Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

her to expect some thick, dark fluids to pass. “Don’t be alarmed,” he
assured her. “That is your sickness coming out.”
“Better an empty apartment than a bad tenant,” I joked, using one of my
mother’s favorite lines. Both Don Elijio and Lola looked at me and giggled.
After she left, I asked him why it is that so many women have displaced
uteri.
“Modern life,” he answered laconically, “carrying heavy loads too soon
after childbirth. Midwives, doctors, and nurses who don’t put belly bands
on the woman after delivery to ensure the uterus is returned to its rightful
place. That’s bad care.
“Also those horrid, ugly shoes with the sticks in the back,” he
bemoaned. “And walking barefoot on cold floors and wet grass, especially
in the early morning hours.”
He said nervousness and anxiety in modern women also exacerbated
uterine weakness. When a woman’s muscles were tense, the blood supply to
the uterus decreased, thereby setting the stage for problems to develop.
Don Elijio was famous for his ability to correct uterine displacement.
Once a taxi full of young and middle-aged women arrived from San Ignacio
for the express purpose of having their uteri replaced. Each recounted a
string of familiar symptoms, and, one by one, he led them into the
examination room.
One woman in her sixties had a uterus that was particularly far afield. It
was lying nearly below the inguinal ligament, just above the thigh. He
instructed her to lie on her stomach as he skillfully executed a sophisticated
chiropracticlike technique to her sacrum.
He pressed down on the small of her back as he brought both feet
towards her buttocks, simultaneously executing the forward motion of one
hand with the backward pull of the legs. He did this, he told me, in chronic
cases of longstanding displacement to strengthen the ligaments that hold the
uterus to the sacrum.
Her daughter, a grandmother in her forties, came in afterward. She
complained of a bothersome yeast infection that did not yield to usual
medical treatment. “They give me the medicine, I take it, the itching and
burning goes away for a while and then comes right back,” she lamented.
This time he sat down on a stool and said, “You do it, Rosita. Tell me
where you find it.”