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“I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.”
- Janet Flanner |
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Don't Worry. Bee Happy: Waldorf Woman's Hope Comes from Daily Bee Stings |
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| May 27, 1992 |
Forty-one-year-old Pat Wagner is sitting on a plastic white lawn chair in her Pinefield backyard. A "Don't Worry. Bee Happy" pin is fastened securely to her blouse as she rolls up her sleeve. Across the lawn comes her daughter-in-law Beth O'Donnell. A gleaming tweezer that holds a twitching honeybee is clasped tightly in her hand.
"Let's do it," says Wagner, as O'Donnell moves the tweezer and then the bee onto her flesh.
Seconds later, O'Donnell pulls back the tweezer and moves her head in closely to watch the bee's stinger pump into Wagner's arm.
This is the first of seven stings Wagner will receive in the next 20 minutes.
In 1970, Wagner was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Decades later and after shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses paid by her or her insurance, Wagner has finally found what she believes is a cure.
It is not, however, a result of any of the hefty drug, hospital or doctor bills she has paid. Her cure came from a $75 beehive near a fence and some bushes in her backyard.
"I thank God for these honeybees," Wagner smiles on this recent weekday afternoon. "They have been my God-given answer to my prayers." As Wagner speaks, bee sting welts dot her legs and arms: proof of this rather "beezarre" therapy she has been going through since March to fight MS, an incurable disease that impairs the central nervous system.
On March 24, with the help of a beekeeper who is a bee inspector, Wagner was given a sting that was the first of 226 she has received since. Called apitherapy, meaning therapy from the bee string, Wagner is using this unconventional means of treatment to combat MS. It is a disease that has robbed her of her ability to walk or even sit upright, greatly affected her sight and hearing and left her in a wheelchair.
Wagner says since she was diagnosed with MS, she has had periods when she was confined to a wheelchair, the most recent and longest being from October through April. But today, she can walk, cross her legs and sit "normally" in a chair - all things she couldn't do before without extreme, and very pain-producing, effort. Her hearing and vision has also improved greatly.
And although Wagner still has trouble walking - in fact she sometimes needs an arm or object to rest on as she moves - it is amazing to see her lift herself out of a lawn chair in her backyard and walk into her living room when months ago she couldn't even get herself to the bathroom. Just sitting up in the bed in the morning, her son Sean recalls, was a draining, exhaustive procedure.
Sean remembers the pain, tests, treatments and doctor's visits his mother has endured. He speaks about the pool the family put in so his mother could swim, and the van they bought so she could have a toilet always within her reach. And Wagner speaks about the medicine she has taken - the prednisone, a cortisone-based drug that worked in place of her adrenal glands; the adrenal corticotrophic hormones (ACTH); and the sleeping pills and 40 milligrams of Valium she took daily just to deal with the agony of MS.
Wagner remembers her first sting as "being nice." It sent a warmth through her leg, she says, that killed the chill in her bones, a condition she says MS patients live with. "I couldn't fathom, though, it would get me out of the wheelchair," she adds.
So what is it that these bee stings are doing? Charles Mraz, a Vermont resident and director of the American Apitherapy Society Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to the research, promotion and use of bee venom therapy, said BVT stems back to its use as a folk medicine in Europe in the 1800s.
Mraz said the first medical doctor to use it in Europe was Phillip Terc in Austria. Terc had reportedly been afflicted with arthritis and was stung by some bees while recuperating at a friend's house. "His arthritis disappeared," Mraz said. He added that Terc soon began treating patients with bee stings to combat different kinds of rheumatic diseases and noticed improvements.
According to Mraz, bee venom stimulates the nerves, which, in turn, activate the immune system and adrenal glands. Medical studies have shown that bee venom does activate adrenal glands, Mraz added. There are several "components in the venom" The main one is said to signal to the body's immune system to protect itself.
Mraz - who has been a beekeeper for decades - is a BVT success story. He said he came down with rheumatic fever in 1934 when he was 28, which scarred two of his heart valves and left him with rheumatic pain in his knees.
"I got damn sick and tired of those painful knees, so I said to myself, 'I wonder if there's anything to this [apitherapy], so I applied two bee stings to my knees at the trigger points. The next morning after those two stings, I knew something had changed, something was different, but at first I couldn't think what it was."
Years later, according to a society newsletter, Mraz underwent open-heart surgery to replace the damaged valves. "The surgeon paused in mid-surgery," the newsletter states, "stating in awe to the operating team, 'These are the arteries of a teen-ager.'"
