Case by Kellie Kirkpatrick
Zen monk, mid-seventies, severe sciatica.The patient has had sciatica on and off for a long time but it has been especially troublesome for a year when I spoke to him in the Spring of 2024. He tends to describe pain on a scale of 1-10. In the mornings it tends to be a “9-10” and in the evenings a “6-7”. Initial remedies temporarily helped the pain, but nothing significant.
He said that the pain goes down to his ankle on the right side and that it is “agonizing” and “excruciating”. From his back all the way down to his feet, he has intense nerve pain. He says it is like muscle pain or an electrical wire. He says, “if I twist or move my hip, it’s like a nerve explodes, the explosion goes all the way down to my feet and my leg gives way”. He has some numbness in the toes from it. The worst position is twisting. “Twisting really aggravates the situation”. Sitting is ok for 15-20 minutes. It feels like someone has been punching that area. “Punching and punching and punching”. The worst time is when he gets up in the morning, especially rising from bed. Once he gets up, he “hobbles around”. Wearing a back brace can be helpful. He uses a walker and has to “hold onto the walls” when he wakes up in the morning for at least an hour, sometimes 1.5 hours. Sometimes he has to crawl on his hands and knees. As time goes on, it progressively gets worse and he can’t walk without a walker and then it starts to spread to the other leg. Sometimes he has to drag his foot “caveman style”. ?! It can be better walking around, but sometimes he cannot walk. “In general, it gets better as the day goes on and I move around”. In the past, I used the rubric: extremity, pain, continued motion, amel.
He also has numbness and a contraction of the fingers in his left hand. He thinks this could be from the cane he used before he needed a walker.
He also has a chronic cough which he says comes from taking care of pigeons. I never hear the cough, although I spend days with him, but he gets an annual CT scan because of it. I thought of chlamydia psittaci for a potential future remedy.
He is a Zen monk. I’ve only known him for a couple years but feel like I know him fairly well because he stayed with me for a week and I drove him around. We stayed overnight with his friends. I had also heard about him and his personality for years.
He is absentminded and a bit in the clouds. He seems to live outside of time and space. If one determines a time to do something, it’s hard to get him to stay on track. He was eating freeze dried shiitake mushrooms by the handful. I pointed out the warning label for high levels of cadmium out of concern for his health. He’s very gentle and sweet. He’s always joking around and using puns. He’s very self-deprecating in a humorous way. When in his presence, there is a feeling of lightness, even when he is in pain. He loves to talk and is very social. Sometimes it is way past the time to leave but he keeps talking. He tells stories from his past and is very funny and entertaining. He starts talking about one thing and gets side-tracked by other stories.
He used to run a Zen Center in the area but was pushed out because the trustees had a very wealthy donor who had a lot of say in the center because of money. Somehow the board decided to sell the building which was in an area with high real estate values. It is unclear where the money went. It was years back, but when he talks about it one can see that he felt quite upset about it, that it was a defining moment in his life. He brings it up a few times. The center only now exists online. He tells me that he had an opportunity to lead a center in another state and it feels like he is hoping that he could still do this. Overall, I have the impression that sometimes he sees only the good sides of people and can be naïve as to others intentions.
For many years he lived half the year in a Japan in a silent monastery there in a small town by the ocean. He worked in the garden and helped in the kitchen. It was very cold there in winter as there was no heat. He developed chilblains and pneumonia and yet he really wants to go back. He really misses the cats there too. They were the only heat he had. He has a big connection to cats. He stopped going to Japan because of covid restrictions on entering the country. He has a lot of people he is emotionally supporting in the area where he now lives. That is secondary now to his extreme pain, with which he can hardly function.
He leads online groups and traveled many times across the country to go to meditation sessions (Sesshins) where he slept in a tent, which was a problem for his back and sciatica. A couple of times, he had to break out of the sessions to go to the doctor because of the pain. In the second visit that he did this on, when he came back, they greeted him with all his stuff packed and told him to leave. He was very hurt. He is a senior practitioner and the teacher was an elderly head teacher from Japan and had wanted to meet him later. Six months later, when his sciatica is no longer a problem, his application for the retreat is refused.
In the past, he worked as a social worker with addicts. To release the stress from the work, he would go scuba diving alone in an isolated place. He also used to hike alone and sleep in the open, under the stars. He moved to where he currently lives to care for his elderly mother and stayed there afterwards.
He loves animals and takes in a rescue cat that was so timid it was hard to know where she was, but he gently coaxed her and now they are very bonded.
He depends on wealthy donors to live. He told me a year before that he has enough money to live off of for three years and no income after that. He was driving a car from 1997 until just now. It kept breaking down and he spent hours in the parking lot of his building doing car repairs. Then he was no longer able to buy the spare parts he needed as they were so outdated. A donor just bought him a new car.
He is a romantic. He tells stories of old girlfriends from long ago. There was one, in his twenties that he dated for two years had intended to marry. He went on a one-week meditation retreat and when he returned, she and his best friend had hooked up and later married. He regrets not telling her his intensions. She had not known that he was serious. It was a big shock for him. Not long after, he became a monk.
