Tassili Liberty:
Recovering Barry Eubanks
He wheels and reels casually around, a picture of grace in graceless motion like a lot of people our age are. Indeed, as we age we do, like children, tend to adopt more comfortable postures and movements; we become, at least in our motions and forms - more relaxed and "monkey like" it seems. A joy and a privelege but the real joy here is that he moves at all; because the first time I saw Barry Eubanks he couldn't even walk upright, let alone swing around and down from the porch pole as he occiasionally does these days. Such simple pleasures and freedoms that we so obliviously take for granted.
It was nearly two years ago now, and I had been going down to town here and there with Leslie "Wild Child" Wagner - local artist and erstwhile Clayton College student. She has a little shop on the highway there in Yellville next to the "Front Porch" Restraunt, and I am not the only person who sits out at the pic-nic table some days just loitering a bit.
So on this particular day I'm sitting out by the road as I recall, and Leslie says "Hey you gotta talk to this guy!" I mean she wasn't alarmed, she was actually half laughing because she herself was already a "mycophile" and heading towards the "cognoscenti" grade regarding medicine and mushrooms. So when I see this guy walking, I get up and go towards him because he's obviously in distress. He was stooped half over, cradeling his guts tenderly and had that face like when somebody is real nauseous and then you punch them hard in the stomach? I remember thinking "Ok, this could be serious right now." and started going through my mental routine and powering up the virtual drive just in case. Never mistake children; livers are dangerous, can be treacherous, and no form of hepatic disorder is to be handled by the support crew.
His chief complaints were PAIN and high blood sugar. When most people have a high blood sugar that means like 150 - Barrys were 400-600 and his eyesight was severly impaired. So we started talking and I come to this conclusion: This is pretty serious right now, but there isn't any real reason necessarily for it to be. He was in remarkable shape for the shape he was in, but that could've collapsed like a house of cards any second (done there/seen that) and in younger days I probably wouldv'e been in more distress myself ("Ringers! EK! Lab!"....just like the "TV babies"...) but I've been in long enough to see a few "inexsplicable phenomenons" and "bullhead miracles" and I try to resist the panic even when there's a good reason.
I propose and explain that we start simple and get the 400-600 blood sugar under control and begin whacking away at the hepatic toxin and viral load, and that this should hold off death and offer some pretty quick relief. We talked some more about how the recovery stages would be and what to expect, and he made arrangements to pick up his protocol and headed on his way. I felt sure he would try, because anything would have had to have been better than the way he felt that day. I bet I could have said "Oh, well lay down on the road here and I'll just cut that bad boy right out" and he would've said "Ok". But of course that isn't what actually happened.
What actually happened is the man picked up his protocol and did the whole thing just like I said. Three days later he became a more happy and hopeful believer, because the pain did stop and the sugar started to go down. I was pickled tink, and Barry had done the entire thing with his own hands, he had been pleased with his results and was almost entirely independent. Whew! Let me stop a minute before I swoon, because here be doctor paradise; the hoped for goal with all patients is comfort, confidence, independence and self esteem.
What actually happened is he got to feeling so good he captured the "Wild Child", moved into better digs and bought a four wheeler! He is still awed that such simple things as the turkey tails, wild reishi and other things that lay at our feet have so much vital power. He's in the woods as much as ever now but his eyes catch many more things, and the garden has become much larger. He makes up a little ginseng, but outdid me by making his with pure moonshine. You just cannot get better art or medicine than Barry-strong ginseng in a moonshine extract!
What actually happened was as fresh and new as it is every single time we are priveleged to witness it; Fascination, liberation and renewal in the simple fundamentals of what we are really made of and what we really are. Because there's more to every person and condition than the sum of the symptoms, and more within our grasp than we know all the time. Barry wasn't out that day seeking help, cures or miracles - he was out that day because he couldn't stand to just sit around, suffer and rot. He would rather be outdoors and suffer "on the hoof" and if in the end it was his sense of vitality that put him in vitality's way, I guess the universe counted it for hutzpah and threw him another card.
He found a large cluster of reishi the other day, more than I ever have in the wild. At least a pound of well formed fruits. I'm totaly green! He also has bags of coreolus drying in colanders in his living room, and a bag of maitake under the table. They have a natural culture ginseng patch going and just put the roof on thier new greenhouse. Not bad for a guy who was supposed to already have been gone for years by now!
