By Leslie Hsu Oh
Photo credit: http://arowantree.blogspot.com
“Yew, Mom,” I said, peering into the pot. “I think I see a cockroach, some snake skin...” “Les, please don’t look at it. You’re not helping.” We had driven from Southern California to San Francisco to see a Chinese doctor who, after examining X-rays of Mā Ma’s liver cancer, prescribed a soup made up of thirty-two ingredients. One of the largest Chinese pharmacists in Los Angeles prepared three bags for her to boil and drink each day. The house smelled of bitter licorice tinged with herbs for a month before Mā Ma decided she couldn’t drink a drop more. Another Chinese remedy required boiling a long, weed-like grass with a blue duck egg. A friend who was cured of liver cancer gave us the name of an old school teacher who lived about an hour away. I yanked long strands of grass from this man’s yard, filling several plastic bags for Mā Ma. The teacher looked like those Kung Fu masters in old Chinese movies. He tugged on his long stringy beard while he gave us instructions on how to plant them in our yard. Once a month, we drove to a duck farm where I combed rows of eggs for any that reflected blue. The owner of the farm was a kind man with a smile that seemed to disappear on the sides of his face and a bushy beard which shook when he laughed. He wouldn’t take Mā Ma’s money for the eggs, but accepted boxes of fruit and flowers. Then, one day, we started bringing fruit and flowers to a veteran’s hospital, where he lay on a bed looking weaker and smaller every time we visited. We stopped going to the farm after Mā Ma received a phone call. She cried all night long. If it were up to Mā Ma, she would’ve tried traditional medicine only. She had her limits. She wouldn’t pay more than a certain amount of money on non-Western treatments. Drinking urine was out of the question. But her doctors and insurance company had limits that Mā Ma believed ended her life. The insurance company would not pay for anything but Western biomedical treatments. Bà Ba and I forced her to choose one Western treatment, even though we had watched my eighteen-year-old brother die from the same disease after aggressive Western treatments that included a liver transplant. Finally, she selected chemo embolism, but still had doubts. She asked her doctor, “When you inject the alcohol around the tumor, won’t you be pulling out cancer cells into my abdomen through the needle track?” Her doctor answered with annoyance, “Ninety nine percent I guarantee you that it won’t. Try to be a patient, not a doctor.” In the end, she was right. About a year after her diagnosis, she died with numerous cancer cells clustered like grapes along her abdominal cavity. Since Mā Ma’s death in 1994, I’ve dedicated much of my life to making it easier for folks to access traditional medicines. On the Navajo Reservation, a plan I developed in graduate school with Chinle Comprehensive Health Care Facility blossomed into an Office of Native Medicine where patients can see traditional healers and receive ceremonies performed in a hogan and a Native healing room. Alaska Natives can receive free services at Southcentral Foundation’s Traditional Healing Clinic. For non-Natives, most traditional healing services still remain out-of-pocket. Living in Alaska allowed me frequent lunch dates, home visits, and medicinal plant harvesting trips with traditional healers such as the renowned Rita Blumenstein, whom I recently featured in a cover story in First Alaskans Magazine and offered our readers a sneak peak in “Native Traditions of Giving” and “Life Off the Grid.”Rita Blumenstein talks to a plant before she harvests it.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh
Ethan says "thank you" to a petrushki leaf.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh