Wound Healer

Wound Healer

Jessy Reine

I was in a distracted, melancholy mood. Everything in my life seemed to be building the way I wanted it, the children were full of their own energy and running about, my partner had started his new job, there wasn’t even a single caveat yet, and I had set to work each day to focus on the one and only thing I had ever really wanted to focus on in my life—writing. Yet when it came down to it, I felt I was faltering, I feared I lacked the presence of mind. I had some weak little habit of peeling my nails and distractedly gazing outside that made me feel I wasn’t being productive with my writing as I wanted to be. I had to churn out, I told myself, to make up for the fact I was letting my partner make our money while I followed my passion, perhaps without any return. Also I felt tired, of this long strung out sunless winter. I want to grow my own vegetables, I want to swim again. Deep in my head, distracted out of my moment, it was a snow day, a wet bright sticking snow that had sunk the trees down, where a white birch was hung all the way to the ground that I shook free of snow and watched buoy up, snap up suddenly, laughing, as a part of me, despite my momentary melancholy was happy and expectant—I have worked very long and hard through this toiling life, to have this family, even this yurt I rent, to be where I’m at. Yet something stupid, a pot I’d been dragging around since the last marriage I was in which was a long mistake, like a long wrong note that almost makes a person forget what music sounds like, that didn’t even have handles and you had to pick up by its rounded edge, I dragged from the stove to the sink to pour off pasta water and accidentally tipped to myself. Immediately my mind was focused as through a tunnel down to a single point. I collapsed to the floor screaming, tugging my leggings off. I’d scalded my right leg with the boiling water.

My knee felt as if it would burn off, but my thigh—my thigh—I could see the raw under-skin, and this dark rope curling around it that was my old recoiled skin, which had been singed straight off. Everyone in the house came running to me. I had my partner, my children fetch me things. A towel. Dump water. Bowls of cool water. A sweater. My leg is burning, on fire, but I’m shivering, shaking. I drape my leg with the towel and begin to pour the water straight over it, breathing heavily, crying. I have to keep doing this. Over and over. The children look scared.

“Go on,” I try and say gently, “have dinner. It’s ready…turn off the stove,” I say to my son who turns the burner the wrong way at first. “No… other way, the other way…”

My partner serves the children their pasta. Then he sits down in a chair across from me and looks in my eyes. I take off the towel. Both our eyes bear down on my raw leg, this intense wound, and then our eyes meet.

“I love you,” he says.

I’ve never had a real burn before. I didn’t even know much about burns. Shakily I began googling the nature of this. What kind of a burn was this? After short research I settled on, scalding, a second degree burn.

“Okay,” I breathed, “I can handle this at home. I can handle this. Baby get me some aloe.”

He brought the aloe plant. I took off the towel and then began to gasp and cry. “No, I can’t. It’s too painful. I need to pour more water.” So I poured for another hour. He had put the children to bed by the time I lifted the towel up, poured on some aloe from a cut limb of the plant and wrapped myself up in gauze for my knee, the burn that was not open, and cheesecloth for the burn that was. Then I went to bed and had the most restless night. In the morning I lifted up, trembling, and examined myself. This was a wound that was five inches long and four inches across, open, and wet with weeping. There were two little crevices I could now see, like craters on the moon, that were deeper than my second skin. Somewhere between a second and third degree burn.

I’ve always been wary of hospitals, well, since I came of age. I seemed to use them at a young age to escape my bad behavior, to be suddenly saved, drastically interrupted. Not that I had lacerations or deep injuries to deal with, but I was not safe sexually and so I would go in sometimes, knotted with fear, to succumb to testing, before falling back into the same self-deprecating behaviors. From then on hospitals, doctors’ offices to me were receptacles of my fear. When I began to build up my inner strength and alter my behaviors, I was always very far from hospitals or doctors’ offices.