Did I "save" Barry as much as Barry saved himself? I never offered him anything that wasn't already his, or performed and advanced technique that couldn't be done in a kitchen? He, like all of us to some extent, had just been sidetracked by the blur of post modern life and the antics of industrial medicine. While he in many ways really is a "model patient" he is also a bulldozer, and since diabetes and hepatitis couldn't kill him, he has since tried to accomplish it by stepping down the ankle breaker hole, rolling down the mountain under the four wheeler, amputating the tip of his thumb with the skill saw (but he saved it in a jar - I think he means to make a pendant of it someday...) and...what I'm glad of is that he has the energy and urge for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - and is able to find some for himself. He no longer has to live by sheer will, and in fact endured stages and phases I never mentioned because it wasn't necessary - and may have actually been disabling for an independant and "common sense" kind of person.
Now I'm waiting for the lab to tell me that my "terminal" liver patient has normal liver function. They don't have to tell me - but I want them to, and I hate waiting at all, any time for any thing. (But that's just me, and it is the nature of a Karl to go...)
I don't need them to tell me because I watch him walk, eat, smoke too many ciggarettes, run the four wheeler, go fishing half the night and a dozen other things that he hadn't done in awhile.
He said to me not too long ago "You know, when you gave me that stuff and told me what to do, I laughed at you." (heh-heh) Now, he gives it to other people and tells them what to do. He also donates the on-call cell phone we have been using for the clinic.
Psilocybinly speaking, Barry is one of our country's original "Mushroom Children" and he has often picked them freely in the open fields but confirms "You don't see them anymore like you used to." He epitomises natural liberty and that quality that the greeks used to call "Kalos" or "One born in that natural fitness which is beauty". Because there was a less jaded time, when we just "didn't know any better" - but seemed nonetheless better off! There was a more recent "golden age" of evolution and thought in our country and world spawned and carried out by people who were at that golden age, at that golden time. Barry is one of those people, and it takes strength to live with that kind of freedom, but what it really requires is to never give up that natural virtue which is where our strength really comes from. When he was a boy, he told me he kept a shoebox full of sassafrass roots and was always making tea out of them. Certainly one his blessings lately has been to find his pleasant remedy once again - right there in the same grass that he grew up out of.
Yes, psilocybes for interferon, and psilocybes for virus, and psilocybes for the respiratory, vascular and endocrine system and more but - be impressed with the simple things themselves, and how they seem so custom made for us. Don't let what doctors (like me!) do beguile or overly impress you or you may forget the original basis, the original children and even more importantly the original child. If you forget that, you will have forgotten everything - because what's the use of a liver, that it have no red blood in it? Why preserve the eye, if it see only darkness? What is the use of us at all if we recall no innocent, pure or higher thing? Do we gravitate toward or covet those things because they are different than us and we lack them, or do we do so because we recognise them intuitively as being innately written into us? Another part of what we are made of. Just turn the magnets around, and you will find that they stick together instead of pushing apart.
Sure, we'll be glad to rinse out your lungs, align your spine, clean your organs and philter your blood, but you'll just be the "worthless walking dead" if you don't air out your head, open your heart and let some fresh air in through the windows of your soul. You can still do that, even here even now. Physical changes are accompanied by intellectual, emotional and spiritual ones so be sure to recognise and allow them to take part in your healing, which is realization and growth. If your body isn't the body it was before, niether is the rest the same as it was before and one is supposed to be able to gain by that. "Permission to Thrive" I guess is what I am saying. So you see though this article was about two cavemen and some psilocybes, polypores, roots, bark, seeds and even all of the things that they do - as well as the continuing "giddy calamity" of the creatures they do it for - It was, as always, about the real healing basis and the underlying theme.
Also, Barry says don't stop eating your mushrooms and drinking your tea. I guess he figures that's enough said and his vote of confidence that you will discover the rest along the way happily for your own self too.
Yours in the "Natural State" we both remain and ~
Best Wishes Always!
Dr. Karl Buchanan
PS - Here he is 9 years after declared terminal, the "unsinkable" Mr. Eubanks!:
http://www.youtube.c...<wbr>talwoman57
