I just woke up from a rather illuminating dream. For those if you gifted in interpretation, some parts are obvious. If you have insight that could help, please let me know:

Amphitheater. Ghosts everywhere, bad vibes. I keep accountability of my family and set up a buddy system for the children and even adults so none get led away by ghosts. Ghosts then seem ok with sharing space: there is an opera singer who floats by singing at the top of her lungs and is ok with a live opera singer performing her song, as long she doesn’t try to hit the high note and leaves that in homage to her. Other ghosts are spectators. They are everywhere, but my buddy system works. The atmosphere is no longer ominous.

Then two young boy ghosts, brothers, try to take me to door to a dusty storage area. I assume it is where they were killed; the amphitheater stage is only a small part of a vast and daunting network of rooms and passages. They tug on my arms but I resist because its real bad energy in there. I am very afraid. I get the idea that their dad, or whoever killed them, is in there and would be pissed by my entry.

Now outside, a healer NCNM friend plants two green shoots for the boys. I’m not sure what the plants are, but I might recognize them if I saw a picture. She tells me they were killed by a little girl they loved: she took them to a basement, exposed them to a poison to see if they loved her. The poison leaked out of the bag in a purple haze; she had suspended the bag above them. She did it first to one boy, and then to the other. The second boy knew she had killed his brother but went anyway. Out of love? Or childlike obedience and ignorance?

I start to follow my friend and she enters a subterranean parking lot. Dead, bleeding people, or ghosts, are suddenly everywhere, coming up to me. She doesn’t see them. The atmosphere again has turned ominous and I am scared. Purple haze is filling the air. I turn and run; my friend is left behind and when I look back she is struggling with the haze but is still trying to follow me out. I escape by climbing up a sewer drain and am outside.

A nonchalant blue collar man walks over, chatting about poison needing to get out, hits a release valve, and it’s like a fire hydrant shooting purple water into the sky. Some gooey drips are falling and I cover my mouth; some poison gets in/on me and I’m worried, but I’m ok.

I awake.

Subterranean parking lot and storage areas: the subconscious. Areas unused, unexplored. The amphitheater stage is real life: only a small part of reality, but where things are literally “acted” out in the “real” world.

Sewer subterranean: kidneys.

My family, NCNM friend, blue collar worker: aspects of myself.

An obvious need to purge a poison or perceived poison … Question is how to do it. Dream suggests I am overthinking it.

Dead, bleeding people underground: my kidney cells? Or, simply more “ghosts”?

The ghosts: beings from other dimensions. Some are perceived as helpful or at least innocuous, others seem dangerous. They share our reality (stage) and also move freely into places we cannot or do not go. Whether or not we are supposed to, or should, is another question. Obviously, the “ghosts” wanted me to go. My NCNM friend tried to lead me there too. My instinct, or fear, said otherwise. Wise choice? Hard to say. What is interesting is that when I refused to enter the dusty, offstage storage area, whatever directs dreams simply gave me another metaphor for the subconscious: the subterranean. Something is certainly trying to get me to go into scary places.

(Note: I’ve gone into “scary” places before in dreams… They are often portals to places where you learn things. Then again, sometimes, they simply lead to a nightmare. Typically, I have to have a real strong motivation to go into someplace that feels ominous. (Once, a little boy ghost told me that a woman who took me into a scary place could help me with Adahlia, so I went, but I couldn’t solve her riddle.) I also once really pissed off a benevolent ghost by refusing to go into the basement where he/she was simply sitting in a rocking chair, knitting. It was as non-threatening as possible, since it was my childhood basement, which is a finished basement, and it was only that one “ghost.” I think I was supposed to go down there to learn from that entity. But I was scared of the unknown: what would this ghost look like? What if she/he got mean? When I shut the door instead of going down the stairs, he/she threw it open and howled at me like the wind for being such a chicken. I couldn’t see the “ghost” because Id been knocked to the floor; I felt more scolded than scared. Since then, I’ve engaged more with talking with “ghosts.” But I do hate it when the atmosphere gets all freaky.)

A purple poison? Interesting. Purple is the color of wisdom, of psychic ability, of the third eye chakra, and second only to the purity of gold and white. Purple is a high color. Very odd that it would be poisonous… Am I not utilizing something properly and perhaps it has turned poisonous? What needs released?

Other ideas?

… Is that my kidney function has continued to improve. Despite the discovery of anti-nuclear antibodies, my eGFR was up to 72, and my creatinine 0.9, as of yesterday. I can only attribute it to the intensive diet and herbal and qigong and acupuncture and reiki regime. Add in the countless prayers and healing intentions and energy we are receiving from family, friends, healers, strangers, and others, and you have a powerful recipe for healing.

The downside to our necessary therapies? I can tell that the herbs decrease my milk supply. It had gotten so low, and Adahlia so frustrated, that I took the whole day off yesterday from herbal therapy. And last night, the deep pain crept back in, and my kidneys ache now. So I will have to restart them.

What a balancing act!

It’s okay.

We can do this.

It’s just a little tricky, but we can do this.

I will do it for me, and dang it of we aren’t going to heal Adahlia, too, I don’t care how impossible it supposedly is. I don’t care how many of her doctors stop talking to me because they find my quest to restore her health insulting, and how many others look at me patronizingly or pityingly. It’s possible. The body is made to heal itself.

It baffles me how so many conventional physicians don’t see that an integrative approach is not meant to threaten them. It includes them. Working together means synergistic results. It’s a good thing.

It’s so interesting to me how I’ve had to incorporate so many modalities, so many approaches, because one by itself isn’t enough. And that makes sense to me, because eating healthy isn’t just about eating spinach. You’ve got to eat the right proteins, carbs, fats, vitamins, and minerals – and one food, or set of foods, just isn’t going to make that happen. Likewise, exercising healthily is a lot more than just running, or just strength training, or just flexibility. And spiritual health is more than just the obligatory check-in at a church.

My medical doctors, the ones who have been so anti-Chinese herbal therapy, so vocal that “we have the answers!” and so sure that the only thing wrong was an obstruction, despite my non-correlating symptoms, so dismissive of my experience of my body, so against the naturopathic doctors and Chinese medicine practitioners that they actually called them “charlatans”, must be flabbergasted, and are most likely, quite upset, and maybe even a little embarrassed.

The doctors of the established medical paradigm would benefit greatly from listening to their patients more, and opening up to the idea of preventative and integrative medicine. More important: their patients would benefit!

It is time to demand a change for ourselves and our loved ones.

Yesterday, Adahlia had her 20th blood transfusion. Just like last time, she was strong, observant, patient, and friendly. For the first time, she was able to walk around the transfusion center, which delighted the nurses, who spoke of how big she’s gotten, how they’ve seen her change over time, her being a regular fixture at the hospital and all. Adahlia received her first temporary tattoo on the back of the hand that didn’t have the IV – a ladybug (she loves bugs, points to them and says: “bah, bah” or “beh beh”). She tried several times to sneak behind the nurses station. She eagerly pulled me towards the play area. And it was another lucky transfusion in that she slept for a big chunk of it.

She also had a baseline hearing exam done, because we need to start her on iron chelation medication. (We need to monitor her vision and hearing, because the medication can cause damage to those senses, so we must be as must be as careful as possible.). She needs chelation. Her ferretin is at 650, her serum iron is at 176, and her % saturation of iron is 95%. Time to move.

The hearing exam was fun for all of us – it’s late at night, I need to rest, so I won’t go into it here. But it was interesting to see how they measure hearing in babies and toddlers, and actually pretty enjoyable.

So I recently got a new general practitioner, who immediately agreed to do autoimmune testing, after months of my urologist and nephrologist refusing, insisting: “you don’t have autoimmune disease. ”

Guess who has autoimmune disease?

This is one of those situations where you don’t actually want to be right. Do you know how maddening it is to have to insist on receiving testing for a disease you don’t even want to have? Oy vey.

So, I have been attacking my kidneys.

Ok, that’s news in a way, because it’s been confirmed by biomedicine, but it’s something we’ve suspected from the alternative and energy medicine side of the house for nearly a year now.

Focus:

What do I need to do to heal myself?

