Secrets from Chuckling Goat

by Shann Nix Jones

  I put the little plastic probe into the deepest hole, pull it out and measure it. It’s deeper again. It doesn’t seem to hurt Rich when I put the probe in, or at least if it does, he never shows it. I pack the seaweed into the holes with the probe, and cover it up again. Clean gauze dressing, strapped down with clean tape.

  Relief – we’re finished again for another few hours.

  Rich is getting very ill now. The infection finally seems to be wearing him down. He spends more time in bed.

  I made soap today – lemon and mint, to try to raise my spirits. Even when I’m at my lowest, making the soap, inhaling the beautiful scents of the aromatherapy oils, makes me feel better….

  Soon, I’ll have to change Rich’s bandage again. Life, it seems, is a very heavy business indeed. And yet, when I close my eyes in the middle of milking, emerging from the beating of the milk machine I hear in my head the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth – that final, joyous, overcoming shout. I felt today a sudden sense of space, of speeding over the landscape, of pouring and dipping and shifting, of flying over the sea, of the land rippling under me and out as far as I could see.

  And from that place – that weightless, groundless place – I felt that I was dislocated from time, and that I could see all the lives of all the people living now, and the ones who’ve lived before, all spread out in a marvellous tapestry of forests and streams and oceans. And I was flying over all of it, amazingly free.

  My particular pain, over this particular circumstance, was only one bit of a whole. A larger, much larger, and much more wonderful whole. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the vertigo of coming unstuck from my own particular suffering, and soaring over the whole scintillating landscape, the laughter of amazement coming out of my mouth.

  Faith comes flooding back – that we will come out of this victorious, that although it seems impossible, we will win in the end. The weapons that we have – love, and light, and goat’s milk, and honey and probiotics – will be enough. They will be.

  They must be. They’re all we’ve got.

  26 April 2013

  The nurse came this morning, looked at Rich’s wound, and went pale. She said, very calmly, ‘I think we need to call the doctor.’

  The doctor came out – a young man. He looked at the wound and he too went pale. ‘I haven’t had any experience with something of this magnitude,’ he said, as he quickly repacked his bag. ‘I think you need to contact the surgeon.’

  He grabbed his bag, scurried out of the kitchen, slammed his car door and roared out of the drive. I was left speechless, looking after him. The nurse looked at me apologetically, and then she left as well.

  The surgeon? I was supposed to contact the surgeon?

  I would call the surgeon’s secretary, and she would ask me why I was ringing. I would explain, and there would be a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  Let’s face it, the surgeon has already done his work. He operated. This is a post-operative infection – not something a surgeon can fix by operating again. And anyhow, Rich can’t be readmitted to hospital. They screen you for MRSA before you’re allowed in. And since they know for a fact that he’s infected, they won’t readmit him. He could pass the infection on to other patients, as MRSA is contagious.

  I sat still at the kitchen table for a long time, admitting to myself the very real possibility that Rich might die on my sofa.

  I felt as if I was looking at one of those ancient maps, where unexplored territories are inscribed with the words, ‘Here Be Dragons’. It felt as if that was our location – beyond help, beyond knowledge, beyond expert advice. If the doctors, surgeons and nurses couldn’t help us, who could? Who would advise us?

  I thought about losing Rich, the one great love of my life. I was 41 when we met, with an entire lifetime of mistakes behind me.

  I set my jaw and put my fist down on the table, very gently, so that I wouldn’t disturb Rich. This was not going to be the way my happy ending finished. I’d not come through everything I’d come through, and worked this hard, and travelled halfway round the world to find this man, only to have him die on my sofa. This was not happening – not on my watch. Not while I had one breath left in my body to fight it.