I am about my body. I live to move. I have to move. Mars is very centrally placed in my chart, wrenched between my Sun and Moon. Everything which was a wound in my life I knew I had perpetuated by my own behaviors or projections. Doctors could only prescribe to me generally, as if I am a statistic, and strangely, as if I am not responsible, but they are responsible, for keeping me marching like a good ant. There are protocols, and ways things are done. Overwhelmingly the hospitals tend toward antibiotics, anti-healing, destroying utterly and then rebuilding mechanically. Working with microbes, or letting the body digest raw milk, the spirit of love that is woven in long-used cloths and in familiar faces, and plants that grow at your own doorstep—that went away with the old villages, the indigenous cultures, when women used to give birth in little huts with their families around. I grew up in the nineties; era of everything comes from China, where things are made far away in factories or chemically compounded down to a central ingredient, where lawns are mowed, remedies are secrets.

At that time I was dipping in and out of doctors’ offices in my early twenties I was also using heroin. I began using it with my first serious boyfriend and continued on and off after we broke up, when my life was devastation and finger-snatches at coping. I was on some other level of spiritual life that is below even the mundane level, where the catacombs of hell have come to be described, and there are only the mysteries of the dark, gnawing cycles, where I shunned all things light and transparent as I felt abandoned by all that. I didn’t think of, at that time, both light and darkness being generated from within me. It all felt like something I was caught up in, which I succumbed to when it was dark or ate greedily of when it was light. I became pregnant at the age of twenty-three with the child of a lowlife man, a drug addict and mental case, very textbook abusive, who would never ask I crawl out of my hole or change at all. That was when I radically began to alter. I had a home birth one night during a blizzard, I wasn’t even in my own home but down the street at a brownstone I’d never been in before. There were women around me then who were aware, alert, had had their own deep crises. The man was downstairs withdrawing from cocaine and ecstasy, but I gave birth among the women and bled out afterwards, bled out all that pain, hemorrhaging. I fell unconscious and the midwife revived me with Pitocin and by pressing on my uterus to get it to contract. The doula I had with me who had a young son of her own at home fed my child from her own breast.

It was not the end of my meanderings through dark pathways and self-collapsing cycles which whispered of my mother and other inheritances; that would take a long time to really reckon with and pick apart and expose to the light. But it was the beginning of my becoming responsible for myself, and choosing self-healing. I had chosen a homebirth after all, for a first child, at only twenty-three years old. But as I already associated hospitals with fear by that time, I wanted my child to be born in my light, that light I had so long neglected, to come out of my strength. I was also more afraid of being in a hospital and being forcibly subdued than of giving birth. I probably would have been subdued or interfered with as my son was born sunny side up and took almost two days to come.

After that I had a real longing to know about herbs and become my own healer, but I knew nothing. My mother used to cook out of packets or her meals were always static, the same, and when anyone got sick we went to the doctor. But at least I had left the most serious death practices behind with my son. Heroin belonged to that life before I was a mother. I took eagerly to my son. I breastfed him till he was three. I managed to be home with him during his early life by living at my mother’s. There are so many stories in between. My trying to learn healing medicine from a Brazilian woman who lived near Prospect Park and falling asleep in her spare bedroom from exhaustion, not getting to learn anything but that she picked little yellow flowers from in between the cracks of the sidewalk outside her house and ground them into tea. In the end all of my teaching has always come from things I noticed offhand that were said inadvertently or through doors that I had to pry open with my own hands, in my own time.

When I was in that marriage that wasn’t right, which I chose like an island out of the choppy sea of my turbulent emotions, so that I would not be so deeply wrecked anymore, I was not greatly in love, but I felt safe enough. I had my daughter then, more peaceably at home, and in a weedy backyard in Ridgewood, Queens began to learn about wild plants. I began my (mostly) daily practice of brewing nourishing infusions of nettles and the various other herbs I am drawn to at the moment, which I either find or source. I drink these herbs to the deeps of life and the deeps of health being mine, each and every day. That is the truest source of healing, you know, that there is a baseline to draw from, of daily health. I was breastfeeding again, too, and close to the wick of life with these young children. I wasn’t having good sex of course, and Ridgewood I found bland and forbidding. Avenues of 99 cent stores, buildings that are moldy yellow brick and reflect the sun dully, the train clattering by above its peeling tracks, paltry gardens behind chain-links, and miles of gray tombstones surrounding the neighborhood like a noose. I was so into plants and the idea of the wild and my daily rituals that I was not only fed up with Ridgewood but the entire city, and of course my marriage to the wrong person. My garden was my only refuge, and I learned everything I could between that ten foot by six foot stretch of earth that ended up being laced with lead. I stayed even after I found out, just tending to flowers, till there was nothing left to create, and a towering black cherry tree dangled little dark berries overhead the last summer I was there when I had an affair, left that marriage, and managed to move upstate with the last of my mother’s inheritance, which wasn’t much, just enough to get me there.

