Monthly Archives: November 2014

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The Introverted Thinker and the Extroverted Feeler play

I am an introverted thinker by preference on the Meyers Briggs test and my sister was an extroverted feeler. My kids each have one of those preference patterns. This story first appeared on an obscure writing website in November 2014.

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When my sister Chris and I were very little, we went on long car trips each summer to a lake in Canada. This is a small lake north of Lake Erie and one of hundreds in Ontario, but to us it was “Canada”.

This was before seatbelts. My father was in graduate school, my mother was an artist who was not making money at it and they were “independently wealthy at a poverty level.” Our cars were always used and tended to break down. My father favored old Peugots and once he and a friend put a new engine in the International Travelall right before we left. We were living in Johnson City, New York, so it was either one very long day’s drive or two days to the lake.

Chris and I had the back seat, often piled with camping gear. She was three years younger. When we were very small we played “Red eye, white eye.” I don’t know who made it up, but I remember my father’s voice. The eyes were tigers. “White eyes” meant that there was an oncoming tiger and we had to duck down behind the seat until it passed, so that it wouldn’t get us. “Red eyes” meant a receding tiger or a tiger in front of us going the other way, so we could pop back up. It also meant no tigers.

“White eyes,” said my father, and we hid, scared. Then there was such a feeling of safety and of not being caught when he said, “Red eyes,” and we could return. We knew that he would protect us from the tigers.

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Eat food not pills

As a United States board certified, board eligible rural Family Physician, I am continually mystified by many of my patients preferring pills to food.

I don’t get it.

Today I will discuss probiotics. I have tons of patients taking probiotic pills. I ask all patients to bring in all pills, prescribed or not, fda approved or “natural”, when they come for their first visit. Many people arrive with a shopping bag. People say, “I am not on any medicines.” Then they pull seven “herbal” medicines out of the bag. A pill is a pill to me. I have never seen one growing on a tree. It’s as natural as a shoe, in my opinion. Shoes don’t grow on my feet, but sometimes I wear them. I feel the same about pills.

I hold up the probiotic bottle. “How long have you been taking this?” I ask.

“For a year,” says my patient.

I then get this internal vision. The probiotic leader in my patient’s stomach speaks, “Another load of refugees. I just don’t know where we’ll put them. Everyone is starving as it is. And dehydrated and dessicated with many dead again. Call the burial team and the grief counselors. I swear, it’s like clockwork. We had a forty eight hour break last Saturday, remember? But then we had to handle all that alcohol….”

“Have you thought of stopping it?” I ask.

“Probiotics are good for the digestion,” says my patient.

“Ok,” I say and try to gently introduce the idea of as few pills as possible. Also if they are taking four preparations with vitamin A, I total it up and ask them to consider lowering their dose a bit……

Why don’t people eat their probiotics as food? I am not talking about the expensive advertised yogurt. Live culture yogurt has always had probiotics, but now they’ve standardized, advertised and raised the price. All of the pickled things are sources of probiotics: Kimchi, dill pickles, sauerkraut and all of those interesting pickles that one gets with sushi. I am not so sure about the sweetened pickles, though my mother used to make watermelon rind pickles in a crock, and I am sure there were very many interesting organisms in them. Delicious, too. A friend said that he first got interested in fungi perusing leftovers in my parents’ refrigerator, and he ended up with a PhD. My digestion has been really really healthy, though my recent strep A was hard on it.

I got live kimchi at the Farmer’s Market recently, and hard cider. Both contain love, I mean live cultures. If you make your own beer, that has live cultures when it’s brewing.

The best thing you can do for your intestinal health is stop. eating. sugar. Quit all the junk food and anything with sugar or corn syrup and make your own food. I have some really dark chocolate or two table spoons of really good ice cream most days. I did eat one donut in the last five months. Perfection is silly, boring and stifling.

Another overlooked cheap source of probiotics that anyone can find: dirt. Yes. Dirt from your yard. It contains all manner of live microscopic things and you are focusing on local bacteria. Don’t wash that carrot quite so carefully and you will be adding to the probiotic culture in your body. If you are in a CSA (community supported agriculture) and get a box from a local farmer once a week, you are getting local probiotics. Do be sure to get your tetnus vaccine updated every ten years, too.

Lastly, think about your food. Would you rather have local probiotics from a local farm or attempt to wash the pesticides off of vegetables that have had pesticide genes added to their genome?

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Dream: Get real, Girl

I dream that I am a prisoner and being tortured. The torturers are indistinct and shadows. They cut slices into my flesh and put me back in my cell.

I am out of my cell again and I am seen from the back, naked from the hips up. The torturer cuts slices in my back with a cutlas. The previous slices have healed and scarred. I am done. I turn, grab the cutlas and slice off the torturers hands at mid-forearm. His hands are visible as they fall away, but the rest of him is still a shadow. I will win, I know.

I have a new vase. I take the white china vase out of the base, which has brass wheels and a support like a coach. Like Cindarella’s coach. I use the vase as a template to carve the base of a pumpkin to fit. I carve it into a coach sitting on the base. I find a plastic horse and the “Get real, Girl” in her hiking boots. I photograph it and caption it: “After she smashes the glass slippers, the coachmen and horses revert to mice and rats and run away. She steals a horse from her father, puts on her hiking gear, skips the ball and heads for the hills for good.”

Then I wake up.

As you can see, I haven’t carved the pumpkin yet, nor found the horse. But I will.