Health and Happiness

My earliest memories as a child was my intense desire to become a nurse and how I felt about nursing.  As a first year nursing student I was observing one day in the operating room.  The surgeon cut a very large nerve and I screamed.  He turned around and shouted at me, ........."what is wrong with you?"  my answer was, "You cut a nerve."  I have never to this day gotten over his response, because he shouted at me that nerves were simply strings that were like the strings that hold packages together.  Even in 1948 there was already enough information about the nervous system  to know that nerves did not represent the strings that hold packages together.  How did I know that he was ignorant?  All of my life I have had a dramatic affinity for the nervous system that in my mind makes us human, besides that I was in nursing school because I had healed my nerves following rheumatic fever. 

One of my favorite people in history has always been "John Newport Langley, PHD"  Dr. Langley was a "nerve" researcher in England and in my estimation he knew the nerves better than any human including the present Doctor's of today.  As a child with rheumatic fever, I learned a lot about my nerves and the pain that was common in the nerves with rheumatic fever.  In childhood my goal was to become a registered nurse when I grew "big."  Even a child can understand that you have to walk to be a nurse, and to walk you have to use the nerves in your legs as well as in the rest of your body and that you need to use your nerves without intense pain.  This information helped me to stay very active throughout my life and the more active I was, the less pain I experienced from my rheumatic fever.   My parents would always tell me that I had to heal myself, because we already had learned that medicine was of no help with the pain from rheumatic fever or with the rheumatic fever itself.

Therefore, even though I was a freshman nursing student when the surgeon screamed at me, I knew that he did not know as much about the nervous system as I knew.  I went through the long nursing program without missing any time despite my pain, and I learned along the way that exercise is probably better for the nerves than it is the muscles, especially when you have rheumatic fever.  Thankfully rheumatic fever is no longer the "scrooge" that it was in my youth because of penicillin, but I have found the information that I learned from living this disease invaluable in my understanding of the Nervous System.  What I taught myself as I was living with rheumatic fever I continue to use today to restore health in other people.