Artist's Bio          

People I meet now ask me what it was like. So here is a synopsis.

Before the Injury.

I was a single mom. I took training in 1982-3 in Computers and then later in 1992-3 to become a Mental Health Tech. Before 1993 I was an inhome care provider who took care of terminally ill folks in their homes so they didn't have to end their time in a Nursing Home. Before I became licensed I worked under the Good Samaritan Law and my Church sent me to people to help them. I was a person who both participated in and helped run Support Groups for people who were recovering from Childhood Trauma of various sorts. I worked with Domestic Violence issues and helped people get to Safety when there was Safety to be had. I educated Professionals in the Law-enforcement, Medical, Psychological, Ministry and other related fields. I worked with children who were in need of respite care for various issues. I ran a small national Newsletter dealing with extreme Trauma Issues and Recovery from that. I ran an Alzheimers Care Home - in an environment that was just a house instead of an Institution, taking care of up to five patients. I worked with Deliverance Ministry people and educated Christian Counselors and did Inservices for Teachers and other workers in the helping professions.

After the Injury.

I am 43 now. (How I got this old I can't tell you!) I am a disAbled artist. In 1996 I was struck in the head by a patient - I used to be a mental health nurse and was working at the time with a violent client in Oklahoma. He struck three of us in two weeks so it was nothing personal for him. Two of us sustained brain damage. I lost consciousness when struck. I was a single mom, the only family I have is my daughter and I was  her sole support then. I lost everything. So did my daughter lose her mother.

Within a month I had lost my speech and my memory and my abilities to do simple things - like count change, or walk, or think, or feel. For the next three years I suffered from migraines that lasted for days on end. My world narrowed down to an 8 by 10 foot space. I could not hear very well and had to relearn sign language. I was diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, Organic Brain Syndrome, and a few other equally heavy things - COPD among them. I was in a wheelchair then - and I couldn't walk - or string words together or have anything approaching 'normal' for those first few years. I ended up living in 'Disabled Housing' in Tulsa Oklahoma. One step away from a nursing home. With all the attendant horrors that such a place brings. There were people there who stole the little I had left. I had trouble with 'activities of daily living'. That is a non-shocking way of saying I couldn't clean my own house or do my dishes. They sent an aide a couple of times a week to help me. I cannot tell you how many times I literally had to crawl on the floor to places in my own apartment. Such is life as a disabled and defenseless person who isn't cognizant enough to even know their own mind. I was asked to sign away my rights to any further compensation from Work Comp. I complied though not even able to speak well at the time.  My lawyer said he could not help me choose. I have, of course, no recourse now that I have my mind re-established.

I could not wear clothes for it hurt. I could not turn lights on or have sunshine then because it hurt. I stayed mostly in dim and cool places - heat made everything worse. My hands and feet burned and itched unbearably. My skin turned red and shiny inplaces and looked like elephant skin in others. I used to immerse them in buckets of ice water. I used leather straps to tie off my hands and try to make them numb so the agony would stop for a few minutes. My skin welted at the slightest provocation. I could not so much as carry a plastic bag with a loaf of bread in it without my hands swelling and where I held the plastic would leave a welt. I could not take a real shower or get in a tub of water because of the RSD. I learned to stifle the screams and moans of pain as best I could for they made others uncomfortable and angry at me for being sick. I looked like I was seventy years old. I felt two hundred. I lived the word Misery. Thankfully the first few years I was not aware of myself in relationship to the rest of the world and so was not conscious of how awful it was. I knew only pain and the different platueas and landscapes within it. I learned patience - to lie quietly long enough for the pain to pass or at least change in intensity. I learned to breathe carefully so I could survive each subsequent bout of pneumonia. I learned to live in the dark because the light Hurt. Most of all then I grieved not being 'me' or being the same mother to my daughter.

I could not walk for longer than five or ten minutes at a time. Then my body would refuse to cooperate. I remember having to consciously tell my legs to move - they usually refused to cooperate. I had to relearn to speak. I read the same three books over and over again for three years to teach myself to read and understand words again. I burned in a continual agony those first three years. I had no thoughts, and no emotions but a dull misery and a small 'I wonder when it will end?" sensation. "End" to me then meant the kindness of death. By 1999 I had lost half of my body weight within eight months. I threw up every day for no reason I could ever figure out. I mostly stayed away from Doctors for it was too traumatic to try and go there and not be able to speak to even explain what I was experiencing. I had no ego as defense. I had no sense of self at all. I look back and what I feel and sense from that time is an overwhelming sense of animalistic agony caged in a non-functioning body. Spiritually and psychologically I did not exist. I did not have the extra energy then to explain to anyone what I was experiencing. I vaguely remember once making a twelve page list of 'symptoms' for the pain Doctor I was seeing.

I lost my math.

I lost my music and my singing. I couldn't remember the songs.

I lost my ability to define and deal with my emotions.

I lost any defense I had acquired against the cruelties present in everyday life on this planet.

I lost my friends for I no longer had the ability to 'do things' for them and most people viewed me as a non-personal Resource. "Work" is all that people seemed to want from me and once I could not provide that the scanty relationships ended.