Rest, get deep sleep at night. (Sigh. Its been impossible to date. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get any quality sleep sharing a bed with Adahlia, especially when she is sick and tosses and turns all night. But how can I kick her out? As long as she’s breastfeeding, which she still does heavily, I doubt she’d go willingly. Considering how she practically sleeps on top of me, I doubt shed even be okay on a bed of her own, set up in the same room. And I do feel it helps her feel safe and loved, and is therefore helping her do better. At any rate, let’s get real here: bed sharing is not the root problem. Deeper, more restorative sleep is. I need to figure out how to get it, even though I have a baby.)

Reduce stress. (Ok , big root problem. A loss of nearly all my earnings and savings from my military service has had a huge impact on me. Going into debt to keep a stable roof and healthy food and bills paid has been very disheartening. It will be hard to climb out of this, and I know it. Especially if I am seriously ill, and can’t work. I feel derailed. It’s amazing how fast thousands of dollars of savings goes. And with it, your life. Money is energy, after all. It needs to flow, both ways. Mine had simply been depleted. And obviously, there’s Adahlia, and the stress of her blood disorder, which I need not elaborate on. If you’ve ever loved anything, you know its very hard to see it seriously sick. Even Joe and I’s relationship, which has been so special to me, is often yet another source of big stress. No easy fixes to any of the above. The stress exists. I will just have to figure out better ways to cope with it, or otherwise embrace an even greater zen outlook, an even deeper trust.)

Eliminate allergens in the diet: starting with gluten, dairy, soy, and corn. Get heavy metal testing. (We’ve eaten mostly organic, healthy fare for awhile now, but to go wheat and dairy, etc, free will be a challenge. I’ve even read that I should eliminate all animal protein. As a breastfeeding woman, I know that is not going to be easy… I’m always hungry as it is!!!)

Positive thinking, meditation, exercise, reiki, qigong, acupuncture, high quality herbs and supplements, and all the other healing techniques I know are also vital. (Most also require time and/or money.)

Sometimes, it’s just so overwhelming. I need an army of me to take care of me.

The point, however, is that though I thought we were already doing everything we could, we obviously aren’t, and I need to ante up. I need to commit further. Our lives depend on it.

And I need to keep breathing through all these stressors, reminding myself that I love myself and my life, that I am already everything I need to be. No matter what the external circumstance. No matter what it looks like, or appears to be, to the judgmental or arrogant or ignorant eye.

When I was little, I had a habit of losing things, like watches, or trinkets, and I got in lots of trouble for it. I simply could not keep track of stuff. I fretted over it, was scolded for it; but nothing really helped. I grew older, and gradually, as the years passed, I lost things less often. But I still, to this day, misplace and lose items, and very occasionally they are important or valuable, but usually they aren’t. It’s simply a quirk about me. I cannot express the relief I felt when I finally escaped the observant eye, and finally didn’t have someone hounding and criticizing me about it, when I did misplace an item.

Except I cannot escape my own eye, and it’s quite observant, indeed.

Hey, Erika: It’s okay to lose things.

Hey, Erika: It is just ebb and flow.

It is time to deeply love myself. To take the best possible care I can of myself and my baby. Time to ante up. Time to get fierce about it.

At all cost.

The other day, as Adahlia strode into the kitchen in her moccasin slippers, I realized I was hearing “the putter-patter of little feet” and grinned. Not only is that particular sound amazingly cute, but with everything Adahlia has been through, it is nothing short of a miracle to hear her walking.

I am. So. Grateful.

I started writing this post on 11.11.13. Things have been busy; I’ve been exhausted. So by the time you get to the bottom of this post, you will realize that it’s nearly time for Adahlia to get her blood checked to see if she needs a transfusion. But first, news:

Very happy to announce that Adahlia is a bonafide free-walker, no longer needing to hold onto a wall or sofa for support! A couple days ago, we went to the playground and she walked, instead of having to be carried, from swing to see-saw to jungle gym.  Hooray, little one!