That was another thing. My mother died during that time. She had cancer, but it went very bad for her when she entered the hospital in the hopes that her deep anger and aching sorrow, the failure of her marriage, and her long resigned silence might be stitched back up and blasted clean back down to the bare bone of health. Instead, she was mutilated and poorly put back together, she no longer looked herself, but only for a short time as she died soon after. I have never again entered a hospital, after that time my aunt rolled my mother in and her Indian doctor, looking over her chart, slowly shut it, looked sympathetically at her and asked if she liked the beach.

So I was not keen to go to the hospital, but this was a serious wound. There is not anything, there is almost nothing on the internet as to how to deal with serious trauma at home, only the minor scrapes that don’t even require attending to. But anything serious, anything where your life is at stake, must be pushed off into the hands of others, in an environment of sterility and the alarm of infection. My life is too too precious for that, and my body practices too ingrained. I have already been to scary places and come back, I will stay in the deeps of my body tending to this with an ever-lit flame, if I must be my own nurse all day and all night; I will not sleep until the time of danger is passed. I have this light I used in those dark places I’d been in before, which gave me wits and cunning and watchfulness down there, and it would serve me again in this twilight, liminal place between living and dying that comes only at times of birth, death, good lovemaking and deep injury. It has something to do for me with that quote by Georgia O’Keefe how she was scared every day of her life but she never let that stop her. I have also so longed to know the remedies of this world, and how was I to know them if I never used them? I am drawn to indigenous, primitive, and forgotten modes of healing, for this culture, this modern world, has mostly rejected me, or I have rejected it. I’ve not led a life others would consider ‘productive’ because I’ve not been able to emotionally or physically endure normal jobs, normal hours, because I suffered through drug abuse and mental conditions then immune conditions—some of which resolved with changes in my behavior, others I live with still with kindness to myself—and because I’ve chosen the strange byways of my soul, and that has often led me to risk much. I went down very deep in order to understand the nature of my emotional cycles and break them, very deep, down into the wreckages of my health. So I knew what it felt like to be obliterated health-wise, but never quite like this.

Still, the more I researched the more I discovered, always between the lines, as like I said, there is nothing to direct you if you choose to heal yourself beyond pieces of information which you have to string together in your own way. I did not know even if it were possible for a wound to heal that was so hugely empty between skin zones, like a flat red sea. There is no way this wound could close like a cut. I’d have to grow new skin for it to close. I researched skin grafts, which is the hospital’s go to for big burns so as to close it quickly and avoid infection, but my mother had had skin grafts, I was especially wary of this. One study showed, however, that choosing not to get a skin graft does not mean you won’t heal, only it will take longer and you are at higher risk for infection. And if the wound was more minor, the only practice is essentially antibiotic and covering. Yet, other research I encountered insinuated that antibiotics directly on wounds slow them down or interfere with the sacred biomes that happen in your body, in the revving of your immune system when you suffer deep injury. Clearly there is this balance between the immune system’s heart beat and ballooning to infection that must be walked like a tight rope between two cliffs to come into the land of healing.

I will admit, I did, rolling with fear, and my stomach recoiling every time I looked at this wound, which I was washing with raw milk and raw honey and then bandaging with linen, take about 2000 mg of an antibiotic which my partner had on hand when he got his wisdom teeth out. I never take antibiotics, even when I go through bouts of Lyme’s disease, so my body was not used to it, but maybe it was a good thing because I reacted immediately and the swelling I had around the wound subsided and then I stopped taking them. I took three pills only. It was day two. I knew if only I could ward off infection and come up with a good practice of self-care, I could stay home, with my family, eating bone broth soup, and being loved by them, and caring for myself.

