Arnica
When I spotted Val in the crowd at the wedding, my stomach lurched as quickly as it leapt. It leapt with the lightness of spotting a kindred spirit in a sea of others and lurched when I registered how little space this giant of a personality now took up.
Val was sick and she didn’t know what with. The doctors had all shrugged. Her family watched on with concern, not knowing how to help. She asked questions, rattled cages, made appointments. Tried eating this and not eating that. But she couldn’t keep food down and she was fading away and no one knew why.
As she talked to me, her dark brown eyes glittered with intelligence and mischievousness, like they always did, while mine welled up with tears of futility as I heard how she would describe her symptoms to physicians and how their eyes would glaze over dismissively when they heard the words: my stomach hurts.
Hysteria is derived from the Greek word hystera, which means uterus. Figures.
I’m not sure that any other three words in the history of the English language, once uttered by a woman in a medical establishment, will result in a door being shut in her face with such firmness and velocity. Very rarely is this symptom properly explored. Very often it is attributed to (then) hysteria or melancholy or (now) anxiety or depression. Maybe fibromyalgia or gluten intolerance if they’re feeling generous.
I felt overwhelmed with sadness for my friend. Seeing her resignation to her fate. Her acceptance of her pain and the downward spiral her body was beholden to. This warrior of a woman…champion for the underdog, wife, mother of three littles, cancer survivor, light finder, free thinker, adventure seeker…reduced to just another woman looking for atten…I mean with a stomach ache.
I was sad. And then I was mad. I wanted to fix it for her. I wanted to make a doctor take her seriously. I wanted to become a doctor and take her seriously and fix her myself.
I felt powerless. I felt frustrated by her vulnerability. Suddenly I was irrationally and unfairly angry at all men. But mostly I was upset by my own lack of knowledge.
A lead, at last
The next day, in a mostly unrelated conversation, my sister-in-law casually mentioned an arnica lotion she’d used with great success on a swollen ankle she’d turned before the wedding. I remarked that I’d heard of arnica, but I knew it as an unassuming yellow wildflower. Not as a lotion for turned ankles. And she said, “Oh yes, it’s a cream made from the arnica flower. Didn’t you have the lotion growing up? It works miracles on bruises and sprains. My mother always had arnica lotion on hand.”
I wondered what else our mothers knew. Or our mother’s mothers. But that I didn’t.
I felt drawn to the plant and I wondered if arnica could help Val? So, I picked up that wisping silvery thread of intuition and I followed it long and far.
Online, I learned that (for those in the know) arnica is used on your skin to help alleviate pain from bruises, sprains, muscle aches, wounds, inflammation from insect bites, and swelling from broken bones. I learned that you shouldn’t eat or drink arnica, nor should you apply it to open wounds.
A wise woman
When I returned to my home in the Similkameen Valley, I reached out to our local librarian who is wise in the ways of plants and herbs. She’d given me a sour cherry sapling from her fabulously wild garden a few weeks prior. The sour cherry never did take hold on my land, but the variety of herbs and plants she grew among her tangles of wildflowers and shady woodlands did take hold in my mind.
I texted her about Val and how I was drawn to the arnica flower on her behalf. I asked if she thought I might be on the right track and if she had any knowledge she might share.
She told me intuitive attraction to a plant can be a very powerful medicine and that she was planning an excursion to gather arnica from up in the mountains that flank the north end of our village. I marveled at the serendipity of it all and then asked if she’d have me along. She said yes.
And so we trudged up Fairview Mountain and came down bug bitten, scraped and beaming. Baskets brimming with cheerful arnica blossoms. She suggested I turn it into a liniment. So I googled what a liniment was and stopped by the local pharmacy to buy rubbing alcohol. I gently packed my arnica blossoms in a mason jar, topped them up with alcohol, and then added some comfrey, yarrow and witch hazel for good measure. So it would really, really help heal Val.