She now loves following me everywhere I go… and I admit, I love it, too.  All around the house, all day long, we walk around together. I don’t even mind when she follows me to the bathroom. And if we aren’t where she wants to be, she takes me everywhere she goes.  For example, earlier today I was in the bedroom, but she wants me to come into the kitchen with her. She enters the room and stands in the doorway holding the doorframe, like a grown-up waiting for permission to enter.  I look up:  she waves.  I wave back and say, “hi.” When I smile she grins. She toddles over, leans up, mouth open for a kiss, and I kiss her, pull her on to the bed for a cuddle.  She then grabs my index finger, turns around, and pulling my arm above her head begins to walk away. 

For exercise, or fun, or both, she walks me around and around the couch. I hold both her hands and lift to give her a boost up the stairs… Her little leg isn’t quite strong enough to push herself up the step.

We go on walks to the nearby nature park. The trail is paved and flat, and there are off-shoot trails of packed dirt and pine needles. She holds my finger as we walk. Sometimes, she walks alone. Sometimes, she rides the stroller. While standing alone a little boy comes running over, chased by his older brother, they are perhaps 6 and 8 years old. Their grandparents follow behind them. The littler boy is making a bee-line for Adahlia, his face lit up in excitement.

“Careful!” I call, as we near imminent collision. “She’s a new walker… Not so sturdy….” I have managed to restrain myself from reaching out to her but I can hear the nervousness in my voice.

She stands. Fearless. Watching. Waiting.

And as he nears, his face beaming in something like mischief and joy, he opens his arms and wraps her in a big bear hug, nearly lifting her off the ground. Then he dashes off, and I lunge forward in time to steady her. Beautiful.

There are some areas of the trail over wetland, or marsh, and the planks are slippery from rain. She slips and slides, holding onto my finger. “Whoaaa! Whooooaaaaa!” I say. She laughs and slips more, and laughs more.

We are at the edge of the park and we hear the sound of the railway crossing. “Look,” I say. “Train.” The light rail zooms by and Adahlia grins. Later, the railway chimes again but I’m lost in thought, or my own observations of nature. Adahlia tugs my hand and pulls. For a second I’m confused. Then I get it. “Oh! You’re right – train!” I say. And I lift her up do she can watch it race past.

On our return to the car, we pass an educational post featuring the photo of a rough skinned newt looking straight into the camera. Adahlia is in the stroller but as I show her the newt photo she lights up, and makes as if to try to sit up and get out. I know what she wants.

“You love him?” I ask. “You want to kiss him?” She smiles broader, eager eyes fixed on the newt, his orange underbelly shining, his eyes iridescent like black pearls.

I lift her up and towards the picture. She kisses it.

And then, as we are passing some oak trees, she again tries to get out of the stroller. This time, I don’t know what she wants. I lift her out and she walks off the path and plops down between the trees, on a deep pile of damp leaves. I crouch next to her as she contentedly examines and sorts the leaves, handing me twigs. We find something that looks like a shell of a nut, but is not. She leans back and then falls back, laying in the leaves, and I laugh. She tries to sit up, but I tell her its okay, so she lays back down and watches the branches move in the wind against the grey sky.

On our way to the car, in the parking lot, she is walking again, holding my finger and I push the stroller with my other hand. Suddenly she stops and squats down, examining the pavement. She is at the edge of a white line marking the crosswalk. She had never stepped on painted pavement before.

Recently, I found a bag of lavender in the back of our bathroom cupboards, either gifted from a friend moving out of town or saved from the free-box at NCNM, and we’ve begun taking baths in it.  It’s lovely, and I feel it calms us both.  I hold the bag open and she grabs a couple baby fistfuls and throws it in.  Its a wonderful way to prepare to go to sleep.

With the windy, blustery days and evenings, we’ve started lighting fires in our living room.  Adahlia comes running when she hears her dad open the stove to make a fire (even if I’ve already got her tucked in bed and she is about to fall asleep… sigh.)

She points to the fire and signs “water” — and I show her the sign for “fire.”  But I also tell her she’s right:  Fire is like water.  They are the same, but opposite, and they control each other.  They are both life-giving and life-taking.  They are gifts, and neither good nor bad, but worthy of respect.  Like many things in this world.

Adahlia helps me with the fire by removing the sticks of kindling one at a time from their bag and handing them to me. “Hot,” I tell her, regarding the stove. “No touch. Don’t touch.” But I know that like all of us, she will eventually learn the phenomenal power and pain of “hot” for herself through first-hand experience.

…. Just not today.

Adahlia loves helping.  She helps empty the dishwasher – meticulously handing me one spoon or fork at a time, holding it up and behind her, waiting for me to take it from her but not looking at me, her eyes still on all the silverware to be removed.  She also “washes” surfaces with a piece of cloth or tissue paper.  She likes to “help” with sorting clothes when I’m folding them, too.  And when we rake leaves, she helps by putting one leaf in the bag at a time… and then clapping. 

Sometimes, if we aren’t reading a book to her, Adahlia will read a book to herself.  She points at the pictures (the same things we point to, to draw her attention towards things happening in conjunction with the words we speak) and babbles in baby speak, “dah-dah-da-dah-dah…. bu-bu-bu.”. She flips the pages one by one, very purposefully. 

Currently, Adahlia’s only true words are “baby,” “dada”, “mama” (or “me-me”), and “ba-ba-ba” … which very clearly means banana, as it is said with great enthusiasm, gesticulation, and pulling at me, while passing the banana display in the grocery store.  (She wont eat bananas though.  Very finicky eater.  It’s tough.  Very tough, trying to feed her.)

Adahlia enjoys drinking the smoothies I blend for us in the afternoon, as well as the fresh carrot, beet, celery, and apple juice I make fresh every morning.  She is almost painfully adorable sipping our shared glass of juice through a straw – her hair pulled back, in an oversized sweatshirt. With her big eyes and pursed lips, its something from a more innocent era, like a 50s girl in a poodle skirt at a ice cream shoppe.

I’m very happy to say that her skin, which was getting very rough, like sandpaper, and was almost looking like eczema in spots, is entirely cleared up and is baby-smooth again.  I think it might have been due to the bubble bath we were using… It wasn’t anything special for babies, just something I’d been given as a gift for myself. But over the month we used it, I noticed she was getting a couple strange rough spots on her upper arms, about the size of a dime, and her skin began to get sand-papery, first starting along her sides and then spreading to her chest and back. It wasn’t red like a rash, but it was definitely like sand-paper to the touch. So, I traded my bubble bath in for some organic baby bubble bath (about time, really, considering how fastidious I have been with all her other organic products). I also began applying olive oil to her skin again – we weren’t really doing anything this summer, and then I was applying coconut oil for awhile, but really, her skin responds best to olive oil.  Its beautiful, really. Must be her Mediterranean blood. Honestly, I don’t know why people waste the money on lotion.

Speaking of ethnicity, Adahlia’s new favorite food these days is pasta – in any form. LOVES it. And a big chunk of crusty bread?  THRILLED.  Not the healthiest of fare, perhaps, but we take what we can get. (And she is eating other food, too.) Ever observant, Adahlia also now enjoys blowing on food to cool it off before she eats it. Last night, with her hitched up on my hip, I spooned out some Israeli couscous from the stove pot and let her taste test from the spoon. “Whheeew!” she blew, and we took turns blowing on it. Adorable.

Other cute things? Adahlia has decided to mooch my wardrobe. She likes to put on my shoes – she will wear them on her hands and walk around, or slide her feet into them and wave them around. She takes my scarf and wraps it around her. My head wrap goes around her neck and off and on again several times. She puts on my fingerless gloves and wears them while reading or playing with her wooden barn animal set.

She also picks out her own outfits now. I hold up a couple shirts and she selects them. I show her all of her pants, and she points to the ones she wants with a big smile. Her favorites? A pair of brown leggings with white polka dots and a lime-green shirt from Portland’s Japanese garden with an alphabet of bugs on the front and back. She has other outfits that she really likes, but that’s definitely amongst her favorites. She also picks out the necklace she wants to wear for the day, and her pajamas.

Its 11.18 tonight, and she looks really good right now, I think, for just about 4 weeks out from her last transfusion. Though it’s hard to say. This past month has been rough on her… on all of us. She got sick the day after her last transfusion and has been sick pretty much this whole month. It seemed to ease up last week, but just as it started to clear she caught something else. We’ve had a series of nights with very little sleep, as she can’t breathe thru her nose very well, and she’s not a mouth breather. It’s been about a week of very deep coughing and really icky, icky stuff coming out of her poor nose. She’s also cut her molars… A tough time, but at least now the worst of teething is behind us! With all the illness, I thought she looked pretty pale, pretty bad, for awhile. But now she’s coming out of it again, and I think she looks pretty good. Pretty good for four weeks. Dang good for having been sick this past month. It’ll be interesting to see what her numbers say.

I’m also doing better. A follow up test if my kidney function showed my creatinine and eGFR were improved. The nephrologist, of course, said we can’t read anything into it, that we need to see the trend over time. Apparently, I am showing some proteins in my urine, which indicates there’s some glomerular damage. But I feel ok about it. The pain is not nearly so bad. I am healing – albeit slowly- from this strange ordeal. Adahlia is too. Maybe it’s too soon to call it, but I think it will be one of those things where we will look back and say, “Oh yeah, that makes total sense, we really turned that around towards health! Thank goodness for integrative medicine!”

Truth is that our eyes are kind of in a misleading place. We just can’t see anything looking forward. It’s when we look back that we see how it all aligns. It’s when it’s the Fall, and we are looking back on our year, our toughest years, and we are so grateful, the most grateful, for them.

So, Adahlia’s 19th blood transfusion was last week. With so much going on, I simply haven’t had time to write about it. She went only 4 weeks this time between transfusions, which we expected, because she didn’t look as good sooner after the last one. (Part of that was due to teething.)

The long and short of it was that it was the BEST transfusion she’s ever had. To get the bad news out of the way, her reticulocyte count (baby RBCs) is still very low. It still hovers around 5, below normal, and well below its all-time high of 30+. I am not deterred, however. I still think we can beat this, and maybe, without needing steroids. I believe the counts will come back up.

The “good” news: One excellent IV stick – Hb of 7.3 – and we we got blood and left. We were in and out in about 7 hours, which is quick, believe it or not. Even better was that she fell asleep after the 15-minute vitals check after the transfusion began, and slept for about 2 of the 3-4 hours it takes to receive blood. When she awoke, we played with more toys, read more books, ate food, etc.

There was, actually, one thing that happened that could have been a major problem, but wasn’t. Shortly into her transfusion, the line came undone. I discovered it because I was lying with her on the bed, her arm over mine, the IV in her hand, and in the heart-stopping moment that she got up to peer through the divider at the kid in the next bay, I saw a spot of blood on my sleeve. And then on her leg. And then in the bed.

And then I realized she wasn’t attached to the line.

And that it had ended up under the organic blanket we brought from home, so her skin won’t be exposed to the harsh chemicals of the hospital linen, (she had a pretty rough skin reaction after her first 4-day stay in the hospital) and it was dropping slow little drips of blood onto the bed.

“Blood! Her line!” I said. Or something to that effect.

Joe jumped up to get the nurse while I switched the transfusion infusion to pause.

The nurse consulted with her boss, and they decided to clean the tip of the line with alcohol but to not flush and replace the line, because they didn’t think it was exposed very long and would likely not be contaminated, and really, well, they didn’t want to waste the blood. The bank had delivered exactly as much blood as she needed…

So the next day, when Adahlia spiked a 102 fever, I was a bit concerned. It went down though, to 99 by the late afternoon. She’s had a nasty cough since then, a night cough, but no further fever. After consulting with the nurse, we decided to just continue to keep watching it, as it is likely viral and will go away on its own.

And happily, yes, it does indeed, a week later, seem to be getting better.

Adahlia is amazing, wonderful, super, and more fantastic with every day that goes by. She can walk now, a tottering little walk with her arms held out like a cross between a tightrope walker and a t-Rex. She laughs a lot. Her favorite equipment at the playground is the see-saw. She was a lion for Halloween and so was I, and Joe dressed as a zookeeper.