There was no plan for his future and no security, but recently his old girlfriend reappeared and said he can live in her spacious house in nature by a river if he ever needs a place. She is a nurse and the two of us look after his health.
He told me one funny story of when he was young. His girlfriend’s father said to him, what are you planning on for your future? He said, “I’m planning to go on welfare”.
I asked him why he said it and he just laughed and said “I don’t know”. “I thought I’d try being on welfare once”. This is a bit incongruous with his very hard-working nature.
As a child he had a condition where his knees didn’t track correctly. He needed braces on his legs, but his parents didn’t have a lot of money and his younger sister had a serious heart condition so the focus was on her. There were frequently ambulances coming to the house. She died at age 15. He had given her CPR to no avail. His legs suffer now also because of this tracking issue of his knees which also bothers his back.
He has a “major fear of not being useful”. He thinks of all the suffering in the world. The fear is that people will suffer more. “I could just lay down and take a break, but my heart can’t do that”. “It’s like being in a guided missile. You have a certain course programmed into your guidance system and it’s hard to change that”. He reads the paper to find disasters that have happened so he can pray for the souls of the endless victims.
He calls himself a perfectionist. Even at the height of his pain, his biggest stress is about not being able to be there for others. Before this acute episode, he would take phone calls at all times of the night from people in different parts of the world to counsel them in a time of crisis. He was not getting enough sleep because of it. He is often at the bedsides of the dying and checking in on their families. He is often doing prayers and ceremonies for the sick, dying or deceased. He takes on way more than he can handle. He takes care of others, but not himself. I had previously noted in his file that what he wants to do is not “humanly” possible. I had prescribed both lac humanum and carc, both human remedies.
“When I was a kid, I had a nightmare of demons from hell pulling me down.
When a little older, I had a vision of squat beings with a hot iron floor. They were chanting these chants in this hot place and beckoning me to come back home. They were kind of hell beings”.
The first remedy I gave him was conium. It completely took away the pain for 2 weeks but when he took another dose all the pain came back full force. I was not sure if the case was ruined because of taking a dose when it was not needed, so I tried a low potency daily. That helped a little but nothing significant.
I found the taxus after he called me from an ambulance because of having stroke-like symptoms. It turned out to be a reaction from being prescribed two incompatible medications.
Thoughts: He’s not a lanthanide, because he does whatever the doctor recommends and more. He had a rash and his nurse friend told him it was not scabies but he still slathered the scabies cream on it, “just in case”. He’s quite concerned about me because I don't have the covid vx. He receives all recommended vaccinations and boosters.
It’s unclear, but it seems had a few TIAs a year or two ago.
Nine months after he started the taxus, his nurse friend tells me that he cannot sleep all night due to itching everywhere. I find this odd since he is doing so well otherwise and research one of the two meds he is on. It seems this is a common side effect of
Diclofenac, an NSAID, so he discontinues.
Previous prescriptions: remedies: con., harp., mand, lac-h., carc.
Both harp. and mand. had some of the modalities as well as devil themes. Mand. is in the rubric: help, people, wants to. I felt really sure of lac-h. and carc. to no avail. They also fit the perfectionism and physical symptoms.
He kept telling me more as time went on.
Analysis:
Taxus baccata is found through his dreams
Dreams childhood home, dreams devil/demon; dreams train; dreams journey. Other rubrics fit, like help others, desire to; jesting.
Stage 12: overdoing, perfectionist
Phase 6: pushed out; girlfriend dumped him.
Stage 1: single, naive
Comment:One interesting thing about this case for me was how slowly the progress went. He was afraid of high potencies because of experiences 50 years before, so I started off with 12c and slowly worked up to 10M. it was a six-month process. Even nine months later, there is continuing amelioration. It’s clear that it was the remedy helping, because he would have an immediate positive response to a raise in potency or after a dose or extra dose. Many years before, he had had sciatica on the left for which he had surgery. Later, it moved to the right. On the remedy, it retraced its steps and went back to the left before mostly resolving. He does not seem to learn his lesson of the need to take care of himself, which is perhaps why the sciatica doesn’t resolve 100%. It also could be related to so much allopathic intervention or perhaps also because of the congenital malformation of his legs. He can sometimes still have a pain level of 2-3 in the morning when he wakes but it’s short lived and he no longer needs to hold onto the walls or crawl and he is not in pain in the evenings. Six months after starting the remedy, he is able to fly to Costa Rico. His back and leg acted up a little, but an extra dose of the remedy helped as it always seems to. His nurse friend had thought that he would not be able to live independently in his condition, but now she is no longer concerned about it. It’s been nine months and he still takes the remedy every two weeks. I recently took a walk with him in the woods. He walks with sticks and can go at a considerable speed for fifty minutes before he needs to take a break. The numbness of his left hand and the contraction of his fingers is significantly improved as well, so his ability to continue to drive is no longer in question. It’s hard to know if the hand improvement is also due to physical therapy. The physical therapy was not helpful for the sciatica.