| Articles about staying healthy written by a registered nurse

Battered is the Wrong Word

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Brie

The word Battered is frivolous and that’s it’s intent. It implies consent and a willingness to accept the action, for both parties. ‘Battered’ as a title certainly was never coined by the victim. It’s part of the dishonest myth constructed by the one giving the beating.

Trees and the shore are battered in a windstorm, something without blame or conscious intent.

An accurate word is ‘Beaten’, she is a ‘beaten woman’. A consequence of being hit is that every part of a woman is beaten, every facet of her life is damaged by this experience.

Who are these Beaten Women? Statistics show that 50% of all relationships are battered and that it crosses all social, economical and ethnic boundaries. This means half the doctors, lawyers, farmers, actors… half of those you pass on the street.

But beaten women stay, why? They stay because the scenario is a 3 part process wherein the partner is:

Nice. The first part of the relationship, the abuser is always nice.
Verbally abusive. In the beginning, a woman makes excuses for this. He’s tired. He’s stressed by work.
Physically abusive. Can be triggered by anything. By something that happened outside of the relationship such as an event during the drive home.
Nice again.

Women do not tell because:

They fear being killed.
They fear for family and friends.
They have no money.
They fear loss of children.
And because the first relationship was nice, they forever believe they have done something to cause this nice partner to become violent toward them.

The term is never applied to men. In news reporting, it’s said ‘he was beaten’. The term battered is used as a global description with no further description of where or with what when describing women and their partners.

It therefore is still accepted as the right of the male in a marriage.

It’s time to call battering by it’s correct term which is beating and to describe where on the body and with what.

The definitive work is from 1980 Battered Women by Lenore Walker…

https://www.amazon.com/Battered-Woman-Lenore-E-Walker/dp/0060907428/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Filed under: ALCOHOL, FAMILY, LIVING TOGETHER, PARENTING, POSITIVE THINKING, STRESS | Comments Off on Battered is the Wrong Word

Battered Women Develop a Unique Skill

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Brie

First of all, the term ‘Battered’ implies consent… one is battered about in a storm because they failed to protect.

Battered Women are Beaten Women. The intent is ‘throwing under the bus’, an act of destruction with far reaching consequences

Very early on, a beaten woman or child will develop a need to prevent the attack. They begin by watching for large signs and eventually for clues. Finally, they perfect a background system which, within split seconds, assesses potential danger. Because these additional skills are a survival mechanism, they become embedded forever into her consciousness.

Every minute and forever, this risk assessment runs in the background, constant and with blinding speed looking for deviance from normal and it can be translated into workforce benefit. In healthcare, it rapidly assesses minute changes in the patient. In software testing it quickly finds problems. As inspector it, with hair standing on end, recognizes risk. The skill eliminates truncated thinking allowing for problem solving until the fundamental base of the problem is achieved.

Filed under: FAMILY, LIVING TOGETHER, POSITIVE THINKING, STRESS | Comments Off on Battered Women Develop a Unique Skill

Freeway Accidents at Night

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Brie

How to avoid a huge freeway driving risk at night in America. From 2AM to 4AM when the bars close freeway driving becomes extremely risky. The risk is being hit, head on at high speed by a car driving the wrong way with it’s lights out.

This is why. Drunk drivers, disoriented and confused, sometimes drive down an off ramp to access the freeway. If they wish to go slowly they will drive in what seems to them to be the inside slow lane but is actually the far left, fastest lane. If they want to drive fast, they will drive in what seems to them to be the outside fast lane but is in actuality our inside slow lane where they drive fast and with lights out. Therefore, the only safe place to drive on the freeway at night is the center lane. Several years ago, in Oregon-Washington there were eleven huge, horrific accidents caused by this with twenty two fatalities in one year. Now, driving the freeways at night in the Pacific Northwest the outside lanes are pretty much empty, everyone, trucks and cars alike use the center lane. There is a fifty-cent fix. Install road spikes at the top of freeway exit ramps. This will quickly flatten all tires on a car driving over them. If emergency vehicles need to access it they can have a switch to disable the spikes.

In England, it’s taboo to drive drunk and taboo is a massive control of behavior. There is no longer anything taboo in America.

The safest time to drive freeways is from 6-8AM, 2-4PM, 6-8PM and 10PM-midnight. These cover the going to work, leaving work hours for Police and Health Care shift workers. Diving to Seattle some time ago, I stopped at a truck accident and everyone else who stopped was part of code teams from various hospitals. It was 4 in the afternoon.

Filed under: STAY HEALTHY, TIPS AND TRICKS | Tagged: accidents, drunk drivers, fatalities, freeway, head-on, night, wrong way | Comments Off on Freeway Accidents at Night

End Hotflashes

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Brie

Hot flashes today are nasty, worse than in our grandmother’s day, because we are losing the vitamins and minerals essential to modify them.

This trick works. Absolutely.

Hot flashes begin at the age your mother and grandmother were when theirs began. Usually in the mid fifties. And they can make you crazy. The body blistering hot, covered with sweat and then, in the next minute, wet and freezing cold. Not once a day. In the beginning maybe 50, 60 times a day and then during the night. Forever.

Low Calcium also causes those massive leg cramps at night. They also happen during pregnancy when calcium is depleted by nourishing the baby’s growth.

The solution is replacing Calcium, Magnesium and Vitamin D, materials we lose through age and living in this modern world, . The normal, routine dose is 1,000 mg Calcium, (Magnesium and Vitamin D are included in correct balance) and 400 Units of Vitamin E every day.

Vitamin D is essential for metabolism of Calcium and it’s lost through chelation from exposure to flourescent lights and it’s absorbtion from sunlight is blocked by Mineral Oil based lotions. on the skin. (Working twelve-hour shifts, five in a row with fragile Calcium and under flourescent lights, I’d have bad leg cramps and exhausting hot flashes and that was a clue. I began researching.) It takes almost a half gallon of milk a day to gain enough Calcium.

Magnesium is the web, the framework if you will, and Calcium is the material that fills the web to form healthy teeth and bones.

Some forms of Calcium are indigestible, Calcium carbonate is chalk and not metabolized. Calcium Citrate is the most easily digestible and is from citrus fruit. CalAbsorb contains Magnesium and Vit. D in the correct balance, is easily digestible and tastes good. No big tablets, it’s a powder to mix with water or juice. You can Google to find sales. Country Life brand Calcium Citrate in capsule form is often on sale in health food stores and internet.

Calcium and Vitamin E have levels so it may take a few days to see results. You will know when your level is reached when the hot flashes are extremely mild and, in some cases, when there is a bit of pale pink spotting every 28 days. Hot flashes never really end, but this routine will make them so mild you’ll not notice them.

If in treatment for cancer, please ask your doctor if you should take these supplements.

Filed under: HOW TO, OLD FASHIONED CURES, STAY HEALTHY, TIPS AND TRICKS | Comments Off on End Hotflashes

Clothes Wet and Smelling Musty?

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Brie

Clothes in the washer wet and musty after forgetting for a week?

Everything ruined? No way. This fixes it perfectly…

Pour at least a quart of white vinegar into the soap dispenser of the washer. Add a very small amount of laundry soap, no more than a spoonful. (any more and the vinegar will make huge foam that leaks out of the washer.) Soaps today are all surfactants and increase surface tension of water, allowing for the top surface of cloth to release anything caught in it. Turn washer on for a few minutes to mix soap, vinegar, water and cloth and then stop the washer. Let it soak for at least an hour.
Finish this wash cycle.
Now add the normal amount of laundry soap and run the same laundry through a normal complete wash cycle and it’s fixed.
Smells wonderful and the musty smell is gone forever.

Filed under: TIPS AND TRICKS | Tagged: clothes musty, remove mold | Comments Off on Clothes Wet and Smelling Musty?

NICU and Divorce

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Brie

Parents of small, sick preemies can, for many reasons, lose each other.

Parents in NICU have a scenario that the normal newborn family, home in 3 days, never has. Because of the construct of the small space for isolette and chair etc., parents come into the unit and the mom absolutely zeros in on the isolette, (Reptilian brain again.). Her body completely fills the space at the isolette and there is almost no way around that. The father sees her back and little else, and again and again, he eventually sits in a chair and reads a book, appearing as uncaring and callous. Sometimes the mother will hand the wrapped baby to dad but it’s still an offering from her, not ownership by him which is a must in a happy partnership.

I would tell this to all the parents of long term little ones and now, fifteen to twenty years later, I’m learning that the majority of our families are still intact so this may be the core problem.

