Instead of protecting me from the common childhood diseases, vaccinations caused those very diseases. When physicians had given me up to die, my life was snatched from the brink of death by the dramatic intervention of a homeopath.
I was the child to whose birth my mother had looked forward with much joy. She was convinced that I would be her first girl, the one whom she had wanted for all those years that she gave birth to boys, nothing but boys. She thanked God for me every day for a whole year. That is when I became deathly sick. I had just received my compulsory vaccinations when I contracted all the diseases against which I had been vaccinated, including scarlet fever and whooping cough, all at the same time. It was only through the drastic intervention of a homeopath that my life was spared.
What no one realized at the time was that I was born with a constriction in the urinary tract, 4 cm below the right kidney, which prevented proper drainage of the kidney. Only through extreme pressure was the kidney able to expell urine, a drop at a time. The backflow of the urine caused continuous blood poisonings which endangered my life time and again.
The surgeon who corrected the problem when I was 35 years old told me that my life was a medical impossibility, in other words, a miracle. The oldest person who had the same operation was a boy of 12. Everyone else had died of poisoning in infancy. I also died of my condition, twice, in fact, and at age 9, I was in a coma for several days, and no one was able to figure out what the problem was.
I have also been told repeatedly that I would not have survived childhood if I had grown up on a North American diet. The starvation diet of the lean days of World War II and the starvation days of the post-war period became my salvation. While surviving on the weeds which we found in ditches, I may have been continually hungry, but my body did not have to worry about having to cope with the excess uric acid which is produced with the consumption of meat, a substance which causes severe problems when the urinary system is unable to expell it.
When I lived in residence during my first year of teacher training, I ate a normal North American diet for the first time, complete with milk and meat. I soon started to experience problems to which I was not accustomed, and that is when I started to develop serious allergies. The greater my problems got, the more I was encouraged to eat more protein, and the more severe my problems got.
There had to be a better way. I decided that enough was enough. I had to stop heeding the medical advice which was contrary to what I had been taught in my childhood. I had to listen to my body.
That is how I embarked on the long journey of learning to conquer my allergies.
