A NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE IN NEW ORLEANS AFTER KATRINA
3Oct2005
A 39 year old woman from Guatemala appeared in the office two hours early for an appointment she had made just that day. She said she would wait. By chance, the schedule shifted and I was able to see her right away.
She said she was tired and was forgetting things. For the last several months she had been working as a courier delivering parcels and packages. Last week she was sent to Mississippi on a delivery and set out in the evening. Three weeks earlier, August 29th, Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans. Instead of taking Interstate 12 that goes north of New Orleáns she found herself on Interstate 10 that goes southeast to New Orleáns and then continues on to Mississippi. It was well after midnight when she realized she was lost. The police gave her directions that she misunderstood. Nevertheless, she kept on. Somehow she got off the freeway and ended up on the totally darkened streets of New Orleáns. She saw an area that was completely uninhabited, vacant and destroyed and became terrified.
“There were no lights, no people. Nothing. I thought I was dead—in another world.” She tried to calm herself. Eventually, she saw a light. It turned out to be the freeway and she got back on it.
While lost in New Orleáns she kept telling herself she was okay. She had no idea how she got lost.
When she finally got to her destination she left off the package. She was supposed to wait for another package to take back to Houston but she was too frightened and unnerved and returned without it.
Since her return she kept getting lost in streets she normally knew well. Even now she was experiencing a sense of unreality. Very forgetful.
Recently, her body was feeling very cold and she was having cramps in her feet. She also complained of bone pains.
As I thought about what she told me about thinking she was dead and in another world I knew I had to probe further.
“When you said you thought you were dead—in another world, were you just saying that or what?”
“No,” she said. “I really thought I was dead and that I had entered another world.”
Chilling.
I thumbed through the Repertory and then I found two symptoms: “Delusion, he himself was dead,” and “Delusion, being in a different world.” One medicine appeared after both symptoms: Cannabis indica. And, to ice the cake, the same medicine appeared in the symptom: “Confusion, loses his way in well-known streets.”
She received a dose of homeopathically prepared Cannabis indica that had been so diluted that no molecules of the orginal substance remained.
A month later she reported she now felt no nervousness, no anxiety and no cramps in her feet. She no longer felt cold and the pains in the bones had disappeared. She was not getting lost when she drove about. She received no other medicine of any kind and no psychotherapy.
This case is an example of a prescription based on very rare, strange symptoms and illustrates the power of homeopathic medicines to bring patients out of deeply disturbed mental states.