It was like a birth had happened in the house. Towels all over the bathroom. a bucket sloshing with milk and rivulets of my blood, honey on the floor, and globs of green clay as I had begun completely covering my wound in bentonite clay and leaving it on for hours, as in my mind, is not new skin being born?— and shouldn’t it be born in the wet and in the dark like a baby? So I covered it with the clay so it was in the dark and the wet like a gestating child. My bed was heaped with extra pillows. The kitchen was covered with the cups and discarded spoons I needed to mix these remedies. I had linen cloths stuffed in my partner’s shirt which he rung up in the bathroom like a hobo bag. I was sick, dizzy and nauseous. That night I ached with chills and my partner was grumbling with the heat in the house so much that he could not sleep. But not like I could not sleep. I only slept two hours at a time. By three am I’d smoke and that would calm me down, and I’d sleep again by five before the children needed to be up by seven. But shallow sleeps, no dreams.

I started crying on the third day. I wept when I thought about how while the children were lying in their beds waiting for me to read to them I was in the bathroom with my partner showing him my wound and he gasped and said, “oh... honey. That’s bad.” And then I covered it again and stood up to be weighed in his arms and cried that I did not want to die. Dramatic, but, I could not just assume that everything would be all right. I still had an open wound, and there could be no continuing of life for me until it closed. He held me tighter even than I held him and told me those things that you would want your lover to say to you. I cried when I told my brothers on the phone, as it was their birthday, and they asked me why I had not gone to the doctor, and had to content themselves with my decision once I reminded them of how I death-doula-ed for our mother, and what I saw there, how it was my choice. Then they did what they could. My one brother sent my medical supplies—which I’m still waiting to receive—and my other, a new pot, to replace the old one I should have replaced long ago.

I cried a last time when my partner huffed at me, and resentfully fetched me my tea while I lay helplessly stretched along the floor on two bean bags. He had just worked an eleven hour day at his job, come home, cleaned everything, made dinner. But still, it was not that I didn’t want to help. I didn’t want it all to be on him, to be a burden to anybody. Is this why they shut people up in hospitals too? So that the family can continue with no interruption, or is it the productivity this culture assumes has to be kept rolling at a height? The reason my brothers could only take a three day leave from their jobs when their mother was dying? I left my job completely to go live with my mother while she died. That was my own choice, but this is too, and I also know that being a mother and the woman to my man, I am the center of this little home, and they love me, and I can be here, even suffering, even in my own little world, or another dimension. For tending to a serious wound is in one of those thresholds, where you learn about sacred things and your intuition is tested, and the most precious ores of life glow.

"I miss my mother,” I cried, “someone to just take care of me unconditionally.”

My partner was lying on the floor beside me at this point, he had rolled over beside the bean bags.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ll be kinder. I didn’t understand before.”

By the end of the fourth day my wound began to close. I read online that it takes seven to twenty one days for new skin to regrow but mine began on the fourth day. It’s still rosy, like a blister that’s become opened, really the same, but fifty times its size, yet my entire body feels different, now that it’s closed. My stomach balanced, the fog in my head lifted, the aches subsided, I could walk without staggering, and my mood buoyed up like that white birch tree that had been dogged with snow. Rather than one remedy that did it, it was in fact, my responding to the changing circumstances all the time with deep attention. I stopped using the honey once the skin started to regrow because it began to stick to the bandage. I had stopped using the clay when the new skin started to come but something told me, a little longer, a little longer, so I went back to it. I spent the whole day molding and remolding the wound with clay until the whole area was sealed. Then I washed it with only milk for a few hours until I felt it aching with tightness. After that I’ve been using a witch hazel cocoa butter salve which I made in the fall, not knowing of course, how important it would be. As soon as I put that on, my leg began to feel more limber and I have been moving more like myself. I never did put antibiotic cream on it or wash it with soap. The last two nights I have had full rest and last night in particular I dreamt I was with my man, we were somewhere in a verdant South America, where there are rolling hills, or at least I thought so, as I’ve never been there, and a woman took us into her cavern to stay the night. There were waterfalls underneath the earth and fires glowing in hearths. And my life is still mine to leap through, to focus on, to untie and let tumble behind me, or gather up and run wild with.