Patience, patience
Six weeks later, my liniment was finished macerating. Two weeks after that, I finally got around to bottling it, labelling it (very, very clearly not to drink it) and mailing it over the border to Val, who lives in the United States.
Four weeks on and there is no sign of the arnica liniment arriving to help save Val. It has either been confiscated and destroyed or continues to be mulled over by some uninterested customs office worker, somewhere. Like Val, it exists in the in-between for now.
And maybe that’s ok. Because Val has finally found a specialist who is taking her seriously, and she is on a waitlist to receive the medical attention she so desperately requires. In truth, I knew my arnica liniment wouldn’t be the silver bullet that would help save Val. But it did help me cope with news of her illness. It helped by giving me direction. Purpose. A sense of control over some small thing. It helped me learn more about plant medicine. And when my husband rolled his eyes and questioned the purpose of pursuing such a futile task, my flash of anger prompted introspection.
Why was I going to such trouble?
It might have started with a scramble up a mountain one day in June, looking for arnica with the librarian. But my efforts escalated quickly. Guided by wisdom from mentors and from old tattered herbal remedy books I picked up in thrift stores and garage sales, July and August found me rummaging in ivy-and-thistle-filled ditches looking for elderberries, sumac and goldenrod. I spent hours sourcing seeds, saplings, wildflowers, herbs and medicinal plants that captured my imagination and held a promise of relief for friends and loved ones suffering from life’s usual aches and pains: arthritis, gout, scrapes, colds, eczema.
I’ve faithfully nipped the head off every calendula blossom in my garden for months and packed my spare room to the rafters with drying strawberry, mullein and raspberry leaves, yarrow, peppermint, hyssop, horehound, wormwood, comfrey and echinacea. It’s September now and I have no canning jars left to can actual food with…all now packed and carefully labelled with dried herbs, infused oils, tinctures, oxymel, vinegars and salves.
So, to answer the question of why.
Well, it started as a desire to provide some comfort for a friend. To show her I care that her body feels like a prison cell and that there is an ally on the outside trying to help while she waits on the big guns in the medical industry to fix the problem.
But the truth is, in taking up Val’s cause, I unwittingly ignited a fire within myself. And now the reason why I am going to such trouble to learn about plant medicine is because I want to. I want to know more about what’s growing around me and how it was used for thousands of years to keep our ancestors and their tribes and families healthy and able-bodied. How they learned by trial and observation to take care of one another, and empowered each other to do the same, sharing healing plants and herbs. The people’s medicine.
So that next time a loved one comes to me and says: “My daily ability to function keeps dropping and anywhere I turn is fruitless,” I can say: “Maybe I can help.”
Arnica Liniment
2 cups fresh arnica blossoms
1 cup fresh yarrow blossoms
½ cup comfrey leaves
500 ml rubbing alcohol (70%)
100 ml witch hazel
Gather the comfrey leaves, arnica and yarrow blossoms in June when they are blooming (or order them dried from Mountain Rose Herbs.)
Chop them up and place in a quart jar. Pour in the alcohol and witch hazel and stir together.
Let sit in a dark place for 6 to 8 weeks, shaking the jar when you think of it.
Strain the plants from the liquid, then bottle.
Apply topically over unbroken skin with a cotton ball or spritz with a spray bottle.
Uses: Excellent for helping to heal bruises, sprains, muscle aches, wounds, joint pain, inflammation from insect bites, and reduces swelling from broken bones.
Caution: Don’t drink. Don’t apply to open wounds. Also, may lead to an insatiable curiosity about other plant medicine.
About the author
Jessica Johnson runs a small, traditional Bed and Breakfast from a vineyard in the Similkameen Valley of British Columbia, Canada.
Raised to be a strong, independent career woman but now a vigneron’s wife and stay-at-home mom, she is clumsily yet happily establishing roots in her new landscape.
An expert at almost nothing but curious about nearly everything, Jessica writes about her adventures in rural B.C. where she raises her son and other wild creatures and is learning the old ways to preserve and grow food.
