No Weapon Formed (Boaz Brown) (21 page)

“That’s what I’m talkin’
about. She probably used coconut oil, tea tree oil. Beeswax to make it stay in
place. Way better than over-the-counter ointment.”

“Why don’t doctors prescribe
natural remedies if they’re so effective?”

“Because you can’t patent
what God made, and what can’t be patented doesn’t make much money.”

This whole conversation
reminded me of banter from Daddy’s lips. He was the only one I knew who was
completely skeptical of the government, despite the fact that he worked at the
post office for over thirty years.

“Okay. We’ve tried everything
else. Might as well go underground,” I conceded, raising my laptop screen, pressing
the power button and wondering why my best friend hadn’t written a book yet. I
was as impressed as I could be without actually seeing this whole natural thing
work on a case more serious than a skinned knee.

Peaches navigated to a
website that looked more like a place for a witch doctor than two Christian
women seeking God’s herbs. “This is spooky.”

“You are so brainwashed. The
system has taught you well that if it didn’t come from man, it’s evil. Quite
the opposite is true. But don’t worry, girl, Peaches is here to set the record
straight.”

“Look at that woman!” I
pointed to the top of the screen, where a woman in clothes that looked like
curtains smiled back at us. I guess she was our age, in her forties, probably
living on an island with no electricity. “She’s a hippie.”

“She’s not a hippie. She’s
sixty-three and runs two miles a day.”

My mouth dropped. “Nuh uh!
She is
not
sixty-three!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I exclaimed, “Okay, if she
was black, I could see it. This is gonna sound wrong, but a white woman’s skin
looking that young at sixty-three is not normal.”

“Well, white don’t crack,
either, if you stay away from foolishness,” Peaches surmised. She selected the
word “timeline” from the page menu. “This tool will help us start at the
beginning. When did Stelson first begin to have symptoms?”

“Um…a few weeks after school
started,” I said.

“Not good enough. Pull out
your calendar.”

This girl was not playing
with me. I pushed away from the table. “Be right back.”

Stelson stirred as I rummaged
through my purse looking for my phone. “Peaches still here?”

“Yes. We’re online
researching your symptoms. She thinks we need to look at natural remedies.”

“I’m open to anything,” he
mumbled.

I walked to his bedside and
kissed him.

“What was that for?”

“Not sure. Guess talking with
Peaches has given me hope.”

“Works for me.”

Peaches and I dragged and
clicked on the timeline. For a bohemian website, the tool was quite
sophisticated. The teacher in me thought the gadget might come in handy for
helping students keep outlines as they read.

She took our search to the
next level. “Now, do you use a debit card or credit card for most of your
purchases? Do you keep receipts?”

“Yeah. Why do they want to
know all my business?”

“We’re going to look through
your purchases to see if you bought anything out-of-the ordinary or forgot to
mention something on the calendar. Your checkbook is a map to your life.”

“Are you serious?” I chided.

“As serious as your husband
having a seizure. Come on. Open the checking account, chop-chop.”

With Peaches nipping at my
heels, I turned the laptop toward me and opened our checking account to search
for unusual purchases. “Nothing we haven’t already put on the timeline,” I
said. “What do they want next, my mother’s maiden name?”

“No. But if you have your
family menu for the weeks leading up to the onset of symptoms, I’ll attach the
file.”

My goodness!

Once we’d plugged in all the
information, Peaches submitted our case for analyzation. “Done. I gotta get
back to Momma’s. We should hear something in the next hour or so—depends
on their holiday schedule.”

“An hour?! Why can’t it just
spit out a diagnosis when you enter a few symptoms?”

“Because it’s not run like a
mainstream doctor’s office. I pay a pretty penny for my subscription to this
site. These timelines are actually reviewed by real people who are passionate
about natural medicine. I’ll text you as soon as I get the email.”

She gathered her belongings
and hugged me good-bye. “You coming to Momma’s tomorrow?”

“I hate to see you go.” What
an understatement. Peaches had been a lifeline for me that week.

“Promise you and Stelson will
bring the kids up soon?”

“As soon as he’s better…”

“I’ll change my sheets the
minute I get back to Philly, then.”

Her vote of confidence swept
from her lips to my soul. She was so certain that my husband would be fine. I
clung to her faith because mine was nearly depleted.

I slept as peacefully as
possible with Stelson tossing and turning next to me as though he couldn’t get
comfortable.

