It has been years since I spent any amount of time in a gym doing intense training.
Hives feel like an inadequate name for what they are. I’ve never taken so many medications at once before. To think it’s all to keep my skin calm. Practitioners of alternative medicine, sometimes call their work “eastern medicine” to distinguish from the more pharmaceutical western medicine.
Compassion means to share in suffering. “Passion” stems from a latin cognate meaning “to suffer.” Homeopathy is more compassionate in this way. It doesn’t eliminate suffering, but tells you where to look.
In alternative medicine, skin is considered the third lung. It is the largest organ of our body, according to anatomists, and often mentioned to those with skin disorders like this shocking revelation should accord skin-bearers more weight. Hives really is an inadequate name for what they are.
I thought I was losing my mind after several weeks of sleepless nights waking myself up tearing at my skin to the point of ecstasy. I learned to meditate in improbable calibers—focusing on listening to words being uttered while playing the loudest hum of bees and flies and televisions in my head until the irritation was completely drowned out. Automatic dialogues and placid smiles.
I begged my doctor not to make me take any more steroids as they were putting ungainly weight all over my aging body, making me incredibly depressed and dysmorphic on top of irritated and tired. She says, “this is now a quality of life issue, and I’m afraid you’re scarring yourself scratching, so I am going to insist you take these drugs.” The second time is somehow different. I manage a new lease on life with recapitulated skin freedom and convince myself I can be happy in a fat body. “Enjoy your chubbiness while you can,” advises a friend.
The allergist guffaws when I tell him I’ve been slathering my hives with plant medicines. He says that with my kind of allergy to tree pollen and fruits, I’m basically rubbing allergens directly into open wounds, which will trigger more irritation. I now bathe myself in a petrochemical salve every night.
I will one day not be on steroids, three antihistamines and a topical analgesic the consistency of cement. And I will return to compassion, the sharing of suffering. Sharing the pain all around me, not available to absolution via work, care, acts of service…I must pause compassion and find reprieve in the most antagonistic healing protocol I’ve ever used.
Compassion fatigue is the inability to feel pain for others due to the flood of deserving cases.
While I was fighting my hives through non-pharmaceutical means, I recall only one true 24-hour period in which I was able to stop scratching or wincing in irritation. On that day, I went to a Muay Thai class and beat the shit out of a punching bag for the first time in years. I nearly crippled my entire musculoskeletal system with compassion. You know, it would be the funniest thing to have a bloodsport action film about Tonglen meditation.
I have an epiphany lately in my sitting practice. Justice for so many will only arrive at death. I need to accept death, as a gratitude. I am grateful for every body that has provided death as a means of justice. I bear compassion towards those who must grieve and suffer death. I herald the clarion for those whose evil truths can only be borne with material passing (I speak specifically of those cultural heroes whose abuses can only safely be discussed once they are permanently absent). Death is like skin, the largest organ of the fabric of our universe. And this may surprise us, and this may require at least two meridiens of healing practice—the hammer of medication and the forest of homeopathy. That I might be the hammer and accept death as the fulcrum without which nothing can heal.
**post script: Let me just say that as a massive believer in alternative medicines I hope everyone finds a way to calibrate lifestyle and nutritional protocols to work with sometimes extremely valuable chemical interventions. I don’t want to hear either that I can’t do the woowoo stuff or that I should avoid Big Pharma. Here’s an incomplete list of things that have helped with my own grades 0-10 (0 being useless, and 10 being manna):
moxibustion (5)
Acupuncture, Japanese style (6)
Craniosacral massage (8)
Shiatsu (7)
Clobestasol (7)
Fexofenadine over any other antihistamine though it makes me incredibly loopy (7)
Cerave (no grade for this, just really the best stuff for general skin pain in my opinion)
Elimination diet has become necessary but surprisingly, berries can really and truly jack you up if you have hypersensitive skin like me!
Steroids as long as they’re low in dosage and meted in a weening format (10)
Tonglen meditation (10)
Muay Thai (10)