This afternoon I took a trip out to where I last went for an eye exam. That was eight years ago. My opthamologist had retired, and I hoped to get my records before my coming appointment with a new eye doctor closer to home. And guess what! Not there. It turns out that their medical records are only kept for four years, and “then a big truck comes and takes them  away.”

Oops! Hmmm. Does this mean I should “get my eyes checked” more often? Well, I guess if I can’t see highway signs I do need to. But even that isn’t true this year. I see highway signs just fine. It’s just that my glasses (new lenses of which I have put in the same frames for 15 years) are now so scratched up that I can almost see better with them off!

I’m not all that into getting regular allopathic “check-ups” — and not just for my eyes! The big exception is my teeth: I get my teeth cleaned every four months.

One of my sisters asked me recently if I still “didn’t go to doctors.” That’s right! I told this slightly younger woman (I’m nearly 75) whose husband has had knees and shoulders replaced and who herself has had numerous colonoscopies and I don’t know what else. She continues to be amazed at my audacity.

I wonder what made me so lucky that, early on, my intuition told me to stay away from both microwaves and mammograms. I’ve never had either one. Indeed, I’m just kind of astonished at how, except for two times in the past 15 years, I don’t see allopathic practitioners at all, and for 30 years before that, never!

These two times involved the following: about ten years ago, a recurrent pain that I thought might be appendicitis, but turned out to be misdiagnosed as something terminal, then was misdiagnosed again into something not so “bad” —and then fa ded away. Not worth going into here, but the experience did give me a taste of what others feel when they’ve suddenly been handed a medical death sentence. And guess what: I was glad! The misdiagnosis flipped me, within hours, into a state of serenity that I had never experienced, for three days, until the next appointment which shifted the diagnosis and left me washing my hands, once again, of the medical profession.

Then about four years ago, I broke the wrist of my right hand by tripping on a tree root on a trail in the woods. The hand looked bent in an impossible direction, so much so that I knew I did need to go to the emergency room. Which I did, and was glad, getting the wrist surgically straightened and held in place with some kind of metal strip. Even before that, I had figured that orthopedics and emergency medicine were the two aspects of “modern medicine” that I could get behind.

Meanwhile, whenever I need some kind of physical care, I go to an intuitive healer, and tend towards homeopathics, herbs, and essential oils. Yes, my insurance (Medicare, with no Part B) doesn’t “cover” any of it. But so what? The point is to heal. And, BTW: this insurance business, for me, is new too. Not until Medicare did I even have insurance, except for that trip down the Colorado River in a raft, when to get on the river you had to have insurance. So I took out catastrophic insurance, for those brief three weeks. Otherwise, for over 40 years I’ve paid strict attention to my own bodily health, and how it interacts with my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Furthermore, I am highly aware of the fact that once a physical “dis-ease” develops, it most likely means that what began on a soul level, since it was not addressed there, nor on a mental or emotional level, finally precipitated out into the body, where the message it sends becomes blatant. What part of the body is affected? All symptoms have symbolic parallels with especially emotional states. Thus, it behooves me to pay close attention to subtle changes, so that I can work with imbalances before they “get physical.”

So, paying close attention, plus eating mostly organic food, plenty of sleep, doing what I love in life, and daily physical practices (walking, yoga, chi kung and tai chi) have, at least until this point, kept my physical vehicle in unusually excellent condition — limber, strong, and balanced. Grateful.

BTW: It goes without saying that I have no prescription drugs in my medicine cabinet.

Americans are on more prescription drugs than ever