Miracle Food Cures From The Bible

I seem to have, once again, made an abscess go away without having had to go to a hospital, or lanced it myself, using one of the hypodermic needles that I sometimes collect off the sidewalks of the Quarter and bring home.

They are pretty good for draining those infections, since they can draw as well as inject. Only when the pain in the gums is worse than the stab of the needle could ever be, does the idea of self-lancing become feasible...
This had been my body declaring in no uncertain terms that, no, the 35 years of health that I've enjoyed while avoiding certain foods has not made me invincible against them.

About 10 days before getting sick, I had been straightening out my refrigerator and, noticing a box of a certain seafood broth (meant to be the "stock" in making clam chowder or lobster bisque, perhaps) that had been in there for at least a couple months.

As I am pretty sure that refrigeration retards the multiplication of bacteria but doesn't stop it entirely, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff of the seafood type broth. It smelled very peculiar, maybe like fermented lobster tail, or something; kind of like a linseed oil essence. I decided to toss it out, rather than rely upon boiling it to make it OK to eat. After all, there ain't a whole lot of calories in seafood stock, nor protein, carbs etc. You might get some calcium and maybe some trace minerals from the deep sea, but I think it's role is to just add flavor to -I don't know- crab cakes?

Within a half hour or so of having smelled the likely rancid stuff, my nose started to feel irritated. Soon the back of my throat felt weird and I felt like I might be "coming down" with something over the next few hours. That never came to fruition but made me wonder if people can get sick just from smelling food that has gone bad.

Out of all the foods that rot, it would be interesting to survey people on which ones smell the worst. Chicken would probably place or show, besting beef, in the stench-off, my opinion. Rotten eggs go back generations, striking the fear of metaphorically becoming one into whomever might be "the last one," in various competitive situations.

I think the rotted shellfish and crustaceans might not be as offensive because we might have developed an immunity against sea borne bacteria from our primordial ooze days. 

This past Saturday, after having consumed the protein drink made from soy, yogurt and raw honey, I got a swollen gland in my throat. The throat became scratchy, then there was sneezing and some lung congestion.

Friday's post went semi-viral...why??

Then I ate the Pillsbury Crescents™ rolls, trying to get some hand eczema to flare up. This made me feel miserable enough to cancel busking and stay home instead. And to have an ice cream soda.

That's what started the toothache. Just like the folklore that has been handed down through the generations warns that it will. "But you'll have to have them all pulled out, after the Savoy Truffle," sings George Harrison on the White Album. He's talking about teeth, of course.

I had always assumed the lore referred to the decaying of the tooth's enamel from eating sugary foods then maybe not brushing well enough. Now I think that it is actually the sugar in the blood stream that somehow feeds bacteria from the inside, weakening the body's immune response. 

I was in so much pain that I could measure my heart rate using the throbs of pain in my gums. I had dug into a book I have on "Miracle Food Cures From The Bible," and along with doing Wim Hof's deep breathing method, and doing acupressure at different spots on my head and neck, and soaking a face cloth in hot water and applying it to the side of my face that was swelling, and doing push ups and other exercises, I was able to find a couple bags of chamomile tea -one of the miracle cures from the bible for abscesses, with thyme being another- and stuffed one of them between my cheek and gum where the pain was.

This was somewhat of a leap of faith, trusting something from the bible, I thought. But then I thought that Pharma would always censure information about any cure not involving doctors and pharmacists and insurance companies, etc. and the fact that I had never heard of such cures meant nothing in the real sense. Hell, when I type in the word "kratom" in this editor, Google puts a red squiggly line under it, as if to imply "this is not even a word." I think that is because people use kratom (there's that line again) as a means of getting off of opiates, which must be disturbing news to the pharmaceutical companies, whose CEOs probably give their yachts names such as "The SS Oxycontin."

Love Thy Neighbor

So, my faith in the unerring wisdom of the Lord, and with a tea bag stuffed in my cheek so that I probably looked like a major league baseball player, I stepped out into the hall, to see my neighbor, Wayne emerging from his apartment one door down. He greeted me and I mumbled a reply as best as I could.

Wayne seemed to figure out right away that I had a toothache. Either he thought that the teabag in my cheek was part of an abscess, or that I had stuffed a teabag in my cheek because of one, he piped up and asked: "Bro, you got a toothache?"

"Ymmm, Immmm, gmmhh, fmuommmer, mmmhah"

"Come on, I got some stuff my dentist gave me that I never used. I don't like to take anything for pain, I like to tough it out..."

It's probably easier to "tough it out" after a dentist has done his part to relieve pressure, remove decay, etc. But, when you are in a situation that is only going to get worse until it kills you (which is another "belief" that I take with a grain of salt -pink salt, in the case of a toothache- as probably having originated with the medical association to keep people from using home remedies and other things, instead of letting them solve the problem at 90 dollars per hour.

My neighbor gave me a couple of antibiotic capsules and a small handful of, wait for it......hydro-codeine pills. It was a miracle cure, brought about by my faith in the bible. All I had to do was step outside my apartment with the chamomile tea bag in my cheek and, boom! -just like that- I found comfort.

In one of the anecdotes in the section of the miracle foods book that talked about thyme was the testimony of some herbalist who had affected the cure of some disease in a man, mentioning that he first got him to cut out white sugar and white flour from his diet.

Resist the Pillsbury dough boy; and he will flee from you!

Anyways, the sun is coming up on a beautiful Tuesday. I am on the lookout for a Christmas card that my mom has sent that might have money in it (along with "the thought" that actually counts) as well as a parcel from The Lidgley's of London, who have resurfaced after having weathered the U.K's authoritarian Covid edicts and come through the immunization process unscathed.