These are very special people, in that they are totally radiation-free. Betty is one of the few people in the United States who had a bomb shelter, and she remained in it for a month after Warday, so even though Cleveland got a dusting from the Dakota strikes, she was not affected. Both of her husbands are from the deep South, Mike from Gulfport and Teddy from Savannah, so they are clean too. The chances of a mutant are very small. Betty also owns a geiger counter, which she uses to clean up hot spots in her immediate environment. This is her sixth child, so things are pretty well organized around here.
The whole family is participating. The twins are boiling water, the middle kids minding the youngest, and the oldest daughter, Tabitha, is playing soothing music on her guitar. A good scene, and they get a boy of five pounds eleven ounces, healthy and strong.
All I do is bathe him and get him breathing and give him to Betty and give her a cup of raspberry leaf and borage flower tea to promote lactation. Then I take off to grab some more sleep after making sure that we aren’t going to have any hemorrhage, that nobody’s got fever, and Betty’s blood pressure is good. Betty Cotton—matriarch to a family of six kids and two husbands. I wish I had more as strong and happy as that bunch.
6:50 A.M. I wake up again and eat a bowl of boiled oats and drink some ground ivy and wild mint tea. My office is already full.
First patient is a cancer case who’s been triaged. He comes for counseling, staging of his disease, and visualization therapy. VT works well for certain cancers, especially tumors of the cerebral cortex, but Joe T.’s bone cancer is proving resistant to our best efforts. He is in great pain. I have been prescribing wild lettuce juice rubbed in at pressure points—armpits especially—for its narcotic effect, but the pain is now breaking through even this drug, which is one of the strongest in my pharmacopoeia. I notice that he is coughing. His disease has spread to his lungs or he has acquired a secondary pneumonia. I tell Joe that he probably has at most a couple more months. He will suffer great agony. I recommend that he let me help him to sleep. His wife comes into the treatment room and the three of us agree. I know not to draw these things out. Joe could go to the hospital for euthanasia, but they would probably make him wait another week. Also, they do not do it with the same atmosphere of love and support. Kathy calls the Rosewooders who are available and we go together to the ritual space we have built at the back of the house. This is a large, pleasant room, full of sun from the skylights. There are flowers in vases. We take Joe to the big lounger and he lies back on it. I pour a tincture of henbane in his ear. His wife of twenty years sits beside him. They gaze at one another, talk a little. They cry. The henbane tincture is very powerful. When we see he is beginning to lose consciousness, we begin to sing. We sing “Deep River,” then one of our own songs, “Joy in the Morning.” Sometime during the last song, Joe’s eyes roll back and he coughs three times, quite violently. His wife calls him once, then again, louder. Then she bows her head.
7:45 A.M. I see a child with persistent diarrhea. A manual examination of his abdomen indicates gas. The transverse colon is tender. A rectal feels clear. Still, there aren’t any intestinal bugs going around and he has been eating his usual diet. He isn’t triaged, so I call the hospital and order up a colon study, and refer it to my Project Partnership M.D., Dr. Stanford Gittleson. Sandy will see the boy at three o’clock this afternoon. The sonograms of the child’s colon will be in his hands by then. I say a silent prayer, Goddess grant that all this child needs is a little sumac root and peppermint tea.
7:55 A.M. I see an elderly woman whose symptoms suggest NSD. I prescribe a depurative tea of burdock root and red clover blossom and a cataplasm of comfrey leaf, which we currently have available. One of the coveners takes her into the instruction room to teach her the use of the medicants and give her supplies. Because she is over sixty, I do not charge her. I will wait until the disease progresses a little more before I tell her what she has.
Over the next four hours I see thirty more patients. Then I stop for a lunch of soybean soup and a glass of milk. Afterward I drink a cup of bee balm tea and read the
2:00 P.M. I fill out my daily report for the Relief. Mainly, the English want to know about any contagious diseases. Except for a possible with the little boy I referred to Sandy, I don’t have any.
Unless NSD is contagious. If the English or the Research Group in Chicago know the answer to that question, they certainly aren’t telling us.
I’d like a bath, but there’s no time for that. I wash my hands instead, and then it’s time to meet one of my psychotherapy groups. Since Warday the number of people in therapy has dropped by more than half. I think most of us work so hard we don’t have time to be crazy. And nobody in this group is actually insane, not in the classic sense. There are ten members, five of them with touch neurosis, which is one of the more common current problems. There are many people who have developed a pathological terror of touching things because of the threat of hidden radiation. Two of my male patients suffer from impotence. Again, fear is a strong factor here. I have two women who have recently discovered they are gene-damaged, and one who is trying to cope with being triaged at the age of twenty-six, as a result of drinking strontium 90 in some milk she got last year in Dallas. Everybody is scared of milk because of the way cows concentrate strontium 90, but it has become a vitally important food. Milk, eggs, dairy products, soybeans, corn, and oats are our staples nowadys. Some chicken, but eggs are now too important to justify the slaughter of potential layers.
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