…Fitting. 🙂

Adahlia loves the pumpkins we carved- a jack o lantern that she likes to point at, identifying his mouth, eyes, and nose. Our other carved pumpkin is of a Halloween cat, illuminated against a full moon. She points at it and says “cat” in sign language. In a few days, we will have to throw them out because they are starting to cave in and stink a bit. I’m actually considering getting a couple more and carving them for her.

Adahlia has molars coming in. Their ridges appear as beautiful little daggers pointing up from her pink gums.

Have you heard of Red Yarn? He is a local musician who sings children’s folk songs, does puppets… he is basically awesome. We took Adahlia to his CD release party and the concert was fantastic. I think it blew her away. She loves the music and now we play his CD all day long. When she wants to hear it, she grabs the CD cover and brings it to is, pointing at the stereo, and making earnest baby sounds. We turn it on, and she begins to sway and bounce.

… Sometimes, she insists we turn off the jazz station so she can hear her music. At any given moment of the day, I typically have a rotation of very catchy folk songs about animals stuck in my head. Luckily, they are fun songs. Frogs going courting, dogs named Blue, rabbits eating up gardens, and the like. The lyrics and instrumentation are really quite good. If they weren’t, it could be maddening. 🙂

Supplementing Adahlia with her vitamins, the ones she’s deficient in, has proved easier than it was at first. And I do notice improvements already. As I said, the majority of her deficiencies would qualify as antioxidants. She seems more relaxed, more energetic, more resilient, happier,
and she doesn’t pull and hit at her hair and head as much as she used to. Getting her nutrition optimized is part of my plan for helping her to kick DBA.

Oh I didn’t mention how amazing Adahlia was with the IV. She cried, yes, but as soon as it was in we sat her up, and as they were taping it down and flushing it with saline to make sure it would flow, I said:

“Adahlia, look, what is that? Is that water they are putting in your hand?”

And she immediately stopped crying, captivated, watching the “water” enter her hand.

… Amazing!

I also didn’t mention how she didn’t cry until we had positioned her on her back and were tying the tourniquet on her arm, and she knew the needle was coming… She didn’t cry as they as applied the warm compress to her hand and held it there to increase the size of her little veins… Nor did she cry when they put the tourniquet on the first time, to check for and find the best vein. And she didn’t cry at the end of the transfusion, when they removed the IV. She merely sat on my lap and watched them, very, very, closely.

And she made friends, during her transfusion, with the brother of a boy being treated for a brain tumor. She watched as we rolled a ball back and forth, laughing when he’d kick it or we’d head-butt it, and she even scooted forward and pushed the ball herself, after intercepting it.

… Amazing!

And for these reasons, and more…

(including how she waves at cars in parking lots, on the street, and everywhere we go, bringing smiles to the faces of strangers and friends alike)

… Adahlia is amazing!

Ps:

I want to thank those who read this blog to learn about Adahlia for putting up with the posts I write about myself. I do it because I’m pretty sure there’s a connection between our conditions, and because I don’t have a separate blog for myself, and because nearly every friend who asks about Adahlia also asks after my own health. People care. After all, I’m her mom and my health naturally impacts her health and happiness. My friends, of course, also simply want to know because they care about me, irrespective of anything else.

While there are always going to be naysayers, and folks who talk down or think the worst of others, there will also always be those eager to see the best and shining light in those they love.

So while every so often I do talk of my own journey, I hope you can see it is because Adahlia and I are still quite connected. And, if you are of the mind that we are all part of a universal consciousness, or one body in Christ, or whichever way you have of framing our interconnection of Spirit, then you understand.

I won’t go into the status of my own health right now, but I want to say that I’ve been guided to some phenomenal folks who’ve given me medicine, treatments, and wisdom I’ve incorporated into my own self healing practices, and the results have been phenomenal. I feel much, much, much better. In a couple days I will have more tests and we will know a bit more scientifically about what’s going in with me, and my trajectory, but for now, knowing only what I feel within me, I am grateful to know I am healing. The kidneys are the “deepest” organs and most difficult to treat in any medical tradition. And that is why any time they heal it is nothing short of miraculous.

Thank you to all who pray, send light, and love to Adahlia, myself, our little family, and to our entire, worldwide family.

We love you and are honored and glad to be here with you!