In Between

Our family is not at all mainstream. What I mean by that is that we only eat organic foods, use natural cleaners, drive small cars and generally try to live healthily, naturally and simply. Oh yeah, and we fallow a Waldorf-inspired homeschool curriculum. In our community, most mothers breastfeed, have homebirths, avoid "Western" trained doctors in favor of acupuncturist, chiropractors and naturopaths, and don't vaccinate their children.

All of which is wonderful, except we have a child with a major heart defect.

The parents of children with heart defects are about as mainstream as they come with regard to their food, health and consumption choices. When I go to an event for my local support group, most snacks are centered around the nacho/brownie/soda variety, you know, things I would never feed my children even if they weren't allergic to them. So I frequently find myself straddling a line somewhere between the two communities.

People in my natural parenting community think I'm crazy for vaccinating my children. People in the heart community think I'm crazy for not giving the entire family the flu shot. And so it goes.

It is truly fascinating for me how the two communities can be so completely different from each other, and how doctors operating under the western medical paradigm have no knowledge about non-medical interventions, like nutrition and supplements. For example, when Youngest was hospitalized during her latest surgery, I was talking to a Research Fellow who claimed to be looking into how nutrition affects heart children. I immediately asked if they are considering giving heart children probiotics to counteract any negative effects the antibiotics may be having on digestion. This lady had never heard of probiotics. To me it is unfathomable how you can look at what people ingest, without also looking at how it gets processed, and how to optimize digestion and absorption of nutrients. But no dice.

I think this is where faith comes in. I'm not at all religious, but when your child's heart doctor cannot help you with questions on nutrition and supplementation, yet your child shows a hair sample so polluted by heavy metals, you have to take that leap and fly by the seat of your pants. So we have become vaccinating (albeit on a slow schedule), breastfeeding, COQ10 supplementing, probiotic feeding, obsessively handwashing, flu-shot avoiding parents.

No wonder we're so damn busy.