Flat on my back, I stared at
the ceiling wondering what God was thinking about this situation. What was the
conversation in heaven? In the spirit realm? What were the angels telling the
demons and vice versa?

For Seth’s first birthday,
Momma had given us a framed illustration of a little boy praying with his eyes
closed. Right behind the boy were silhouettes of majestic, towering angels
listening and watching intently. The cut-out matte showed Luke 4:10. “
For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over
thee, to keep thee
”.

Personally, I wasn’t feeling
very kept. I felt loose. Out there.
What’s up with my angels? They on break?

I nearly jumped when my phone
vibrated on the nightstand.
You’re funny, Lord.

The screen showed one text
message.

From Peaches:
EUREKA!!!!!

I fell trying to get out of
bed and get to a place where I could freely talk to Peaches. “Ow! Shoot!”

“Shondra?” Stelson asked.

“I’m all right,” I answered
from the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“I just got a text from
Peaches. She says she has the answer.”

He switched on the light.
“Call her.”

I wasn’t expecting him to
jump on the trail so quickly. “I’m all over it.” I snuggled up next to my
husband and dialed Peaches.

The phone didn’t complete one
full ring. “Shondra, you are not going to believe this.”

“Hold on, let me put you on
speaker so Stelson can hear.” I pressed the corresponding icon. “We’re here.”

She busted out, “Lyme disease.”

Stelson and I waited
silently, which I assumed meant he was as clueless about what she’d just said
as me.

Peaches continued, “You
remember when Seth got lost and Stelson was looking for him?”

I replied with, “Uh huh,”
although I wondered what Seth’s disappearance had to do with Stelson’s illness.

“Lyme disease is caused by
the bite of an infected tick, carried by deer. North Texas is in the danger
zone,” she explained.

Stelson grabbed his phone
from his nightstand. When the Google search engine page popped up on his
screen, I knew he was already off to the races.

Stelson leaned in to ask,
“What do we do now?”

“Take the test. But you don’t
want to take it at any old lab. There’s a list of recommended labs whose
equipment is sensitive enough to detect what we’re looking for.”

Isn’t a lab a lab?

“They start you on a round of
antibiotics. Now, this late in the game, I’d say you should probably take them
in addition to the natural therapies since this thing already has a head
start.”

“What’s the prognosis?”
Stelson asked.

“It can be a very long
recovery, but you can beat it, my white brother from another mother.”

Peaches promised to send over
the results and recommendations via email. We thanked her profusely for her
time and for helping us in all matters bohemian.

“After this, you’ll be one of
us,” she said. “Night y’all.”

Lyme disease
. Since Peaches first mentioned the name,
I thought she’d meant “lime” disease, which sounded like fruit poisoning, if
that’s even possible. We Googled it and found a website with more information.

“Did you
see
a tick on
your body?” I quizzed as we sat up in bed viewing the images together on my
laptop.
This is gross.

“No, but some people never
see it.” He pointed to someone’s testimonial on screen and read out loud,
“I…never… saw… a… tick.”

The way he said it, like a
new reader tackling a
Dick and Jane
book, cracked me up.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“You sound like Seth.”

“Seth can read?”

“Yeah. He wanted to tell
you.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He tried.” Rather than make
my husband feel worse, I softened the truth. “You didn’t feel like talking at
the time.”

Stelson covered his eyes with
one hand. And he cried. We both cried, hoping the worst was behind us.

First thing in the morning,
we tried to schedule an appointment with the lab, but Stelson’s insurance said
the request had to be written up by his doctor in order for them to cover it.

His doctor seemed quite
annoyed that an online website had caught what he’d missed. Nonetheless, he
conceded that Lyme disease was a definite possibility, given Stelson’s day in
the woods. The lesions, he surmised, might have been from a previous Lyme
infection. This most recent exposure might have triggered a more potent
reaction.

As was routine, he prescribed
antibiotics immediately, even before the diagnosis was confirmed, because with
this disease, every day counts.

When Stelson and I got the
results from the lab a few weeks later, we clung to one another and thanked God
for a definitive answer. He’d tested positive for Lyme disease.

As Peaches had forewarned,
the recovery process thus far had been slow, even with the antibiotics. Every
few days, she’d ask me how he was doing. “He seems better.”