Mraz said he has gotten stung constantly, sometimes as many as 50 times a day, since managing 1,000 beehives for the past six decades. "People come to me to apply treatment to them," he said. "I have treated thousands of people. I wouldn't be wasting my time for 58 years if I thought it was nonsense. People wouldn't be coming here."
He said BVT is used for afflictions such as arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, shingles, chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, including lupus and scleroderma (a disease that causes the skin to become hard) and MS, which Mraz has only been administering bee stings for in the past six years.
"I was skeptical years ago and a lot of people are skeptical today," he admitted. The organization's president is Dr. Bradford Weeks, a psychiatrist working at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., who recently came to a meeting at a local church to espouse and explain BVT. Mraz says Weeks believes that apitherapy works, but he cannot use it to treat his patients. Weeks is not permitted to use BVT since doctors are not supposed to treat their patients with unorthodox means.
"It's unfortunate that the medical community has to be so resistant to this," he added. "But bee venom is not something you can patent or control... so naturally they're not going to push something that will not make a lot of money."
And about Wagner, who he has spoken to, he said this: "I don't think I've seen anyone make that dramatic of a recovery. She spent an hour on the phone trying to thank me for what I did for her."
Wagner says she had symptoms of MS in 1969, but they were attributed to a pregnancy and the baby pushing against her pelvic nerves. Later, she remembers trying to put her shoe on one day and being unable to move her foot. "It was," she says, "like a stump on the end of my ankle."
Finally, she went to a doctor, who referred her to a neurologist who put her in a hospital for immediate tests. "I had no idea what was wrong. I had never heard of MS, so I couldn't think or say, 'Gosh, maybe I have MS.' I was a young scared mother, separated from my husband, and the world was falling apart on me.
" ... I have been frustrated with the agony of MS. When I could, it was a grueling, long process for me just to walk to my front door. At times, I couldn't even cross my legs, I couldn't sit up, I couldn't walk."
Her voice shifts, the memory clearly painful: "It was total frustration. I'd cry, 'Why can't I sit up? What can't I cross my legs? Why can't I even go the bathroom by myself?" To go to the bathroom, O'Donnell would pull her up, place her mother-in-law's feet on hers and then walk her into the bathroom and set her on the toilet.
Sean, who lives in the Wagner household with O'Donnell, tells of a childhood that was atypical because of his mother's illness. "I wanted to be like other kids, to play football, to have my parents come to my games, but my mother couldn't come. … After school, I had to come straight home. I couldn't go anywhere because my mother hadn't eaten since the last person left the house that morning."
He adds, a teasing grin covering his face, "I remember Hamburger Helper - a lot of Hamburger Helper."
But Sean says he also recalls his mother having a unique fighting spirit. "I never felt like, 'Why did this happen to me?'" Wagner says. "I felt like, 'Why not me?' The next persons may not be able to handle this. I thought, 'I've got this for a reason, and if I can help find a cure, I'm willing to try anything.'"
There were times as a young mother, Wagner remembers, that she had to call from the apartment they lived in for the mailman to help her pick up her daughter, her child from her second husband.
Today, Wagner's family is amazed by her recovery. "I didn't expect as much as it has done." O'Donnell said. "But I'm more excited than I am shocked. I'm excited for what's to come."
O'Donnell, however, said she believes the therapy has worked well for Wagner because her mother-in-law wanted it to. "I think if you told Pat that bark off of a willow tree would cure MS, she would be out there eating bark off of a tree."
Wagner said this is true. "I would have done anything. ... I live on the thought that I have an overdose of adrenaline all the time. I couldn't stand being trapped in a body that didn't work, that couldn't do the things I wanted to. I was hell-bent on getting our of this wheelchair."
Sean says the family was at first more skeptical of BVT (which his mother learned of through her mother who knows a beekeeper) than Wagner. "I've been around it so long, and I know what the doctors haven't been able to do," he says. "Then some guy comes along and says to people, 'Let's string you with bees. I think it will help.' My first question is: 'What do you base this on? Nothing else has worked."
But Sean, who gave his mother her "Don't Worry. Bee Happy" (the second "e" on the be was added by her husband), is now a believer and Wagner is so hyped up about her improvement that she is at times like a child at Christmas. She exudes excitement. She exudes life.
"I cannot believe the healing powers in that little box in the backyard," she says. "It's just awesome."
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