I no longer went to Church because Christians had this strange idea that since I was sick I must not be 'right with God'. A ridiculous assumption of course, and when followed to it's logical conclusion means that No-one is 'right with God' for we ALL sicken and die. Even with severe brain damage I could figure that one out. For a while Church came to me by way of the tremendous Kindness of a few people whom I can't even remember their names who brought me Communion in the midst of that.

I had trouble swallowing, and breathing, and moving. I had to learn to take as much 'conscious control' over my supposedly 'involuntary bodily functions' like breathing. I still have to pay pretty close attention to such things but now it is second nature to me. I had to learn to watch where every step was going to be - I still do.

I could not remember most of my life for those first few years. My daughter tells me now I didn't really know who she was. I learned about being disabled - Being one of those whom I had been helping before. I learned about being invisible in this society. I learned that people do Not Want to hear about pain or real illness for it evokes their own issues and makes life too immediate for them. So I learned to silence myself as best I could. I relearned to cry in Silence - a hard lesson from my childhood revisited.

I have experienced most ways a vulnerable human can be attacked.  In 1999, at the end of over a year of throwing up and nausea and drinking liquid lidocaine and being on methadone for the pain (which didn't really work for the pain but took enough of the edge of to keep me from going crazy) I thought I was ready to leave the planet. So I prayed for about two weeks straight.

I asked to be prepared, and "Please God if there is anything I need to do before I am free to leave here let it happen now!" By that time I was living with my daughter in low-income housing. I didn't want to end in the Disabled Housing place so I stayed with her instead.

I spent that night on the kitchen floor wrapped in a blanket, which I eventually took outside and ended up curled in a ball on the back porch, and prayed for Life to release me. During that process it occurred to me that I had never forgiven those who hurt the folks I used to help. I didn't even know why I would need to do such a thing. That last night was when that came to me and so I chose to forgive all that too. I had been in the place of helping others for several years before my injury. As a burden bearer I Really Resented the awful things people did to each other.

I woke the next morning, stiff from the cold. The pain was lessened. I didn't throw up that day. Within a few hours after waking I realized I had been Healed. I had a cane back then. I suddenly didn't need it anymore. I began to think more clearly, and from then forward I have been healing. I began slowly to remember some of my previous life. It is still jumbled and I do not remember clearly or I combine memories of what happened. It was a Blessing not to remember for so long. It has been a further series of miraculous blessings for me to remember and heal from all of this.

It is now 2005. I am still grateful every day that I can actually walk.

Over the last few years, I have re-learned, with the help of the Internet, and learned things I never knew before as well. I woke up from that head injury somehow understanding Quantum Physics.

I have had a few relapses with the RSD - I am still clumsy and have to be careful of my movements. I ended up in excruciating pain last year again because of an injury to my arm.  I am still 'disAbled' according to Social Security. I stayed away from the medical professionals for almost three years till they insisted that I at least go in for a re-evaluation. So I went and told them what my life is like now. They re certified me as disabled.

I still become ill easily - I haven't much of an immune system left. I have done what I could to learn what is healthy and nutritious, etc, and follow all of that. It has been somewhat irritating to the medical professionals I have sought help from because I am already doing on my own most of what they would do to 'treat me'. I had one Doctor tell me he didn't want to go back to College just to learn how to treat my various issues.

In 2001 or 2002 (Can't remember which year) I was living in a basement that had a large growth of toxic mold. I was just learning glass that year as an at home hobby. I was not sufficiently recovered enough to know that mold is a danger to one's health. I spent nine months sleeping six feet from a closet of black stinking mold. I rarely left that place for I am an introvert and a hermit. (INFJ)(HSP).

I was coughing blood, and leaking blood from the strangest places. I ended up in the emergency room a couple of times - then I learned about mold and went into an immediate 'learn all about it' stage which horrified me and left me emotionally wiped out for the time I immersed in learning about it. I went to the College Library and did actual research on it and found the best ways to treat it. There aren't many. It damages the DNA - so I found a proiduct that claims to heal such damage and I take that now.

I found an environmental specialist who helped me too.

Now I live my life in such a way as to minimize the damage from that. I am MCS(Multiple Chemically Sensitive) due to the expsoure to toxic mold. I lost everything i owned Again several times because of the mold. I live my life in such a way now that most contact with other people is minimized. I was Blessed to learn how to make glass flowers. (I always wanted to be a Flower Child while growing up - I guess I made it but not in the way I expected!)(smiles)

I built this site with my limited internet skills and have been doing my best to help this Retreat come into being. I had felt so exhausted and bankrupted by these experiences that I began seeking a Retreat to go to and heal.

I learned that there aren't any I can afford.

Most cost for a few days what I receive from Social Security Disability in a month.

Period.

Unless I want to go "throw myself on the mercy of" or invoke Canon Law of the Catholic Church I am not able to afford Any Place that I have found. (and NO I haven't the least inclination to trust in such a non-existent Mercy) The few times I have tried I have been more stressed than it was worth.

I stopped looking for Spiritual Retreats and began looking for Natural ones. Then I found gatheringlight.com in Oregon. That is where I am leaving for in February of 2005. I can take my glass and do it there. I will do my best to learn how to build and run a small Retreat.  I intend to use every avenue open to me to create a safe and nurturing Place on this planet that I can both Live in and Share with Other People.

So.

Click HERE to go back to Higher Ground Natural Retreat

 

               

         

          

    

(C) Mystik Energy Deborah Johnston 2005

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