Walking Pneumonia And Catdaddy Moonshine
Image by Raptor Alpha via FlickrI Am Not A Doctor
And neither is Junior Johnson. I’m not a NASCAR fan either, but I have developed a sincere appreciation for at least one thing this man has accomplished.
He makes and sells moonshine. And he does it legally.
Back In The Day
NASCAR fans already know the short history of the sport. It grew out of the mid-20th century moonshine-runners here in North Carolina, driving powerful muscle cars from county to county, delivering the illegal drink to those who would have it, regardless of the law.
My grandaddy ran a still, way back then. Here in Rockingham county it was a common sight to see the sheriff drive up and get out of his car, pulling his pants up to cover his enormous belly, looking around like he was the sheriff of Nottingham instead of Rockingham. Yes, the fat sheriff from NC who said things like ‘You in a heap o’trouble, boy’ really DID exist. I have seen him in my childhood, and I will never forget.
It was against the law to make your own liquor here. Still is, as a matter of fact. But Carl Axsom, the high sheriff of Rockingham County, showed up on a regular schedule to load the clear juice into the trunk of his huge Plymouth Fury III. On the side of the car in letters 6 inches tall were the words ‘Carl Axsom, Sheriff’, and down below, in 2″ letters was ‘Rockingham County, North Carolina’.
Sheriff Axsom would pull into the driveway, get out of the car and hike his pants up around his really, and I mean REALLY fat gut. It was his trademark move. He’d ask for my grandaddy and they’d go down one of the little farmroads, down into the ‘holler’, to fetch the stuff. A little while later they’d return, loaded down with the shine and drunk on their asses.
Grandaddy would load the stuff into the official car’s trunk, gallons of it, and the fat man would leave.
Back To The Present
Axsom was defeated in an election by a guy who promised to clean up law enforcement, and he did, as best
he could. My grandaddy got older and finally died, a sober man who spent much of his time reading the Bible. In the end, he was a man I was proud to call my family, a man who finally came to be who he was all along, a good man.
But before I was proud of him, I learned to hate drinking alcohol. I learned it made me feel bad, that I hated the taste of it in all its forms, that I was one of the few lucky ones in my family who would not love the beast that killed. I can drink, and I have been drunk many times. That’s how I learned.
So it came as a special surprise to me that I was planning last week to drink that strongest of drinks, white liquor, in a quantity that even my grandfather might have avoided in his wildest days. And I didn’t plan to eat anything while I pulled this drunk. I was just going to pour the stuff in and see what came out.
Long term readers here at Wordout know I have been sick for awhile. Since November 2007, as a matter of fact. My personal philosophy prohibits me from seeking so-called medical advice except in extreme cases. I won’t go into the reasons or the philosophy right here, but I do have reasons for my stance. So in August, when I bowed to my family’s demands that I at least have some tests done, it was a major deviation from my normal way of living.
The truth is, I thought I was dying. I just wanted to know exactly what it was that was killing me. Because of some really severe pains, I was pretty sure it was something in my circulatory system, so I chose a heart specialist. After nearly $3000 in testing, he assured me my heart was fine, and instead diagnosed me with a severe case of emphysema based on x-rays of my lungs. But he also told me that I was a strange case, as the only indication of severe emphysema was the x-rays. I didn’t exhibit any of the symptoms you’d normally expect from a severely emphysemic patient.
That was in September. By the middle of October, I was very ill. When November rolled around, things took a turn for the worst and within another week or so I was so sick I could barely get out of bed. My skin changed colors, gradually becoming a kind of gray you’d expect to see in a terminally-ill patient. The black circles under my eyes had grown to cover much of my face.
I. Was. Dying.
Mysterious Ways and Unexpected Means
I’m a lucky guy, though, and the Lord of the Universe wasn’t finished with me. My niece would come to check on me every day back then, and sometimes would force me to let her drag me to Chaney’s, my favorite local restaurant, for soup, or whatever she could get me to eat.
One particular night during the worst of this ordeal she lugged me over to the restaurant. I hated going there by then. Chaneys is one of the most popular places in this little southern town, and I didn’t want folks I know to see me in that shape. But this night it paid off. One of my friends, a customer with a contract for IT services (which had been neglected for a month due to my illness) came in with his wife and sat at the table next to us.
