Arnica

For Thursday is Herbs Day I wanted to tell you how wonderful arnica is.

Its wonderful!

The End


Just kidding. It really is wonderful! I use the cream all the time for aches and pains. Not that I have a lot of aches and pains but when I do...Arnica cream is for me!!!
Its so much nicer than Icy Hot or other creams like that. I don't like the hot and cold sensations of those types of treatments. Arnica has no "feel" and it really works!

Here's when I really learned how wonderful it is:

Picture this:

Its a nice summer day. There is a woman and a horse in a nice, shady round pen working peacefully with her loving mate sitting peacefully. He's enjoying the day watching the woman and her horse perfectly synchronized and in tune with each others movements as if they were two seasoned ballet dancers that have been dancing together for all time.......

................

uh...yeah. That didn't happen.

The part about the woman, the horse, and the husband was true but that's really where the truth ends. What really was going on was I (the woman, just in case you didn't know)was working a very green horse in my round pen. (oh yeah, it was shady. So that part was also true) My mare (his mama) was running up and back wildly along the fence the whole time we were working. He was doing okay except he kept stopping at the point in the round pen where he could watch her. I calmly turned him away got him back on track. This whole time, the loving mate portion of the story is that my husband was sitting in the shade in a lawn chair watching and chatting with me. That part was okay too. What I forgot to mention is that I had scheduled to go on a big trail ride with a friend of mine for Labor Day weekend which was coming up that very next weekend. So, that horse needed to be ready!

So, I decide he needs to be out of the round pen in the back yard. My trees need to be trimmed really badly and the low branches were catching the horn of my saddle spooking him. My husband, meanwhile, is informing me of my bad decision in bringing him out of the pen. I very politely (he will tell you differently but he drinks on occasion so don't believe him!!) told him that I was taking him on a ride and if he can't behave in the back yard how in the h... oh yeah, I said politely. How in the WORLD (yeah, that's what I said... :) is he going to behave out in the wide, wide world of horses???? So into the big yard we go! I get up on him and he's dancing around a little. I keep him turning into the fence line away from his mama and all is well. I really was only going to ride another 5 minutes and turn him loose. Then, at one point, he decides his mama has more pull than my reins so lifts his front feet off the ground in a pirouette (well, not a pirouette, because a pirouette is pretty and what he did was just plain naughty). I wanted to make sure he knew that wasn't a cool thing to do so I smacked him on the neck. Not a hard smack, geesh!!! And that's where all heck breaks loose!! He starts bucking, my husband starts yelling "Misty!!!! Make him stop!!!!" I'm yelling or maybe I'm just thinking, because in that situation who really knows 'Yeah Right! Don't you think if I could make him stop, I would have already done that????'

And then, BOOM! I'm on the ground. Well, let me just say that BOOM! may have been an over reaction. I'd like to think I'm petite enough to maybe just go boom. But, anyway, he asks me if I'm okay. "Yes" I say because I try not to make people worry. As an aside, when I was a teenager I got hit by a speeding car as I skipped, yes I said skipped across the street. As I was rolling or spinning, because in that situation who really knows, I had the thought 'I bet whoever's driving thinks they probably killed me' so when I stopped spinning I jumped up, threw my hands in the air and yelled "I'm Okay!!!!"

But, back to my original story. Where was I? Oh yeah... "I'm okay." As it turns out I really wasn't okay. I think I probably had a mild concussion and I for sure had a fractured pelvis. I didn't know about the pelvis for a couple of weeks though. I'm tough that way.... :)

Anyway, the whole time I'm in excruciating pain. I say tough, you say stupid....tomato, tomato....

But, I just happened to have some arnica cream laying around because my good friend Barb had some at her health food store and I bought it when she went out of business. But I will tell you that it really made me functional. That's why I didn't know my pelvis was fractured for weeks!! By the time I had X-Rays, the doc said "Just don't do anything extreme and it'll heal by itself." Okay, define extreme........

I continued my yoga teaching, Tae Kwon Do, working cleaning pools, and riding horses....all with a fractured pelvis.......arnica cream my friends...arnica cream.