Now for the bad news. The divorce rate in families with long term NICU babies is believed to be 97%. Tulane calls it 100%.

I believe the father as ‘left out’ is the major cause.

There is an easy way around this for fathers and I have seen many do it. They come in alone, often before work for the 6AM bath and feeding. It seems that this experience creates a sustained bonding.

We are enculturated to focus on ourselves with such intensity that everyone else is left out. Intimacy is frightening and humans no longer look each other in the eye. They don’t even look their pets in the eye. It’s too much giving up control and allowing vulnerability. Force yourself to do it. Begin with a child or maybe the cat. Talk to this spirit as independent from yourself. When brave enough, look an adult you love (and trust) in the eyes… it’s a soul to soul experience.

Only the last years in NICU did I begin looking newborns in the eye and talking to them as an adult (and what was looking back at me was very adult… try it.) I’d say to the boys: “You are born onto earth and have parents who are going to give you a great childhood. And you are quite handsome, like your father.” And they smiled!

The notion that newborns smile is gas is complete nonsense, driven by those who have no experience. We in NICU see it all the time and a classic example is the photo called Laughing Premie from Loma Linda.

So, how can parents avoid divorce after NICU:

Choose a baby sitter. Have the person take a CPR class for infants.
Include Dad in the daily care of the baby.
Do not focus completely on the baby. It’s hard on the marriage and hard on the baby.
Make some feedings by bottle so Dad can see the curve of his baby’s cheek, that beautiful corner of the baby’s mouth where tongue, bottle and cheek meet. So he can feel how strong the baby’s pull on the bottle is.
Don’t always hand the baby to Dad, he must be a full partner, not a participant. There’s a difference.
Do not criticize parenting of the other. It turns the critic into everyone’s parent, not a nice place to find yourself.
Once a month, go to a restaurant with booths (so no one can shout and no one can cry) for a family meeting. Bring notes if you want to. The agenda is to be objective and to answer the question: “How’re we doing?”. This way, gripes don’t ooze out and ruin the time at home. Just put it into the notes and save it for the family meeting. Home must be safe for everyone, always.
Plan a date. Once a month, every other week, you each plan something very special that will please the other and make good memories. Not a dinner and movie date. Something like sitting on a dock in morning mists, with a thermos of coffee and breakfast treats. Feeding ducks in a rose garden pond. Visit art galleries on a First Thursday. Sit on a bench and guess what passerby’s do for a living. Visit a toy train store. Go to garage sales or a flea market. It need not cost money. The upshot of this is that you know your mate is thinking of how to please you and you are thinking of your mate in positive, loving terms.
Learn Partner Yoga. Do it with your mate. Do it with your children.
Become romantic. Set up candlelight dinners.
Look into your partner’s eyes.

Filed under: BABIES, FAMILY, LIVING TOGETHER, NICU, PARENTING, POSITIVE THINKING | Tagged: divorce, father left out, intimacy, NICU, Parenting, parents bonding | Comments Off on NICU and Divorce

Causes of Hoarding and How to Prevent It

Posted on October 12, 2013 by Brie

Our reptilian brains are about survival and continuation of the species. These two functions are beyond control and override everything else we do. Scarcity and it’s companion fear, drive us. This is true for every living thing.

We are not all the same. We are molded by our experiences and adapted by our drives.

From childhood, females build the nest and males build the support system. Little girls play with dolls and boys with building. Watch them playing… a boy may drive a plastic truck through the dirt, silently for hours and adults tend to see it as mindless pastime. It’s not and if you watch long enough you will see the purpose. Girls nurture and boys support. The reptilian brain at work, busy, focused and with intense purpose. Serious stuff.

Part of that drive includes amassing a collection of ‘things’. Everyone does it. Sports hero memorabelia for boys, pretty things for girls and most of the time it remains orderly and within control.

Hoarding is when it becomes out of control and the hoarder is not crazy, bad or low class. The hoarder is trying to fix something damaged in childhood.

When a parent throws away or gives away a child’s toys, or more importantly the little things the child brings home, a stick or rock or flower… when they pack up the child’s clothes and some favorite thing is lost forever.

Make a shelf for the child’s very favorite things. Assure him that his shelf is off-limits to everyone but him. When he outgrows his clothes, ask him if there is a favorite he would like to save. Cleaning out the toys? Ask him if there is anything he’s not finished playing with yet. This implies that he will be finished with it eventually, a normal occurrence.