“Nuh uh. You need to make a
list of all his symptoms and chart how he’s feeling every day. Scale of one to
ten, ten being horrible. This will also help make sure no co-infections are
starting and sneaking up on him.”

I railed, “You’re making this
sound like a full-time job.”

“LaShondra.”

Her pause alarmed me. “What?”

“Taking care of Stelson
is
your new full-time job. I am soooo not trying to scare you. God did not give us
the spirit of fear. I do want you to be aware, though. He’s not totally out of
the woods. There’s a huge cloud of suspicion and political mystery around Lyme disease.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll send you the links.
Call me after you’ve read the articles.”

My computer dinged with her
incoming message. Within a few clicks, I was dumbfounded. The titles of the
first two articles alone caught my attention:
Lyme Disease Biowarfare
.
Diseased
Ticks from Government Lab
.

If Peaches hadn’t been so
helpful already, I probably would have dismissed them. But she’d been right
about everything else so far, and she had opened my eyes to the fact that I
needed to open my eyes even more when it came to trusting my health to a man-made
system.

I was almost late getting
Seth from school. Couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen long enough to
take a breath and process. Though no one in an official capacity had owned up
to it, there was a theory floating around that Lyme disease was a man-made
disease. An experiment in biowarfare gone wrong, which explained why something
as complex as Lyme disease was officially “discovered” in 1975 despite the fact
that ticks and deer have been around for centuries. The map of Lyme disease’s
progression across the United States also showed the heaviest concentration in
areas nearest the lab, heading westward.

Online whistle-blowers
alleged that Lyme disease, in particular, was engineered to progress slowly, in
intervals, and mimic so many other diseases and affect people in so many
different ways that enemies wouldn’t know what hit them until it was too late.
Depending on how the disease manifested, people could be diagnosed with
rheumatoid arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, chronic fatigue,
ADHD, fibromyalgia…

Undiagnosed, Lyme disease is
a horrific condition. I couldn’t finish watching some of the documentary
videos.

“God, if this is true, it’s
terrible,” I whispered to Him.

Peaches and I, of course,
gabbed about it as I traveled to Seth’s school.

“I cannot believe the
government would let something like this happen,” I said, “and then deny it.”

“Girl, please,” Peaches
smacked.

“This is crazy. I don’t think
Stelson will believe it, though. He doesn’t believe in speculation about
conspiracies and big cover-ups. He’s an engineer. Unless it’s something
spiritual, he defaults to facts. I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but the
only reason he listened to you was because everyone else has been wrong.”

“Well, maybe he can pray
about the information. No matter what, he needs to know. The biowarfare
researchers knew that doctors would prescribe antibiotics to fight the disease,
so they infused components that could make the disease worse after antibiotics.
From what I’ve read, this thing was engineered to confuse doctors, torture
victims, and destroy lives. Stelson needs a major, systemwide detox to ward off
co-infections.”

“Got it. Bring on the owl
powder and skunk extract.”

Peaches laughed, “Quit.”

“I’m serious. Whatever helps,
we’ll do it.”

Stelson, as predicted, wasn’t
as receptive to the biowarfare theory, nor the alternative supplements despite
the fact that God used a natural-medicine website to shine the light on his
issue. “You sound like your father,” he called from the bathroom as I lay in
bed.

“You’re right,” I agreed
because I didn’t want to lose him to the politics.

 Instead of focusing on
the questionable origins of Lyme disease, I weighed in on Peaches’
recommendation for detox. “Suppose the Plum Island theory isn’t true. You must
admit that after three weeks of antibiotics, your symptoms haven’t completely
disappeared. A detox would be good for your overall health. Can’t hurt.”

“Depends. I don’t want to be
tied to a toilet,” he complained. “Got too much work to catch up on.”

Stelson walked out of the
bathroom wearing only a towel around his waist. Though he’d lost some muscle
mass while ill, he was still a decent chunk of eye-candy. Took my mind
completely off the subject. “You got any special surprises for me tonight?”

Our intimate time had
resumed. Kinda. Nothing but the basics and only on weekends because he was
pretty much pooped after work.

His complete healing couldn’t
get there fast enough for me. “If I pack your lunch every day, put your pills in
little baggies and label them, would you do the detox then?”

He shrugged. “That’s the only
way it’ll happen. I don’t have time to read labels when I’m rushing between
clients.”

“Fine. Personal lunches it
is.”