the secrets of underground medicine 510 pages

In homes, Anna found the care could be slower and gentler, the patients more in control.Ībout four years after her child was born, Anna became pregnant again, and she couldn’t afford another kid. She gravitated to clients like herself, often low-income women in tougher circumstances, who didn’t seem to get the same treatment in hospitals as wealthy women. When she wasn’t dancing at the strip club or taking classes, she attended births in homes and hospitals. Within a few months, she’d enrolled in a midwifery school and trained as a doula, a support person and patient advocate during pregnancy. The experience left her angry, and it got her thinking about birth and how to do it better. For delivery, they gave her an episiotomy, which resulted in a fourth-degree tear from her vaginal opening to her anal sphincter. Doctors had drug tested her repeatedly even though she told them she was sober. She had grown interested in health work after she’d become pregnant. This works.Īnna, who was a young mom, was often doling out health advice to other girls at the club, trying to get them to eat better or use natural cures when they didn’t have money for antibiotics - garlic for yeast infections, cranberry juice, not cocktail, for urinary tract infections. Jules stepped out of the tub, and a gush of blood fell onto the floor. She ran into the bathroom, where drying lingerie hung from the rods, and saw a pinkish swirl marbling the bathwater. Nine days in, Anna was lying across from the tiny TV when Jules screamed from the tub. Anna kept taking her temperature and handing her glasses of water, too. She drew baths for Jules, listened as she ran the stairs, and watched as she gulped Tanqueray. She set an alarm every four hours, keeping Jules to a schedule of 20 tincture droplets under the tongue and a cup of brewed tea. Anna didn’t know how long it would take, so she moved in with Jules at the motel, dancing at the club each night. Women have relied on herbal abortion for thousands of years, and though specific regimens were hard to come by, anecdotal accounts littered the internet. She’d read other tips as well: frequent hot baths, vigorous exercise, lots of gin. She was going to help Jules try to have an abortion.Īnna had found the herbal recipe online. Anna pulled out the tinctures and tea and explained the plan. The women, both in their 20s, then drove to the Motel 6 where Jules lived and entered her dim room on the second floor, which smelled of grape cigars. They performed on a small stage with crystal curtains, the green light of an ATM flashing on their left, until 9 p.m. On a winter morning, Anna* walked the aisles of an herbal-medicine store, picked up a bottle each of blue cohosh and black cohosh, along with a plastic bag of pennyroyal tea, and drove to the topless bar on the edge of town where she worked.

The secrets of underground medicine 510 pages