My Life with Medicine

Abstract

ONCE my mother put me on a horseradish diet for an entire week. I ate nothing but tablespoonfuls of freshly grated horseradish, and drank gallons of water to flush out my system. After suffering for months from a lingering bronchitis no conventional treatment seemed to cure, I was ready to try anything. Possibly my mother had learned about this treatment in one of those old-time remedy books that lived on our shelves, written by someone named Jethro or Hubert. The delicate tissues of my inner cheeks and throat blazed mightily each time I braved a dose. I squinched my eyes shut and thought about: the lips of my ex-boyfriends, the extravagant view from the South Rim at Big Bend National Park, chocolate cake?to be able to swallow. Till now I have hesitated to mention such details about my past, for fear they might make my mother seem reckless, or myself susceptible in the extreme. The horseradish did not make me well, but it didn't make me sicker either. I remember the lumpy horseradish-like texture of my off-white ceiling as I lay weakly in bed staring up at.it, and the bones in my wrists, which seemed more prominent each morning. I was reading Jack Kerouac at the time and had not eaten meat for years, so I could not imagine whatever meat it was that people liked to eat with horseradish to help it go down easier. My idea of a nightmare was a lamb chop sizzling in a skillet. The Kerouac books I read from then on were marked by a certain tingle that would arise in my tongue upon opening one. This treatment preceded my personal visit to one of the Filipina faith healers who had come to San Antonio to give presentations on psychic surgery. Their films showed a healer running his or her hands over the troubled region of the patient's body, babbling in some intense, electric vocabulary, and lifting what looked like a bloody kidney or tumor from the body without ever cutting it open. A few people in the back of the tiny auditorium, where my family liked to sit so as not to be called on to demonstrate anything, murmured that it was a chicken gizzard or pig liver or cow heart, and the so-called "healer" had had it up a sleeve. I listened to each possibility with equal interest. I was not devoted to believing things, but it seemed as foolish to scoff too soon. When the scratchy film showed the previously "sick" patient now well and