Children will look for things they loved and that have vanished and it continues into old age. A terrible thing to do to someone. They will have a lifetime of feeling unstable, vulnerable and certainly unsafe. Remember that someone else’s things are important to them for reasons we will never know and the repercussions never end.

Adults need to remember also that leaving behind a room of childhood /teenage treasures when they leave home is absolutely not fair and reflects another problem. They never wanted to leave mom and dad’s house and need an excuse to come back . There is a bumper sticker that says ‘They haven’t left home until their stuff is out of the basement.’

So, the hoarder is keeping everything close to home, safely protected around him. It may be a pile of newspapers but something happened to cause that. Maybe someone interrupted a statement he made to arrogantly say: “What is your source of information?”

Be kind to the hoarder. Anything else is just another case of blaming the victim.

Filed under: CHILDREN, Hoarding, LIVING TOGETHER, PARENTING, POSITIVE THINKING, STRESS | Tagged: hoarders, hoarding | Comments Off on Causes of Hoarding and How to Prevent It

Why Women Shop, Why Men Fight and More About Hoarding

Posted on October 12, 2013 by Brie

Why Women Shop:

Girls begin to prepare the nest at about age 5. It probably has a relationship

to estrogen production. For generations a girl was given a ‘Hope Chest’, usually a large cedar lined rectangular box that was put at the foot of her bed. This happened at puberty, around age 12 and was long awaited and expected, a rite of passage if you will. Into this box, she was to put linens and things she had made for her future home. It recognized the reptilian brain drive for reproduction and the required nesting. All species do it!

As a child, she saved and protected and thought about things she liked. When teenage years gave her freedom to move about, she began to shop. The initial shopping was mostly for things to beautify herself in order to attract a mate, originally the primary requirement of the nest. Later she shops for the nest.

70 pairs of shoes and gold faucets is a perversion.

Why Men Fight:

Young boys can play intently with toy trucks and heavy loaders for hours on end, day after day and never tire of it. Or throw basketballs through hoops endlessly and never tire of it. It’s all like a mantra, the precursor to adult jobs that will give him money to support family, his part in the reptilian brain’s nesting drive.

And men fight. From our days in the cave, the male, stronger and testosterone driven was free to patrol and defend the nest.

Stabbing a passerby on the street and destroying villages with bombs is a perversion.

More About Hoarding:

Where the statistical numbers of 3-5% are hoarders. People who, by instinct and conditioning would hoard but fight it every day, are most likely well over 50% of us!

There are many events that initiate hoarding, all of them bullying, unkind behavior.

During childhood, someone threw away the child’s things… sometimes with the child watching and sometimes the child just found it missing.

The child quickly recognizes the threat and begins to keep his possessions close, thereby acting in accordance with his reptilian brain’s demand that he protect himself. He is doing what he must.

And it can initiate as an adult. If a husband says to his wife after she’s made a declarative statement in a social setting; “What is your source of information?”, it will forever launch her into hoarding books, papers, documenting bits of proof and now computer links.

Hoarding is not the psychological disease. Not hoarding is!

Hoarding is the natural reaction, part of the ‘taking good care of myself’ paradigm. Those who do not hoard have been enculturated out of it. If, therefore, hoarding is the norm, throwing things away is the deviance. The trick is to, like everything else in life, use moderation.

When hoarders and would-be hoarders begin to throw things away, a scenario begins. There is a very rapid assessment known to the victim, of how will I be harmed by this, and a flight-or-fight panic begins. When done in old age, it’s preparing for death.

Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist, identified things as ‘little murders’. This is a little murder.

Filed under: FAMILY, Hoarding, LIVING TOGETHER, POSITIVE THINKING, STRESS | Tagged: family, fighting, hoarders, hoarding, hope chest, nesting, shopping | Comments Off on Why Women Shop, Why Men Fight and More About Hoarding

It Only Takes Seconds to Make a Child Autistic.

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Brie

If your child was normal and speaking before the age of three, and suddenly he withdrew and only made sounds… SOMETHING HAPPENED TO HIM.

Something so terrifying, so world shattering, so beyond his comprehension that he could not process it.

And you may not have been in the room.

From birth to two and a half, a child’s main focus, his every thought is to define and understand what is human.

