Excluding grandchildren, nothing would make my mum happier than if I stopped wearing an underwire bra. She first made me aware of this desire when she gave me a book entitled, Dressed to Kill. It was about the link between breast cancer and bras and had my mum convinced, that by me wearing an underwire bra, I was putting myself in unnecessary danger.
Perhaps if this was the only book or advice I’d ever received from her about an unusual health discovery, I’d listen, but the last thing my mum needs is encouragement. She is an alternative health addict. Eschewing mainstream alternative health gurus like Deepak Chopra and Julia Cameron, she prefers rare, quirky, and extreme (i.e., things that make her sound crazy). A quick glance at her bookshelf of fatalistic and dramatic titles offers great insight into the topics that concern her: Life Without Bread; Root Canal Cover-Up; Tissue Cleansing through Bowel Management; six copies of One Answer to Cancer; Iodine: Why you need it, Why you can’t live without it; and, the truly terrifying, Alkalize or Die.
In addition to the plethora of obscure health books, my mother appears to have bought every type of machine available to support these theories. While the books are fatalistic, the contraptions are fantastical. Some of them look like they come straight from Willy Wonka’s factory. There is the upside down machine that enables you to invert your body effortlessly (if you don’t consider all the blood rushing to your head and making you feel like it will explode, too unpleasant); the ionic foot bath that extracts brown and black gunk from your feet, which then froths and sputters before your eyes; and the Chi Vitalizer, which holds on to your feet and vigorously shakes them from side to side. There are the EMF necklaces and clocks which are supposed to reduce the amount of electromagnetic waves your body absorbs; the Lympholine, a trampoline for adults said to help drain your lymphatic system through the action of bouncing; and the PowerVibe. Now, I’m not quite sure what the PowerVibe is supposed to do and clearly my mother doesn’t remember either as when I ask her she responds with,
“You’d have to look it up.”
When I press further, she says,
“It warbles away the fat.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“It shakes it all off,” she says, as though this were the most reasonable thing ever said.
Her initial enthusiasm for all these things is in stark contrast to her later complete inability to remember what they were ever supposed to do.
So, the thing she’d spent hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars on, is relegated to what I call the Torture Room. Everyone has one. You know, the stuff that sits in a room (usually the “guest” room), making you feel guilty for the money spent on things that now only collect dust. In the case of this room though, it actually looks like she might torture people in there: There’s the Ceragem massage table which is supposed to be relaxing but just feels like a steam roller doing its thing over tight muscles; the infrared sauna for detoxing; Gua Sha tools that leave your body looking like raw meat across whatever surface you scrap them over; the head stand contraption (which appeared after the inversion machine was given away); and the Bio Wave Generator (nicknamed the Zapper), which sends low level electro currents through your body with the goal of healing different ailments and getting rid of parasites. You wrap electrode-bearing straps around your wrists or feet, then adjust the “drives” (i.e. how intensely you want to electrocute yourself, but which mum says is based on the fact that “every condition in your body has a specific frequency with which you need to attack it in order to kill it”), then switch it on and adjust to the metallic taste in your mouth (which supposedly is only telling you how much you need to do it, not serving as a warning to turn it off). There’s also the HeartMath machine which, according to the website teaches you to “transform feelings of anger, anxiety or frustration into more peace, ease and clarity.” How does it do this? Mum’s explanation is simple: “Watch yourself go relaxed and you see it all goes down.” Hmmm, I think the “it” is a squiggly line on the machine, but I’ll refer to the website for accuracy: “It collects pulse data through a pulse sensor and translates the information from your heart rhythms into graphics on your computer or into easy to follow lights.” Moving on.
My mum buys health gadgets like most women buy clothes. When my parents’ GP put my dad into a “fat pod” to measure his body fat and declared him “the classic fat skinny man,” my mum wanted to be able to measure this at home too. Along came two different scales which measure weight, BMI, body fat, muscle percentage, caloric intake, body age and visceral fat.
In addition to all these contraptions and books, there are the endless lectures, classes, and experimental diets: Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, health farms, oil pulling therapy, Candida/gluten-free diets, cleanses, heavy metal chelation, gallbladder/bowel/liver flushes, enemas, colonics, adrenal exhaustion supplements, and Chinese cupping and acupuncture. I think all my family members would agree that one of the most foul-tasting processes we all engaged in were the Chinese twig teas: tea made from what looked like forest floor droppings of dirt, twigs, leaves, a preserved critter, and a feather. To make matters worse, it wasn’t a one-time deal. You had to drink it three times a day for weeks, sometimes months. A friend who was visiting the same Chinese doctor as us, used to come over to our place every week to make her teas because the neighbors in her apartment block complained so vehemently about the smell.
If you grew up in my parents’ house, you got used to all these things. You got used to being told to put caster oil in your eyes when they were dry and hydrochloric acid in your ears when you had a cold, and pricked your finger to test your glucose level (even though you aren’t diabetic). You were desensitized to the sun, learned to “tap” your way out of unpleasant feelings, and were told that “impatience with the way others do things” is the emotion related to dandruff.
