Through the Glass by Shannon Moroney

Author:Shannon Moroney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ALL THE BROKEN PIECES

When I lived in Ecuador in my early twenties, there were wise women you could go to for advice about what ailed you. They didn’t have titles—they had strands of gold beads around their necks and coral bracelets wrapped around their forearms from wrist to elbow. The bigger the size and quantity of the beads, the older, wiser, and more respected the woman was. Maybe she had delivered a lot of babies, healed wounds of the flesh or spirit, or maybe she had just lived a long time. Whatever her experience, the important thing was that she was someone you could trust when things were uncertain. You did whatever she prescribed because you wanted to feel better, even if it broke from convention and scared you breathless—especially if it scared you, because that seemed to mean it would work.

I discovered this truth when I sprained my ankle running down the mountainside toward the casa comunal, where the one telephone in the community was located. My friend Rachael was there with me. She and our neighbor Rosa rushed to my rescue, helping me hobble home in pain on an already swelling foot. I lay on the bed with my foot elevated while Rachael consulted a popular reference book called Where There Is No Doctor and Rosa rushed off to retrieve Nicolasa, the community’s wise woman. Rachael read the instructions aloud, which included icing the joint (we didn’t have refrigeration), getting an X-ray (the hospital a bumpy two-hour drive away in the back of a pickup truck), and giving the sprain a month to heal. The underscored advice was this: “Never rub or massage a sprain or broken bone. It does no good and can do more harm.”

Soon, Rosa arrived with Nicolasa, who spoke only Quichua. She looked at me, smiled, and then set about examining my injury. Before I could protest, she began an intense and excruciating massage of my ankle. Tears sprang to my eyes and Rachael and I locked fearful glances. Never rub or massage a sprain or broken bone. I held back my urge to protest out of politeness and respect. Much to my surprise, by the end of the massage, I felt better. The next morning, the swelling had gone down and the pain had subsided. Nicolasa returned in the afternoon to give me another, slightly less agonizing massage. When that was over, I was up and about as though nothing had happened. Wordlessly, Rachael wedged Where There Is No Doctor under one end of an unstable shelf. We’d been looking for something exactly that thickness to balance it. What I gained from the experience was an appreciation for alternative treatments, and an understanding that in times of desperation it’s best to have an open mind about the healing process.

Now, years later, I found myself on terrain even more foreign than rural Ecuador, feeling far more desperate to heal than I ever did about that sprained ankle. The aid of medication, other than for sleep, was an option I shelved for the time being.

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