I think it’s because I’m so happy and thankful to be here with Ben and our children and so in love with this house and with this place.

This old house was built for families, not for parents who work and put their kids in school and are only use the house to watch TV and sleep.

It’s small (by American standards; huge by Japanese, lol) but so functional.

I washed dishes this morning by hand and emptied the junk out of the sink into the trash can because there’s no disposal. It’s like all the kitchens I grew up with. It’s so familiar and comforting.

Everywhere I look, inside the house and outside, everything is beautiful. The air is soft and smells like flowers. There are so many trees and greenery everywhere.

For the first time since I moved to America, I feel like I belong where I am right now.

I love Seattle. Thank you for bringing us here, honey.

We started using steroids in February. They helped a little bit at first, but the fluid-filled bumps kept multiplying and getting bigger. The fluid started turning milky-colored instead of clear. Then turning yellowish. The rash kept spreading. His skin started swelling, like it was getting thicker, flaking and peeling, and it was bright red, and covered in those bumps.

Thane had an allergic reaction which gave him diarrhea for a week. He went from being his usual skinny self to skeletal. After a week of diarrhea, he quit urinating or having diarrhea and started vomiting bile over and over and over again. We took him to the ER (with Shelby who was in town for a visit). We waited there for 3 hours, saw the doctor for a minute or two, long enough for him to smile and scribble a prescription for Zofran, an anti-nausea medication. I told him I thought it was an allergic reaction because he’s had reactions like this before and if it were a stomach bug then the whole family should have gotten it by now. The doctor told me to trust my instincts and didn’t even flinch when I told him I was still nursing him. Instead, he told me that was best and to continue nursing. He was a really nice guy for all the 2 minutes we saw of him. When we were discharged, we got a paper that said, “Symptoms: diarrhea and vomiting. Diagnosis: diarrhea and vomiting.” No kidding. We were supposed to come back to the ER if he got more sick. Thane took the Zofran for 3 days till he quit gagging and heaving. Our co-pay for the ER visit was $200. Then insurance refused to cover part of the rest so we got another bill for over $130. Plus whatever the drugs cost. We also took him to a naturopath and NAET practioner nearby who treated him and stopped his allergic reaction. That was only $30 for the co-pay.

Meanwhile, Valor’s skin kept getting worse. This is the same ankle as above a few weeks later.

He spent hours every day and night, crying and scratching. I started carrying him around on my back in a wrap to keep him from scratching all day and because I couldn’t handle him following me around sobbing all day. Around this time I got a kidney infection which became increasingly painful.

Lavender and tea tree oil seemed to give him a little bit of relief but nothing permanent. This is what the backs of both his legs looked like on a good day. I didn’t take pictures on the bad days when his skin was torn open because … I just couldn’t.

The bumps suddenly jumped from his legs to his face and upper body. His face was completely covered in painful pus-filled bumps. His hands and arms and shoulders were, too. He would wake up several times an hour every night, crying and scratching. No matter how much I would bandage him up, he would tear the bandages off his legs, sobbing and scratching. Every morning, we would wake up with blood on the sheets, covers, pillow cases, and his pajamas.

He would tell me over and over again, “My name is not Valor anymore. I can’t be strong. I can’t be brave. It hurts, Mama. It’s bleeding, Mama. I can’t stop crying.” And I would hold him and gulp down my tears, over and over again.

We took him to the Bastyr Center and saw an ND there who specializes in skin disorders. He ordered a blood test which we were supposed to get back in a few days. We didn’t get it back for a week and a half. I asked him three times if he had ever seen anything like this before and if he knew what was wrong and what the bumps were. He was very vage and distant and in a hurry to get out. I asked the two student doctors. They didn’t know what it was or if they did they said nothing about it and just said they would ask the doctor later. Never heard anything back about it.

After many more hours of Google searches and Google image results, Ben and I were very sure he had a staph infection (which was later confirmed by a dermatologist). I cannot understand why he didn’t say anything about it even after I asked him more than once.

Around this time, I went to urgent care for my kidney infection because my back hurt so much I couldn’t walk or sit or lie down without pain. The doctor prescribed a week’s worth of antibiotics which I took for a week. After a week, the pain went way down but the infection didn’t go away.

Then on St Patrick’s Day while we were out house-hunting, Valor went into anaphylactic shock. We took him to a doctor who did a swab on his sores and sent it to the lab. She also prescribed a week’s worth of oral antibiotics and steroids for the ongoing allergic reaction from the anaphylaxis. The drugs did nothing. He kept getting worse. Supposedly, the lab results would be back in 2-3 days. We heard nothing back after 4 days so I called. They said they would get them that day or the next day. Nothing. So the doctor referred us to another dermatologist.

He was in so overwhelmed by being in so much pain day and night he would get panicky and cry about everything. I spent many hours just holding him.

Meanwhile, we took him to an acupuncturist and Chinese herbalist which gave him great relief but it only lasted a few hours. Also, we would have gone completely broke if we took him there every day. We were told that if we took him twice a week, it would take about 3 months for us to see a difference. We were prescribed a non-dairy-based probiotic called inner-eco that we bought at Whole Foods. It’s very bubbly and not unpleasant-tasting.

Then Prester had a bad allergic reaction. We have no idea what it was a reaction to. He started vomiting violently and got covered in bright red hives on his entire body, face, arms, legs, torso. We gave him Benadryl and Zyrtec right away. He still has a a few areas with eczema and has been having diarrhea on and off. And I thought he was going to be allergy-free like Rinah is.

We finally got Valor in to see the dermatologist, a super friendly cheery guy. This is what he said. “This is a bad rash. We call it atopic dermatitis. He looks like he also has a staph infection.” (What? Really? Are you freaking kidding me? A RASH? Wow! I had no idea. A rash? Imagine that!)

Then he prescribed even more steroids and told us to put him in a bleach bath twice a week till our next appointment in a month. He said he also needed those ever-elusive lab test results. After the dermatologist appointment, I played phone tag with the doctor’s receptionist for a while before I got a phone call saying the lab test results showed nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah, right.

By this time, I was so desperate and so exhausted I was on the brink of tears and was fighting just crying all day. I did not know what to do. All these doctor’s visits and drugs were getting very, very expensive, too.

Ben and I had already spent hours and hours for the last few months googling natural and home remedies. I can’t remember how I ended up googling staph and garlic, but I did.

We crushed several heads of fresh, non-irradiated garlic and put it in the bathtub. (Irradiated garlic doesn’t work because irradiation kills the special garlic enzyme that kills all the bad stuff.) I sat in the tub with him for an hour or so and he stayed in there by himself for another hour. He had an organic lollipop and watched Netflix for a bit. When he couldn’t take it anymore from the sheer boredom of sitting by himself and got out, all his sores had burst and the inflammation in his skin was gone. No more redness or swelling anywhere. A couple hours later when he went to bed, all the places that used to have big angry-red bumps were pink and light orange. He slept soundly last night and did not wake up one single time that night scratching or crying.

Here he is the morning after the garlic bath. His sores are all scabbed over and healing instead of swollen and oozing.

I am so thankful to God for garlic. I cannot believe that God has given us an incredibly cheap miracle cure and nobody knew about it or told us about it for all these months. He has been on so many different steroids since December and they did nothing. He just kept getting worse. Two hours with garlic and his infection is gone, inflammation/redness is gone, and no more sobbing and crying all day and scratching and sleeplessness all night.

Garlic did in one night what weeks of steroids and antibiotics failed to do.

It makes me so angry that there is a virtually magical cure that costs almost no money and nobody would tell us about it. But the reason doctors didn’t tell us was precisely because there is no money in it. There is no way for big pharma to patent and synthesize raw garlic. Can you imagine how much money they would make if they did? And doctors can’t prescribe it because it is not approved by the FDA and they would not be protected against malpractice if they told patients about it.

I know there are so many other simple, cheap cures God has provided for us that are far, far more effective than all the drugs the pharmeceutical companies push. I want to learn more about them.

The amazing thing about garlic is that when it kills staph, it completely kills it. It doesn’t kill most of it and create new strains that are resistant to antibiotics necessitating an endless cycle of antibiotics created to combat the increasingly-resistant strains. There is a lot more info about it if you click here.

A few years later my wife and I were having dinner in Tulsa, OK, with Dr. David Mirelman, Chemistry Chair of the Weitzman Institute in Rehovot, Israel, and one of the most prolific garlic research scientist in the world, based on the number of research papers he has had published in peer review journals in the last 20 years.

I had heard about MRSA and was concerned so I said to him, “David, I know crushed raw garlic kills staph because I have used it on myself with excellent results but, tell me, what do we do when staph becomes immune to garlic?” He looked at me and smiled and said clearly, “Bob, staph can not become immune to crushed raw garlic, ever.” I told him I was stunned as I had never heard anyone else say any such thing and I asked him to explain that to me and he did. He told me how pharmaceutical antibiotics work, how staph works and then how garlic kills staph differently than standard antibiotics and now I will pass his explanation on to you.

David explained that penicillin and other pharmaceutical antibiotics work by blocking the chemical bonding sites, the receptors, of the staph and this kills 99.99% of the staph cells. However, not all staph cells have identical receptors. Due to natural mutation, there are a few who are different and the penicillin does not kill them. They survive and breed and become a new strain of staph which it is immune to the original antibiotic. Scientists then invent another antibiotic  which it is effective against 99.99% of it but again there are a few mutations whose receptors are different and they are not killed by the new antibiotic. They on to breed and bring forth the new strain of staph which is immune to both antibiotics causing the pharmaceutical industry to come up with a third antibiotic which will go through the same process as the first two and this never ending cycle perpetuates.

David then said, “Bob, garlic doesn’t work that way. Garlic kills differently.” He said that when garlic is crushed, it forms allicin. If you wait 15 minutes before you use it, even more allicin will have formed. Allicin is interesting because it has both fat-soluble and water-soluble properties. Its fat-solubility allows it to penetrate right through the bi-lipid outer cellular walls of staph and other bacteria like they weren’t even there and get into the interior of the staph cell. Once inside the staph cell, allicin’s mere presence there changes the electrical polarity of the interior of the staph cell causing it to swell up and burst, killing it. He said, “Staph cannot become immune to crushed raw garlic anymore than you or I could become immune to being blown up.” This was coming from an Israeli in October 2001during a time of suicide bombers and 9/11.

I know that God must have a simple cure out there for allergies, too. I know it. I don’t know what it is yet but I will keep looking. When I find it, I’ll tell everyone I can about it.

The pears were sweet enough we didn’t need to use sugar or syrup. I saw recipes for apples and cinnamon but didn’t see any with pears. Next time I’ll try some nutmeg sprinkled on top of the pears.

The kids and I were all so hungry we ate it before I remembered to take a picture. Maybe next time.

6 eggs
1 cup flour
3/4 cup half and half
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 pear peeled and sliced thin

1 tablespoon butter

1. Preheat oven to 450.
2. Put 12-inch cast iron skillet in the oven while pre-heating.
3. Mix the first 4 ingredients except butter (I used my Kitchen-Aid).
4. Take skillet out of oven and coat with butter.
5. Pour batter into the skillet.
6. Lay the pear slices in the batter.
7. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes.
8. Eat.