  I thought of my favourite saying, the one that I tell myself when things get very, very dark – which, in my dramatic and somewhat chequered life, they have frequently done! I call it the Toast of the Unrepentant Cowgirl. I came up with it while sitting on a gravestone, back in California, after a very bad day. It’s best accompanied by a shot of straight tequila, and it goes something like this:

  ‘One day, the world will knock me down and I will not get up again. But that day is not today you sons-a-bitches. Not today!’

  Not today.

  I thought again about that combination of essential oils I’d mixed up in the soap room, the one that started out based on ancient research. My own modern variation on an old recipe. Would it work? Would it help? I’d no idea. But it couldn’t hurt. And let’s face it, I didn’t have a lot to lose.

  I put some of the oil mix into a bowl of warm water. Rich was wrapped completely up in the duvet. I got a clean washcloth out of the airing cupboard, took a deep breath, and fixed a smile on my face.

  ‘We’re going to try something different this morning,’ I said.

  Rich was too tired and weak to complain – probably just as well.

  Taking one limb at a time out of his warm cocoon, dipping the washcloth into the oil-scented water and squeezing it dry, I gently washed down his arms and legs. A lovely fragrance spread through the air….

  I wasn’t brave enough to put the oil onto the wound itself – what if it burned? What if it stung him? What if it made it all worse? If it went wrong, it would be all my fault, and I couldn’t cope with that possibility. So on the wound, I decided, I would just put more medical honey dressings.

  As I worked, I thought about the time that we’d gone back to the surgeon for a check-up – on the visit where I believe Rich had become re-infected. The surgeon had given us a bit of information about MRSA. ‘It colonizes all over your body,’ he’d said. ‘Every normal skin cell that you have is replaced with a copy of the MRSA.’

  If that was the case, I thought now, no wonder it’s so hard to clear the infection. You can clear the MRSA out of the wound all you like, but it’ll constantly re-infect itself from the surrounding skin.

  But what if I could knock back the numbers of the MRSA, by using this oil? I’d never kill them all, of course – there would be bacteria under his fingernails, in his hair, everywhere – but if I could just reduce the numbers of the pathogens.

  And then… I suddenly thought about our kefir.

  It’s amazingly powerful, and its greatest power is that it repopulates the gut with good bacteria. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the missing piece of the puzzle: repopulation. It’s no good just killing off the bad bacteria – they’ll always regrow – what we needed to do was put some good bacteria in there, to repopulate.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, right? It’s always going to get filled with something. We needed to have allies in the microbiome. Get the good bacteria to come in and fill up the space, so that the bad bacteria couldn’t take over again.

  Kefir works in the gut that way. Would it work that way on the surface of the skin as well? I’d read that you could put kefir into face masks, and that it helps the skin. And again, I reasoned, it couldn’t hurt.

  Looking down at my semi-conscious husband, I knew that I’d nothing left to lose.

  In the dairy we’d been working on an experimental version of kefir – hoping to develop a product that didn’t rely so heavily on the goat’s milk. As part of the process, we’d been working with coconuts. And since I’d no idea what I was doing – as usual! – we’d started out using coconut milk, instead of coconut water.

  Coconut milk, as it turns out, is high in saturated fat, and isn’t particularly great to drink. Coconut water, on the other hand, is a fan
tastic way to rehydrate your body and has loads of benefits that make it a perfect base for a probiotic drink.

  But while I was working out the difference, we had kefir-ized a batch of coconut milk. It’d raised a heavy layer of fat, like on gravy. Disappointed, I’d tested the liquid underneath the layer of fat, finding it full of bits and not nice to drink. A failure.

  Poking at the layer of congealed oil sitting on top, though, I realized that this was probiotic coconut oil. Coconut oil is good for your skin, in any case. I use it in the soap. It’s also anti-viral. And this particular coconut oil, being probiotic, would be just the thing to repopulate good bacteria on the surface of the skin.

  If any of my theories were right, of course. And if I wasn’t absolutely barking insane. Which, at this point, seemed like a very real possibility.

