Warday

One of the things that sets people back nowadays is poor nutrition. I try to teach modern nutrition techniques, how to adjust to a reduced-protein diet. I get a lot of people coming in worrying about leukemia or anemia, who simply aren’t eating right. Vitamin C and D deficiencies are most common, followed by proteins and amino acids. I can usually tell by looking at people or talking to them what their general deficiency problem is.

Most of the people in the afternoon group suffer from lack of good nutrition as much as anything else. People in therapy also tend to be the rigid personalities. This is an era of extreme change, and these are people who are afraid of change. Deep panic reactions are common. Most of them have very vivid memories of prewar times, and they are clinging to them. In better-adjusted people, prewar memories are always kind of hazy.

3:30 P.M. I go from the therapy group to the daily business meeting of the coven. One of our problems is record-keeping. We have applied to the Relief for a computer, but so far no response.

They’ve been granting small computers to certain types of farms, so we decide to look into that program. For a suburban community like Shaker Heights, we have a big farm, seven acres. Two are in herbs and the rest in corn, soybeans, and vegetables. We’re even trying to grow watermelons in a semi-sheltered environment we’ve built, though they are officially an illegal crop here because of the likelihood of failure. As an experimental effort, they are tolerated.’

We also have a geiger counter, and run a radiation program. I have the whole property checked every day.

4:00 P.M. I start on my housecalls, taking along Kirby Gentry, who assists me in this part of the practice and is going to take it over sometime soon. In the ideal world, I would devote myself to ritual, meditation, one-on-one counseling, and critical procedures such as deliveries and euthanasias. But this is hardly the ideal world, so we get in the vanagon and set out. First stop is the Barkers’, where the little girl has chicken pox with a secondary staph infection. On the way in, I see that the Relief has quarantined the house. The little girl, Dotty, is really bad. I have prescribed applications of juice of sundew to the areas of most severe eruption, but I can see only slight improvement. This is one of the few herbs with a staph-effective antibiotic. The kid has acquired secondary pruritis from scratching. Her fever is 106. She is delirious and suffering agonies from itching. I think we might very well lose this child. I make sure her fingernails are trimmed back so that she won’t break her skin so much. Then Kirby and I give her a bath in butter-fat soap and water. She screams from the cold. We reapply a paste of myrrh, golden seal, and cayenne to the sites of infection and make sure she is comfortable. The mother tells us that the children’s clinic won’t accept her daughter because of the risk of contagion, but they have promised to send antibiotics if I approve. I sign the form.

Next stop is a house where both husband and wife have NSD.

Their three children will soon be on what the English call the “orphaned list.” We are getting to know these kids, because they will be in the fostering program we do with the Diocese of Cleveland and the Council of Churches.

We do five more housecalls, and we find a situation where a diagnosis of tuberculosis is highly probable. Yesterday I gave scratch tests to Mr. and Mrs. Malone, and they are both positive.

They also have hacking coughs and look generally debilitated. I have no choice but to isolate them and call the Relief. TB is a serious contagion, and we cannot risk letting it spread to the general population. The supply of curative drugs like Isoniazid is too limited to run that risk. The Malones will be hospitalized. Even though Hank Malone is triaged, he will get drug therapy, primarily because the disease is so contagious and long-term hospitalization is too expensive. I encourage them as best I can, explaining that if a triaged person is going to get seriously ill, TB is his best choice, because all cases are treated.

Now it’s six. I’m tired. I go home and sit down to dine with Kirby and four other witches. We eat, as usual, in silence, too exhausted to talk, too hungry to want to.

Rumors The Garden of Eden

We had been traveling on trains almost continuously. To vary our experience, we took Trailways from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. It’s a three-hour-and-ten-minute journey over the Ohio and Pennsylvania turnpikes, both of which are in rather poor condition. There is considerable shoulder erosion, and what the bus driver called “settling,” which makes the road look wrinkled and feel as if the bus is a boat on a choppy sea.

We asked a number of passengers if they had heard anything about a part of the country being a Garden of Eden.

They certainly had.