After that appointment, my husband recovered. He went back to work.

I am not going to oversimplify what happened or make claims I can’t substantiate. What I know is what I witnessed: a man who had no intention of returning to his career did return, and did so with enough energy to keep going for years. Whether the feng shui shifted something in the house, in him, in the whole situation — I can’t draw you a diagram of the mechanism. I just know what came before and what came after.

I subsequently studied under that same feng shui practitioner for three years, completing my certificate in Tibetan Buddhist Meditational Feng Shui. It was not a hobby. It was a complete reorganization of how I understood environments, energy, and health — physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. All of it connected. All of it being influenceable.

Around the same time, Young Living essential oils entered my life, and that opened another whole language for supporting the body. What I breathed, what I diffused, what I applied — the oils became part of how I managed my own frequencies day to day. Frankincense. Lavender. Oils, I reach for the way other people reach for their medicine cabinet, except I have studied what I’m reaching for and why.

I made a goal. I will be healthier, happier, and prettier at 100 years old — on December 15, 2044 — than I am right now at 81. I mean this completely.

But ...recently, the universe handed me a gift I did not ask for and did not want.

A rash appeared under my left arm and spread — slowly, determinedly — across my chest, up my neck, onto my face. Red, relentless itching, the kind that wakes you at 3 am convinced you are being consumed. My doctor tried two things. Neither worked. Finally, she said, “Just go to a walk-in clinic.” The clinician there prescribed prednisone.

I stared at that prescription like it had personally offended me. I do not use steroids. I have spent thirty years building a different toolkit precisely so I don’t have to. However, I was exhausted and covered in a rash, and out of better options, so I filled it.

Days one and two: the itching quieted. The redness started pulling back.

Day three: I almost felt human again.

On day four, I got out of bed and there was nothing bad or uncomfortable in my body. No complaint from my knees. The little discomforts I manage every day with supplements, movement, essential oils, all of it, was simply absent. Gone.

I stood there taking inventory of a body that had nothing negative to report. I was full of energy, ready to take on the world.

I felt thirty years old. I stayed in that state for forty-eight hours.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I understood something I hadn’t known I was missing. I had a vision of being healthier at 100. I had a goal date. I had thirty years of practice. But I had never had a benchmark — a felt sense of what healthier actually feels like in the body, not just on paper.

Now I do. That particular freedom: no uncomfortable reminders of this or that, just energy and clarity and the sense that everything is working the way it was designed to. I experienced it for two days at eighty-one, and it was completely real. Now I know the thing I am aiming for.

The five-year-old who made her decision in a stark hospital room during a snowstorm is still running the show. She just has a better-equipped laboratory now: feng shui, essential oils, energy healing, decades of study, and one reluctant prednisone prescription to thank for the clearest version of her lofty goal.

That determination brought me here. To writing. To Substack. To you.

I write about what it looks like to pursue a dream life, understanding the body is part of it — the environments we create, what we put in and on our bodies, how we think, what we feel, and why any of it matters. That’s the conversation I will keep having.

Welcome to it.

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