Hey, Want Some Herbs?

I think I'm in love. I think I'm in love with my herbalist. No, really.

After trying tubes and bottles and vats of creams upon creams, pre-scriptioned and not, I'd just about nearly given up on my eczema-strickened skin. My itchies had gotten as bad as they'd ever been in years. Watching in agony for the past many months and yet still on the losing side of the battle with my skin, my mother took charge of me and decided to drag me to the Chinese herbalist that my family had relied on for years to provide us with relief of all of our many and diverse ailments with her strange, stinking, but wonderful concotions.

We got down to her house and were led into her tiny front office which doubled as her examination room. She sat me down on a chair by her desk and gave me a looksee, all the while chatting to my mom (who sat on the acupuncture table) in Chinese about me and my symptoms. After taking a look at a couple of my most prominent patches of grossness, she took my pulse from both of my arms. After this, she was up and bustling around her office/examination/acupunture room which quadrupled as her herbal storage room, weighing out herbs into a paper bag for me to take home and boil into a broth of which I was to drink a cup of, and then use the rest to have a bath in.

?!?!?!

Yeah, I understand. Who would boil up some stuff to drink, and then decide to have a bath in it too? (Wait...that's what we do with water...) Well, that's what I did. Now, imagine the smell that emanates into the halls from a Chinese herb store at the mall. Now multiply that by 100, add some essence of dog-poop, toe-fungus, and month-old gym socks and you'll have the smell that filled my kitchen that day from boiling this stuff. And yes, after faithfully gagging down a cup of this stuff, I hauled the rest to the bathroom from the most stinging, stinking sponge bath I'd ever had. If anything, I did to get my mom off my case before I took a dive back into my ointments and lotions.

The next day, I was so lightheaded at volleyball I had to sit out the game (**note: for those of you who don't know me, it is a BIG deal for me to SIT OUT of a game) and my skin seemed to have turned a shade darker, not to mention that my patchy eczema was STILL THERE!!! I was kinda disappointed all day since although I'd been kinda skeptical of that broth, it was still my last resort next to peeling off my own skin.

Today, however, LOOK!!! I can't say my skin is perfect, but I've barely scratched all day and I definitely can see a difference! I'm not so blotchy, and my forehead seems to be staying on today. I'm thrilled. Words cannot express my enthusiam. And it's all thanks to the herb lady. If there was any lesson I would want to take from this post, it would be that you should accept and ingest herbs offered to you by little old chinese ladies no matter how bad they stink because they're probably good for you. In short, say "yes" to herb(s).