SKUNK OIL

Bonnie H's mother used dead skunk oil to try to relieve her daughter's excruciating pain from rheumatoid arthritis. It's a miracle Bonnie survived her pain, and her mother, to write her memoir!

By Bonnie H

Ma was a firm believer in home remedies. Certain things she swore by. Like castor oil, and Vicks mixed with lemon juice. But it just so happens I was the not-so-happy recipient of one of her off-the-wall ones.

When I was about seven, in between agonizing tractions, I started school. Which I hated. I hated everything about it. I was “the crippled kid.” The odd one. I didn’t know how to make friends. I wore splints, used crutches. And my mother didn’t help anything by using her skunk oil treatment on me.

Ma swore that my Grandpa (her father) was a Cherokee Indian. Maybe. Maybe not. But Grandpa had told her that he knew for certain “there’s only one thing known to man'“ that could penetrate to the bone and ease the pain I was going through every night while she stretched my legs back into those plaster splints.

And Grandpa knew how to make it. So, Ma went on a hunt for the one and only ingredient. A freshly run-over skunk.

Yes. A skunk. Which apparently was not so difficult to come by. Dad was not happy with the smell in her car — the car he had just bought her, Ford Galaxy 500 convertible, gold in color. But Ma insisted: she brought it to my grandpa in her car. And a few days later, she presented me with her remedy. Skunk oil. Made from a very slow-roasted skunk. The oil was in a pint-sized alcohol bottle.

She warmed the oil by standing the bottle in a pot of warm water on the stove. Put a few drops in her hands and proceeded to massage my legs with it. Honestly, it didn’t help. At all. Just made my legs itchy and smell bad. Real bad. And for a child struggling with school issues, it was horrible. She used it every night.

After me complaining and crying over the skunk oil for weeks, Ma “found a solution,” AVON-perfumed scented powder. Ma applied it liberally to my freshly oiled legs. For three years, I smelled like a perfumed skunk. After the third traction, the splints stopped and so did the skunk oil.

Bonnie H, who is writing a memoir called “Trauma Drama,” grew up in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. She contracted juvenile rheumatoid arthritis as a two-year old, but no one knew how to treat the autoimmune disease in those days. Instead of taking her to Shriner’s Hospital in Springfield to see a rheumatologist, as a local public health nurse recommended, Bonnie’s mother chose to let orthopedists in Pittsfield, MA basically experiment on her child.

The three sets of tractions the doctors performed on Bonnie when she was only four or five years old, were absolutely torturous, and worst of all, they didn’t work. In fact, the tractions accelerated the damage to Bonnie’s joints, to the point that, when she was 25 years old, a doctor told her that she had the bones of someone in her 60s.

Today, Bonnie H — the H in my mind stand for HERO and HOPE — is 62 years young, having survived a lifetime of agonizing physical pain and emotional abuse that few people could endure. I’ve known Bonnie only two months, but in my 50 years as a journalist, and in my 15 years as a University professor, including a year at Georgetown University teaching writing to graduate students, I’ve never met a more courageous woman, or a more gifted storyteller and writer.