Mum once lived on chlorophyll and beet tablets for a month, insisting the whole time she wasn’t even hungry. When I bring up all these things, she responds with, “All families have stuff like this. We just have different stuff…Other families spend money on vacations instead.”
All these things are child’s play in comparison to the disturbing Peaceful Pill Handbook. It sounds lovely doesn’t it? A clue that it might not be is the publisher: Exit International. The reality of this book is that, in the words of my mum, it teaches you how to “off yourself.” The suggestions range from carbon dioxide, helium or cyanide poisoning to prescription medications such as Morphine or tranquilizers and each suggestion offers a detailed description of how to obtain and use it, legal issues, and patient success stories (obviously told by someone else). For carbon monoxide poisoning there is a photo of a car with a pipe coming from the exhaust to the inside of the sealed car. With other forms of poisoning, a dummy head wrapped in a plastic bag illustrates the how to. For things that are a little bit trickier, such as obtaining a barbiturate, the reader is told how to obtain Nembutal in Tijuana through a veterinary supply shop.
Now, it’s surprising mum even felt the need to buy this book as she’s always instructed my brother and I to just wheel her off a cliff when things get bad. Perhaps she has her doubts we would oblige. Or maybe she doesn’t trust us knowing when things really are bad. Regardless, when I ask her about why she has the book she responds as though the answer is obvious: “Honey, you do that or you go to Oregon.”
I flip through the book some more as I absorb that information and come to the final chapter entitled “After It’s All Over.” I’m not sure who would be reading that chapter but as I walk away mum urgently says,
“Don’t take that book away from me! It cost a bomb to get. Very few copies were made.”
I wonder why.
All this started innocently enough, as most addictions do. I think in the 80s mum was too busy raising my brother and I to have the time for anything else, but by the time we were pre-teens in the early 90s, it began. We’d just gotten prescription glasses so, after reading a book entitled Better Eyesight without Glasses, mum ordered a pair of opaque black pin-hole glasses. The idea was that your eyes would have to adjust to see through the pinholes, resulting in better vision, but all I remember was being endless frustrated by having to wear them during my half an hour of T.V. a night. It was like viewing T.V. through a haze of flies. But that was the rule: no pinhole glasses, no T.V.
After this came the Kombucha she cultivated in the fridge. This was way before the current popularity of Kombucha and mum was hard-core in that she grew her own. How hard can growing your own symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast be you might ask? Picture this if you will: A large shallow container in which a flat, smelly, slimy jellyfish-looking object festers away for weeks, luxuriating in its self-created juices. After it has produced enough juices, you peel the top layer of the fungus off, drain the juice and drink it, then place the remaining fungus back in its container, replenish the water and watch it happen all over again.
Even though my mum carried on with dedication for a year, I think it put her off extreme health kicks for a while. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that it started again, this time with Reiki and Qigong classes and visits to psychics, past life regressionists, energy healers, and hypnotists. When we moved to London for a year, for what became the worst winter in recorded history, my mother bought a SAD-Lite to help with her London-induced Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Not only is mum fascinated by all this, she is obsessed with documenting it all. I was reminded of this recently when, on a hike, my mum urgently told me to stop walking. Fearing there was a rattlesnake ahead, I did as I was told until I heard the shutter click of her camera phone. I turned around to her saying, “I just want to show you something.” She shows me a photo of me, from behind. The photo makes me feel such self-hatred, I feel like directing it to her for capturing it. It displays my bat (back fat). She just didn’t want me walking around not knowing.
I’m reminded of numerous other ways she documented my lowest moments. Chicken pox as a child: my brother and I, the same color as the dried Calamine lotion covering our bodies, are propped up in bed, our pajama sleeves and pants pulled up to showcase how covered in pox we were. Our faces say it all. We are fed up, very sick and don’t want to be photographed. When I got Strep throat and could barely swallow, mum hinged my mouth open, peered down with a flashlight in one hand and camera in the other while I obediently held the back of a spoon to compress my tongue, and said “aaaaaaaah.” She documented my dad’s shingles, my brother’s terribly infected throat when he had mono and everyone’s go in the ionic foot bath. It’s self-inflicted too. When mum’s best friend told her about Cansema, a black salve used to “cure” skin cancer, mum couldn’t wait to try it out on what she lovingly called, her “barnacle,” then document its progress.
Every time I think we are down to the last possible thing mum could buy, something new comes along: a slightly improved Lympholine, a new book, or a health conspiracy upon which to focus. A perfect example of this is when a letter arrived recently from the City of Los Angeles. They were notifying her that, in order to protect public health, they were going to start adding Chloramine to the city’s water. Even though the water in my parents’ house is filtered, with the added option of it being alkaline too, mum panicked. Within minutes of receiving the letter she went online to print up all the information she could about this chemical in an effort to formulate a “contingency plan.” She will no doubt take the notice to the naturopath to see what supplement we can take or additional filter we can use to counterbalance the effects of this nasty chemical. I don’t doubt it’s nasty, but I rest assured knowing I’ll be covered. After all, I’ve got connections to the best health crusader out there.