  I ran downstairs to get the failed-experiment probiotic coconut oil out of the fridge. ‘What are you doing?’ Rich asked, looking up at me blearily when I came back, out of breath but triumphantly clutching my experimental jar.

  ‘Putting coconut kefir on you,’ I said firmly, trying to sound as if I knew what I was doing.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and went back to sleep.

  I rubbed the probiotic coconut oil into as much of Rich’s skin as I could reach – onto his torso, arms and legs, hands and feet and face. Whether it would help or not, who could tell? But at least I felt better, with something to do. And the oil was moisturizing and good for his skin, which had gone very dry during the infection.

  30 April 2013

  Rich has been very dopey, these past few days, fading in and out of an exhausted sleep. I’ve been carrying on with my new-found regimen – dropping the essential oil combination into a bowl of warm water (I used our big ceramic cake mixing bowl) and gently sponging Rich’s limbs down with a clean washcloth dipped into the water. After that, I dry him off and then rub the kefir-ized coconut oil into his skin.

  Then I curl up in bed next to him and we talk, facing each other on the pillow. He’s often very cold, and has the duvet right up around his head, like a hood.

  We’ve talked about crazy things – like the possibility of Rich and Benji making a rocket ship fuelled with kefir. Why not? We’ve talked about how Rich, wrapped in his duvet, is like a giant Daddy Butterfly in his cocoon – why are butterflies always considered to be female, anyhow? And about how someday I’ll have a posh wet room installed where our grubby old bathroom is now, complete with an enormous bath tub, big enough for both of us to fit into, like the one we’d had in France on our honeymoon.

  We’ve talked about how we’ll go on a trip to Sardinia, to see how they keep their goats there, and about how someday we’ll meet the Prince of Wales.

  It all seems about as possible as Rich ever getting up out of bed.

  I’ve kept on with the oil wash and the kefir rub, even though there seems little point; it’s all I have and so I’ve grimly, stubbornly persisted.

  The nurse has been over daily, to change Rich’s dressing. She’s finally given in to my incessant nagging and agreed to use the medical honey dressing. I think she pitied me, and thought it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

  But then, one morning, she looked up at me with a surprised look on her face. I glanced over, rather hopelessly. I’d given up expecting anything in particular.

  ‘I think it’s… better?’ she said cautiously.

  I hurried over to look at the long incision down Rich’s midline that I’d come to know so well. The two wet red holes, like angry mouths that refused to close – one right at his navel, the other a couple of inches higher. They looked – well, smaller. Drier, maybe? Not so angry.

  ‘Do you think so?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a bit smaller today,’ she said, peering closely at the plastic probe and double-checking it against the tiny ruler from the field pack. ‘I’m almost sure of it.’

  ‘Told you,’ said Rich, from the pillow. ‘There never was anything much wrong with me to start with.’

  I punched him on the arm, very, very gently.

  ‘You reckon not?’

  ‘I reckon not,’ he said, and grinned up at me.

  4 May 2013

  Today when the nurse came I was waiting expectantly, and walked her straight into the lounge. Rich was feeling better, and was sitting on the sofa. There was a different feel in the air – lighter, and happier. Something had shifted, I was sure of it.

  The nurse pulled off the long dressing, and we all leaned in for a better look – the nurse and I peering in from either side, Rich looking down from the top. We all drew a breath in at the same time.

  It was better. Definitely, absolutely better. Drier, smaller, lighter. Healing over. Pink, rather than red. Drawing in from the edges, it looked like a different wound.

  I felt a rush of blood to my head so violent that I had to sit down.

  ‘It’s definitely healing, isn’t it?’ I asked the nurse.

  ‘It’s healing,’ she confirmed.

  I left the room and went upstairs into the bedroom, where I burst into tears – of relief, I guess. Or exhaustion. Hard to tell. I cried hard for about two minutes, then blew my nose and took myself back downstairs. The nurse was just packing up.

