Words That Heal

I guess I’ve known for a while that there is a connection between a person’s ability to communicate and a person’s ability to heal.

But that was underlined for me last weekend while I cradled the seventeen month emperor, while perched on a hospital bed, listening to a doctor puzzling over why the Epinephrine, steroids and Benadryl cocktail was failing to slow my son’s severe allergic reaction.

His face was puffy. His chubby baby skin was developing more red spirals of rash by the minute. And he was puking repeatedly in some sort of biolgoical attempt to rid his body of an unknown toxin.

There aren’t too many words a mom wants to hear LESS than We’re going to bring in a breathing machine, your son’s throat is constricting.

An hour later, though, miraculously, the doctor’s super human vision figured out the cause of the problem: a microscopic bee stinger embedded under my son’s wrist (which had probably been there for seven or eight hours by then).

Within an hour, Justus was clear-skinned, alert, breathing normally and ready to get locked in a battle of wills over whether or not he should be allowed to play in the hospital toilet.

Watching the almost instant-recovery, all I could think was Man, if only he’d been old enough to TELL us he’d been stung. He could’ve started to heal so much earlier. He would’ve been able to avoid a lot of these side effects.

But in the end, it was a good reminder: at least infants have a built-in excuse for not communicating their pains. We adults have words to communicate the hurts we hold inside of us–disappointments, broken trusts, being misunderstood, failing faith in the people around us. And yet so many times, we put ourselves through that same sort of torture…letting the hurts and fears and our quiet paranoias impede the way we function for days, months, even YEARS to come.

It made me wonder how many of us could really use a sharp eyed observer to notice that we’ve almost unknowingly let ourselves be poisoned by a toxin; to cast vision to us that we can be more well than we are.

Dreamers, visionaries, influencers… we will all accomplish more, for longer periods of time, if we remember that our ability to heal is often connnected to our ability to communicate. Who are you communicating with?