Southern hospitality always trumps everything else. Forgetting myself, I asked how he’d been lately. It’s the polite question, the equivalent of asking how’s the weather. The answer is almost always as shallow as the question. I expected Tommy to look at me, see my illness, and say something like ‘fine’ and then ask about my health. That’s the normal way it goes.
But he didn’t. He told me how he’d been sicker than he had been in over 30 years, maybe longer. Told me how he’d seen the doctors, taken the antibiotics which did nothing, taken the anti-viral shot which did nothing, followed all the doctor’s orders, all with no improvement. It lasted for 5 weeks he said. ( His wife leaned around him and said that he had looked JUST LIKE ME.) He listed his symptoms, and they were exactly what I was going through.
Well, he looked fine to me, so I asked him what he did to finally get rid of it, which brings me back to Junior Johnson. The cure my friend Tommy came up with was to go back to his childhood, back in the 1950s and 1960s, when his grandma would treat nearly everything with what else but liquor and honey.
Liquor and honey was a big cure-all around my house, too, when I was that young. My grandaddy’s wife, Mama Lacie, would make a small glass with the white liquor and honey and make us drink it. I never understood why, and being so young, I never asked or gave it much thought. It was just one of those things that eventually went away as the 60s turned into the 70s and then the 80s and we became too ‘modern’ and ‘advanced’ in our thinking, throwing away the old so that we could embrace the new.
The wisdom of trying to eliminate an illness gave way to the madness of managing it. Younger doctors with much education brought with them a distrust of the old ways, the ways that had kept us alive these last 40,000 years, the ways which brought us here to this pinnacle.
He Looked JUST LIKE YOU
Back to the story: Tommy said he just sat himself down on his couch in front of his 60 inch plasma TV, turned off all his phones, and broke out the best of the best of the ’shine, a quart of white lightning made by the only guy in North Carolina with a license to do so. He drank that quart over a period of about 36 hours, supplemented only with chicken noodle soup (another old remedy, which recent studies have shown has many curative properties which are still not understood well.)
He said that was all it took. He coughed and shat the infection out of his body within the next two days and had felt fine since. (Again, his wife leans forward and says ‘He looked JUST LIKE YOU, Jon’.) And then he makes a comment that stuck in my head: ‘I think I was on the verge of having walking pneumonia’.
That stuck in my head for a few days. I’d been sick off and on for over a year, always the same symptoms, always seemed to be some form of the flu. For decades before, I had hardly a sniffle and then, an entire year of it. I had done what I never do (seen a doctor… and believed him), and I had given up on recovering health. I had updated my will, began to unwind my obligations, started trying to prepare those closest to me for the certain day of my approaching death.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what Tommy said. I could barely breathe the day I started searching the internet for information on pneumonia. I knew it was a waste of time, but I had nothing else I could do anyway. I felt like a desperate fool, grasping at a hope that would never be real, but I did what I do. I searched and researched and gradually I learned.
I had never found any illness that matched ALL the symptoms I was experiencing. I’d been searching for nearly a year, and had finally given up. You can imagine how it made me feel to find that pneumonia caused every symptom I felt. Well, imagine my surprise when I found a cross-section photo of a pneumatic lung, and compared it to the cross-section photo of an emphysemic lung, and to my eye they were identical!
Legal Lightning
I realized that if indeed I had pneumonia, that could explain the on-again off-again progress of my symptoms over the past year. I had always thought that pneumonia was caused by either bacteria or viral infections, but I learned that there are at least 5 other causes, and that one of the most common causes was from inhaling particulate matter. Even dust can cause the condition to occur.
I called Tommy. I asked him if I could get some of that moonshine from him. He said I could have a quart if I would use it just the way he said. I agreed, and the first day I was barely able to get out of the house, I picked up a quart jar with an ‘A’ on its lid. The ‘A’ designated the highest grade, 180-proof, 90% pure alcohol.
That’s when I learned where the stuff came from. It was from the Piedmont Distillery, owned and operated by Junior Johnson under a license from the state, making him a legal manufacturer and distributor of the most illegal alcohol in North Carolina. Until then, I didn’t know anyone could do that. From what I understand, it was a hard fought battle to get that license.