  ‘I’ve taken another swab, just to be sure,’ she said. ‘We’ll send it off and see what it says.’

  6 May 2013

  We’re still waiting for the swab results, but in the meantime, Rich is rapidly regaining strength and colour. The wound is drying and healing; once on the mend, it has quickly shrunk in size until there’s almost nothing left of it.

  I feel that we’ve really turned the corner, but we’ve been down this road before – thought that it was all healed and then it’d re-infected. I don’t want to get too excited, or too happy, until we know for sure.

  9 May 2013

  Finally, 14 days after I started treating Rich with the oil and the kefir, the nurse turned up again, with a piece of paper in her hand.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Out on his tractor,’ I admitted. The nurse laughed out loud. It was funny, and I laughed with her – after all, how ill could he be, if the nurse who came to treat him couldn’t even find him, because he was out working?

  She shook the paper at me.

  ‘He’s clear. The swab came back negative.’

  I blinked hard a few times, to clear the mist that had suddenly come over my eyes.

  ‘All clear?’

  ‘All clear.’

  She came around the table and enfolded me in a hard hug, the crisp blue of her uniform crinkling against my cheek.

  ‘Well done,’ she said.

  15 June 2013

  Rich continues to improve; he’s gaining flesh and colour. The wound is completely closed, and it remains dry and healed. Hard to believe – still hard to trust – but I’m trusting it more, every day that he stays safe and well.

  27 June 2013

  I wonder, was it really that essential oil combination that did the trick? Together with the probiotic oil? Or was it just a coincidence? How can I find out?

  Glorying in the sight of Rich walking across the farmyard, tall as a tree, striding out the way he used to….

  Later… The question is really starting to nag me now – what really did make Rich better? I have the name of a testing laboratory, MCS Laboratories: the one I used to safety assess my skin cream.

  The technical manager there is named Angus, a lovely man. I phoned him and put my question to him. Was there a way to test the essential oil blend that I’d used on Rich? To find out if it really was what worked?

  Angus assured me that such a test existed, and was fairly straightforward to perform. It would be expensive, he said, but I don’t care – I simply have to know. He talked me through the process of downloading a test request form off the MCS website.

  ‘What’s the oil called?’ he asked. I could hear his pen scratching over the phone as he made notes.

  ‘Umm…’ I considered. Not
Chuckling Goat Oil – that made it sound like something unpleasant secreted by a goat. ‘CG Oil?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Angus said. And so CG Oil is born!

  4 July 2013

  I’ve been waiting anxiously for the results of the test to come back – seems like that’s all I do these days. Not as tense as waiting for Rich’s results to arrive, but pretty darn curious all the same. Like waiting for exam results, to see how you’ve done.

  I’ve phoned Angus repeatedly to check on the process, and I’m sure he must be sick to death of me by now.

  ‘We have to culture the bugs,’ he explained patiently. ‘If you want the oil tested against pathogens, we have to grow the correct pathogens first.’

  6 July 2013

  Finally, the results are here.

  CG Oil is active against MRSA, at a dilution of .05 per cent. Turns out it’s also active against E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter.

  ‘Is that good?’ I asked Angus.

  ‘That’s very good,’ he replied.

  21 July 2013

  Sitting outside with my laptop at the picnic table, enjoying a golden sunrise spilling over the hills. Very quiet, just the rush of the trees and some birdsong.

  Rich is getting better, growing stronger by the day. His wound is completely healed.

  Independent microbiology laboratory report showing that CG Oil is active against MRSA, E. coli, salmonella and Campylobacter.

  And things are getting very interesting. The fact that the CG Oil is made from food grade ingredients and can potentially be eaten, inhaled, and used on skin makes it interesting to the Welsh Assembly government, who are now working with us on developing further applications of the oil. The Food Standards Agency is potentially interested to see how well the oil works against campylobacter. We’re also working with Swansea University to do more advanced testing of both our kefir and the CG Oil.