Cause and Effect

In my last reflection on Joy's brush with craniosacral therapy, I mused about doing a post on cause and effect. Here 'tis.

It strikes me that there are two sides to cause and effect when it comes to how we evaluate what's going on with Joy's health and development. One has to do with what's going awry; the other has to do with what's going right.

I'm particularly interested today in the "what's going right" side of things.

We're trying different treatments and interventions with Joy all the time, in an elusive journey toward improvement / healing / wholeness.

There's the allopathic medicine side of things, such as the combination of strong medications we've brought to bear on Joy's epilepsy. We carefully track the seizures against the dosing. Funny thing here: the three times that we've almost gotten to a month without any knock-down seizures don't seem to correlate very directly with dosage changes, and yet without the meds we'd be in big trouble. (The one time that we tried to back down the dose of one of the two meds she's currently on, the seizures increased dramatically).

There's the non-traditional medicine side of things, like we tried with the craniosacral therapy, various attempts to bring healing through correcting flows of energy and such.

Then there's the educational realm of interventions that we're tweaking all the time, between three therapists from the school district. The intensive autism therapy I should perhaps put with the medical side of things, but the day-to-day interactions have a lot in common with what we're doing with the school district and we deliberately coordinate the two.

Then there's the fact that Joy continues to grow and mature.

What a complex and fascinating endeavor, trying to facilitate (and evaluate) all this potential growth/healing!

And somewhere, woven between all of this, is faith and mystery and miracle.

Some Boggle-playing friends of mine at church had an amazing experience lately that relates to this.

Their middle-school-aged son dislocated his knee earlier this month, a painful injury. The doctor was able to manipulate the knee back into place with quite a bit of effort, but it wouldn't stay -- it was popping back out with a fingertip's worth of pressure. The family requested the prayers of the congregation as they scheduled their son for surgery.

The day of the surgery arrived, the son was prepped for the procedure and placed under anesthesia, and then... the surgery didn't happen. The surgeon reported that the knee was back in place and healing well, staying put even when he pushed at it. Nothing in the literature suggested the possibility of that course of events.

"Are you religious?" the surgeon asked the parents.

There is much about the causes & effects of healing that is beyond our knowledge. I'm continuing to learn about being open to a range of healing, however it may come.

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Thank you to Barbara at TherExtras for precipitating this post. I hereby submit it for inclusion in her upcoming blog-carnival on healing, scheduled for October 6.

[Additional note: the mom of the lad with the inexplicably-healed knee did give me explicit permission to post the story!]