In the end, I’m glad Junior Johnson didn’t give up. I couldn’t even tell you what the numbers are on his race cars. I don’t know who his sponsors are. And that probably won’t change. Junior Johnson isn’t in my mind associated with racing. In my mind, he’s the guy with the cure for what ailed me.
Alcohol In - Alcohol Out (Plus Lots Of Other… uhhh… Stuff)
I started last Wednesday night about 8 o’clock, the night before Thanksgiving, by drinking a full four ounce dose of the moonshine. It was really hard to swallow, literally. I don’t drink, remember? Can’t stand the taste, can’t stand the feeling in my stomach. But convinced I was dying, I continued with about 2 ounces every two hours. After a few doses I felt just purely awful, but I persevered.
Following Tommy’s advice, I drank this way throughout Thanksgiving day, and around 10pm was a little more than halfway through the quart. That was the total dosage he had set for me, and that’s when I stopped. I wanted to be able to drive to my mom’s house for the big Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. Most of my family would be there and I had hopes of looking good and feeling better. They’d been really worried about me lately. I wanted them to see a future with me in it, not in a box.
Thanksgiving, For Real
I won’t describe the nastiness that came out of me. Some of you would enjoy that narrative, but my mother probably wouldn’t, and she still reads Wordout. Suffice it to say that I was both amazed and humbled. Alcohol is one of the few things humans put into their bodies that cannot be metabolized at all. Most other things, once eaten, are broken down into what eventually become sugars that your body uses to regenerate itself.
Alcohol is different. It enters your body and remains alcohol until it leaves your body.(<--NOPE! I WAS WRONG HERE! SEE COMMENTS BELOW) From your stomach it enters your blood, goes immediately to your heart, then your lungs, then is sent to literally every cell in your body. It’s removed from your body through your urine, your sweat, your breath, your feces. It comes out the way it goes in - as alcohol.(Wrong again - see comments below)
But along with it comes many things you never even suspected were in there. I will ignore the other ways it comes out and just say here that the blackness which came out of my lungs, clumps of it at times, was simply astounding. I almost said ‘breath-taking’, but after each spell of coughing this crap up, I could actually breathe BETTER.
It is strange to feel yourself healing, almost minute by minute. Within hours of waking on Friday, I knew I was on the right track. A certain fog that had descended on my mind months ago began to lift. My vision actually cleared a little (I am blind in one eye). The pain that had wrapped around my chest for months was gone. It had completely disappeared from one day to the next (and has still not returned).
Dinner was scheduled for 5pm, and I showed up at my mom’s house around 1 o’clock. There was color on my face, the blackness receded to just under my eyes, and my eyes were clear and sure. I could stand straight and tall - geez, I could stand at all! I felt absolutely fantastic.
They Forced Their Hope Upon Me
It’s been a week now, and I still feel stronger. I am not back to my ‘old self’ yet. I don’t have the physical strength that I had a year ago, and I’ve learned quickly not to expect to recover from a year-long illness overnight. There’s a long row to hoe for me to completely recover, but I can hold that hoe and I know how to use it.
What still brings me to tears is the solemn truth that I had accepted my death as not just a certainty, but an imminent fact. I don’t know if I ever actually gave up - I think I was on that precipice - but I do know that I had accepted it. I was trying to help others accept it, trying to make that inevitable day less painful to them.
But they would not accept it. My niece, my sons, my family and friends - they didn’t let me go. And go I would have, with a dignity and honor I have practiced all my life.
There is no way I can ever thank them enough for that. I hope they always know with certainty that they saved me from an end which I mistakenly thought my own. I hope they know how much that means to me. They forced their hope upon me, when I could find no hope at all.
Death, to me, is not something to be feared. It is not some horrible destiny that awaits us like a ravenous beast, but is instead the natural completion of the time we have here. It’s the last New Thing any of us will experience while we live. Still, to die when there is reason and method to remain with the living would be a sad thing, indeed.
I am Jon. I am alive.
Thanks to PerceptiveTravel for some info used here.
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