The thing that happened to him is Television. Not the programs, you can control that. It’s the commercials quickly flipping on and off when a toddler walks by…

In the 1990s software appeared that could morph one thing into something else and it began… to accelerate. Commercials where a man in a suit, talking has his head suddenly burst into flame. Another where a man’s head becomes a cat.

The horrified child is thinking: “When will daddy’s head burst into flames?”. ” Will my head be a cat?”, “Is a cat really a person?”

More recently a man in a suit is talking and he rotates where you see the back of his head is gone and in the space is a band playing. Now there are commercials where flames come out of a man’s body, again a man wearing a suit. Another where there are big holes in a person’s body that you can see through.

We must begin talking about this, good sensible talking, sharing information. No name calling, no ‘experts’ saying this idea is wrong. Just common sense. I can tell you the event that made my daughter autistic, not TV but something so terrifying to her that she changed. I can tell you the date and time my son became gray, tachycardic, sweating with terror when he saw Captain Kangaroo’s Grandfather Clock, a clock with the face of a human. His physical reaction happened instantly when the clock began to talk. I turned the TV off but it was too late. He was two and a half and he changed in that minute, he withdrew and lost trust in humanity. He would score in the Autistic Quotient test.

An infant and young child is not just a little adult and he is not a blank slate. He has a brilliant mind involved in learning a language, often two, maybe three. He is problem-solving constantly, defining a question and working out the solution and he is learning how to please the parents (food source), he is figuring out what is human and how the world works.

So we as a society can just wait for studies to be done so experts can tell us what to believe or we can turn the television off and provide a gentle, safe surrounding for young children.

My baby was diagnosed at 11 months and ‘they’ wanted to institutionalize her. I said: “Over my dead body.” and the adventure began. I did nothing for 2 years but work her out of it, and another 2 years to cement her sense of a safe world. She was severely Autistic and stared at lights, made the loud, monotone, no-tears cry that parents of autistic children know and dread, and she would not be touched or even approached. Now she is perfect, beautiful, fully normal, genius mind and fearless.

This was in 1971.. Five years later the book Son Rise by Barry Neil Kaufman came out and they had done pretty much the same thing I had and with the same result.

Just turn television off. There is no way you can moderate what your child sees on the commercials and you cannot risk turning his life and your life into hell forever.

Filed under: AUTISM | Comments Off on It Only Takes Seconds to Make a Child Autistic.

Children’s Ear Infections, the Cause and Cure

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Brie

Don’t let young children blow their noses!

Sinus means cavity and our faces have 4 of them. Two in the forehead and two large ones in the cheekbones close to the nose. When born, these sinus spaces are closed and as the child grows to adulthood, the sinus’ elongate filling with air and the face lengthens.

The Eustachian tube goes from the area behind the nose to the middle ear. In children under 7, the Eustachian tube is short and more horizontal due to the compressed sinus.

Therefore, if the child has stuff running from his nose and he blows, the stuff (schmutz) will be forced into the short Eustachian tube and into the ear where it multiplies, causing pain and bulging the eardrum, often with enough pressure to burst the eardrum. Then the mucosa swells, closing the little hole that drains the ear. (Bacteria need a perfect culture medium to multiply and this dark, moist, warm, sweet apace provides that.)

You can fix it. A marvelous Pediatrician, Dr. Robert Day, taught me this long ago, using nose drops designed to reduce swelling…

Privine is an over the counter nose drop that’s been around for a long time and it instantly reduces swelling.. They’re the only drops that work and hard to find. Amazon has them also. (Nose sprays don’t work for this trick.)

Open and drain the ear canal:

Lay on the the child on the bed with head slightly tilted back over the edge and put one drop into each nostril. Wait a few minutes.
Now, still tipped back, turn the head slightly to one side and put another drop into the nostril on that side. Wait again. He can feel a tiny pop as the sinus tract opens.
Repeat this with the other side.
Sitting up, he will feel the secretions running down the back of the throat.

You can get rid of the schmutz by just wiping the nose but that will make the skin sore. Kid’s instinct is to eat it and this causes no harm (other than being disgusting). Stomach acids will kill the bacteria. Mucous in the stomach is not digested so if there is enough of it, the child may throw it up and that’s fine.

Filed under: BABIES, CHILDBIRTH | Comments Off on Children’s Ear Infections, the Cause and Cure

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