They Eat Liver Don't They?

I didn't make enough money in my day job in Fredericksburg to afford moving to Albany. My only option to afford the move (other than my credit card) was to get a second job. I applied around but nothing was really happening until a coworker at my day job got a job at a health store. I applied out of desperation and she got me in. In retrospect working that particular job wasn't the wisest decision because I had to do wacky stuff with my day job since the hours at the health store were pretty much only during the business day. Luckily I had a really flexible boss who really helped me out with that.

My boss at the health store was a vibrant woman. She despised vaccines, behavioral drugs and antibiotics. I'm not saying she totally eschewed conventional medicine or that she didn't have massive silicone breast implants. What I am saying she was alternative in her medicine in every way. She knew the supplements to take if you had cancer, high blood pressure, and twitching eyelids. She knew her shit. And she took it upon herself to educate the masses and shake them out of their Pfizer induced comas. I liked her. Before this job I took one crappy multivitamin. I now take a few more. Let me rephrase, I take a crap load of pills a day. Big pills, little pills, red pills, blue bills. The only prescription is my birth control, the rest are vitamins and minerals. And that's thanks to my boss' direct influence.

She taught me that there is something provided by Nature to heal any affliction and that prescriptions should be a last resort. (She wanted me and a fellow young coworker to stop taking birth control and use fertility beads instead. I politely declined.) There were other incredibly knowledgeable women who worked there but my boss attracted people like an ice cream truck in August. I'm a better person because I worked there and I'm also healthier for it. I make more educated decisions about my health and preventative medicine in general. I'm healthier, Mike's healthier and I like to think my children will be healthier. Knowledge is more than power- it's healthfulness.

But sometimes one can learn too much about alternative medical practices. Is there such a thing as learning too much? I may have found out. I read about a new movement for women to save their placentas for consumption. This nutrient rich ORGAN is said to possess hormones that will help a new mother produce more milk and stave off post-partem depression. Ok. I can understand women's concerns about those things. I'm concerned about these things. But cooking the after-birth and having it for lunch? Uh, no thank you. But being sadistic, I read on. Apparently you can cook it, dehydrate it and then make it into pills. That way you don't have to actually eat it like bloody haggis. My lunch moved back down my esophagus at that point in the article. It didn't seem so gross anymore. I would treat it like eating meat. I would ignore the middle bits and just focus on the innocent enough looking final product. You could think of it like growing your own vegetables. Something healthy for you that you grow yourself. The idea is growing on me. But as for the umbilical cord tied into a heart for a keepsake? I'll pass.