When we first bought Lizzie–a beautiful chocolate brown Alpine goat–she was so skittish that you couldn’t get near her. She would run away and jump onto something high or hide behind the hayfeeder.
That is, until she met Eera, our homeopathic veterinarian. You see, in our section of Israel, many goats get abscesses. Lizzie did too. My landlady, from whom I had bought Lizzie, said airily, “Just wave your hand and the energy will break up the abscess.” I did what I could, being an energy healer, but nothing worked. For 9 months, the abscess got bigger and bigger. Finally, a vet visited for another reason, saw Lizzie, and said the abscess was very dangerous. Eera said simply, “I know what to do for the abscess.”
“How much do you charge for lancing an abscess?” I asked.
“Let’s first see the abscess,” she replied quietly.
“No, I don’t want to begin until I know your price,” I said. I didn’t want to have any misunderstanding about why I was hiring her.
She refused to tell me her price for lancing. “Let’s just see,” she said, leaving me and entering the pen. I lingered behind to lock the gate after us.
A moment later, she returned to me, triumphant. “Ein tzorech–there’s no need!” she said.
“There’s no need for what?” I asked.
“There’s no need to lance the abscess. It’s opened on its own.” Sure enough, the abscess was open and draining.
“What? Did you do anything to her?” I asked, in disbelief. There had not been time to catch Lizzie, much less treat the abscess, in the short time it had taken to latch the gate.
“No, it opened on its own,” she replied.
“Eera, that abscess hasn’t healed in 9 months. In fact, it has only gotten worse and worse. You mean to tell me that all you did was walk into the pen and the abscess opened on its own?”
“Tamid kacha–it’s always like that.”
“Tamid kacha?” I asked. I was confused.
“Yes.”
I began to understand why Eera did not have a set price for lancing abscesses. It was because she never had to.
“Eera,” I begged her. “How does that work?”
“Lo yadat sheh al kateif kol rofeh yosheiv mal’ach?” she asked. Didn’t you know that on the shoulder of every doctor sits an angel?
I was stunned. But that was only the beginning. Eera gave Lizzie a constitutional remedy to strengthen her immune system. It didn’t, in the end, totally prevent more abscesses, but it did fix something else….
After a few days, Lizzie was no longer nervous Nellie. She was totally relaxed, sensuous, always approaching me with her face tilted up at an angle so I could give her a facial massage. She then took a full-body massage–up to 40 minutes long–every day. She had turned into a pussy cat.
Eera came for a follow-up a few days later. “Eera,” I said, “Something has happened to Lizzie. She’s not crazy anymore.”
“Yes,” she replied. “I came to see her a few days ago, and I looked around and couldn’t find Lizzie!” she joked.
“But Eera, what happened?”
“That old behavior–that was just a mask,” she explained. “The remedy lifted the mask and now we can see who she was all along.”