Next to Innate: Part I

"I took myself a blue canoe and floated like a leaf. Dazzling, dancing, half enchanted in my Merlin sleep." -- Elton John

The starlit night induced a calming sensation within my mind's neural milieu. One could liken this feeling to that experienced by a moth flying frantically about the porch light when suddenly it is turned off to reveal the security of the country evening: the cool scented breeze gently playing natural rhythms through the trees; the billions of stars visible without competition from city lights. Neural centers previously wild with the attention to man-made stimuli now peacefully seek harmony with nature. But, like the moth, when the artificial lights turn on, our attention shifts, seeking out intense stimulation.

My day has collapsed into this moment under the twinkling of night, and I remember the night when my daughter, Ayrha, was born at home. Her birth was as much a shift in heart again as that between a view of the New York skyline and an Eagle Cap Mountain sunset. Natural home birth transcends all human experience transforming life into creation. But the experience of birth again was dwarfed by the miraculous beauty of the baby, a beauty that was immediately dependent upon our belief in it, a sort of Peter Pan's Tinkerbell, if you will.

You see, my wife and I believed that life came from above down, within out, and we had confidence that the Above portion of life was benevolent with most of the problems in the Within Out department (except in special circumstances where the Above needed some design changes for special purposes). So when our first child was born so beautifully, what happened was a natural strengthening of our convictions -- to a point.

There is the Educated mind that demands logical satisfaction even when the Innate mind does not. The Educated Intelligence is like a moth while the Innate Intelligence is like the butterfly. You will never see a butterfly buzzing around a stadium light. This was the case with the knowledge of Rh factor incompatibility.

The next morning, with our newborn bundled in swaddling, we were off to the Smiley Medical Clinic to satisfy our Educated knowledge of Rh incompatibility. "No time to wait for a test," said the MD, and he immediately ordered the rhogam shot for my wife, Anita. The baby, as it turned out, was Rh negative and no shot was scientifically necessary, but a human antibody was relatively safe anyway.

Meanwhile, my grandma came by the house to deliver some chicken soup and found no one home. When we returned, we found the soup on the porch and called her. She was relieved to know that everything was okay.

Now we were home free with no medical needs and our newborn baby girl just making every minute so special. Her little nose was so tiny that I marveled at her ability to breathe through it. A dark sense crept across my mind when I thought of the possibility that this small obligatory nasal breathing child would be in peril if she caught the slightest cold in this frigid Minneapolis winter. But she had already had her first adjustment right after she was born and her birth was completely natural up to this point -- well, everything was going so well how could anything go wrong?

And so we continued to beam with confidence that the natural form of living was best. We allowed no flash pictures or bright lights to interfere with our baby's perfect view of the universe. When a visiting friend, a registered nurse, asked if the pediatrician gave her the shots yet, we promptly took the baby from her arms and politely said that there would be no pediatrician, nor would there be any shots for our precious girl. "What about the test for PKU?" she asked. The thought of jabbing our baby's foot with a lancet was barbaric by our standards when a simple urine test was available. We told her of this test, but she did not look convinced. But it didn't matter what anyone, friend or foe, said to us from that day forward. Our little child was born naturally and there would be no drugs allowed to interfere with her Innate life force -- unless there was no choice.

My Educated mind demanded that I read every piece of literature on vaccinations, but the side effects that the medical community dismissed as insignificant, I deemed to be too risky for my precious little girl. And so by the time she was two years of age, she had never seen the inside of a doctor's office. She did have some bad colds, and maybe a bit of pneumonia, but she never lost her harmony with Innate and so we lived a bliss that only this life could offer.

Not long after the natural home birth of our second daughter, Heather, came a serious challenge to our Innate concepts. Ayrha had a slight cold for a couple days and that morning she woke up, but couldn't get out of bed. I remember how cute she was in her bed with her big brown eyes. Just looking at her made me smile clear down to my heart. But from the same place, came a dark sense when I pulled her playfully out of the blankets and her legs were as limp as her hair. In an instant it dawned on me: polio.

The yearbooks say there were only eight cases of polio that year, most of them caused by the vaccine. I knew of one that wasn't and that reminded me that Tinkerbell was a fairy tale character, and my beautiful daughter was not. I remembered hearing the stories of the Sister Kenny Institute where polio victims were cared for. But, the sense of foreboding vanished when my little daughter with her arms around my neck started jabbering and laughing as if nothing could ever go wrong. I believed her again, but just to be sure, I found her subluxation and adjusted it. By that afternoon, she was walking again.

She and our other children would live the protected life of a butterfly: shielded from the harsh unnatural world by both the gentle countryside and her chiropractic parents.

Next to Innate: Part II is the next of a series of six articles dealing with chiropractic family care. There can be no finer place to raise children that in the country where they freely identify with the natural environment in ways that a city park will never provide. More importantly, for chiropractors, these articles will point to the limits of natural health care and hopefully stimulate reminiscing about similar experiences in their own lives. By the way, these articles are stories that are composites of actual patient histories and are not intended to replicate actual persons, living or dead.