Shock Waves
“I can’t!” was her mantra.
An uplifting and shocking end-of-life story
with extraordinary improvement
after four years of steady decline and deterioration.
HOW?
Thanks to the hands of a Cranial Osteopath…
Within eight months:
April 30 – December 13, 1982.
St. Louis Blues
W. C. Handy (arr. Hall),
Cory Hall, pianist
Harriette Vicars Cooper Coker
1913 – 1983
was my mother… the life of the party, entertaining everyone with her piano playing.
Our Everett grand piano filled the living room with blues while I was growing up.
She played by ear and her “St. Louis Blues” was always a favorite. I can see her hands playing the stride bass that’s the hallmark of this era, entertaining whoever would listen.
Bowling, golfing, dancing, bridge parties… she was a vivacious personality with lots of friends
until her sudden and unexpected ‘collapse’ after the death of her third husband.
Within three months, she was nonfunctional —
refusing to eat, go out of her house, drive a car, accept or seek help.
1978-1982…four years. My husband and I desperately tried to find help and different living arrangements with no improvement in her functioning. My mother returned to old friends in Tennessee for six weeks; everyone was stunned to see her sudden and rapid decline. When in-home living assistance failed, she was moved to assisted living during these years. Counseling and psychiatric intervention with medications eventually culminated in hospitalization and electro-shock therapy. There was no history of depression or mental instability during her lifetime. This was a shocking and unexpected happening at the age of sixty-nine.
When she was six years old, her mother died giving birth to her fourth sibling, Lila. When she was thirteen, her father was gored to death by a bull The psychiatrist suggested these traumatic deaths could have relevancy to her grief reaction and sudden collapse after a death at this time of her life.
She would not communicate with me, her friends or a therapist. My phone calls, cards, letters received no response. Personal visits or visits with my husband and children were most difficult.
Nothing helped.
My mother was my only family except for my husband and two children. An only child, my father died when I was 16. I had leaned heavily on my mother during the past six years, dealing with chronic pain from two failed back surgeries after the birth of my second child herniated a disc in my low back. My daughter, as an infant and a toddler, knew her “Mimi” as much or maybe even more than her own mother.
During the fifth year of dealing not only with back and craniofacial pain [courtesy of dental trauma] but also ‘Mother’, a referral from a physical therapist landed me in the office of a Cranial Osteopath. My pain – and my life – began to steadily improve from this unusual hands-on treatment. Fourteen months of treatment with the Osteopath and I tossed my dental splint into the garbage along with several bottles of medication. My back pain was improving. Most importantly, my hope was restored.
Thus, I decided to take my mother to this Osteopath.
When I asked him if he could help her, his response was:
“I can’t tell unless I treat her.”
We had tried everything else.
What was there to lose?
The progress that unfolded under the care of the Osteopath
from April 30 – December 13, 1982 was remarkable and most unexpected.
A Different Perspective
Central Nervous System shock
is not a surprising ‘diagnosis’.
The interrelationship between structure and function is paramount in a cranial osteopathic treatment.
What effect does ‘shock’ have on structural and functional efficiency?
– the shock of death,
– the shock of medications,
– the shock of ‘electroconvulsive
shock treatment’?
Office notes illustrate a structural/functional orientation
revealed through palpation:
left hemisphere no motion; weight
in pelvis released; occipital twist;
no inherent sacral motion,
T12, SBS no inherent motion.
She was not a willing patient. She refused to go. My determination was stronger than her resistance. I had to pull her into the car as well as into the doctor’s office. She was hostile and argumentative. After her first treatment on April 30, 1982, I was afraid the Osteopath would tell both of us to never return!
All of us persevered through these beginning appointments. At the beginning of September, after only three months, five appointments and a homeopathic remedy, my mother called me on the phone. She had not called me since her collapse in the early months of 1978! And, what was even more surprising, she asked me to bring her a lipstick the same color as mine and wanted to borrow the blouse that I was wearing at our last visit. Always the height of fashion, the neglect of her appearance had been very distressing. Her most amazing request: bring her piano music on my next visit. She wanted to play the piano! This was the Mother that I knew.
From September to December, she began entertaining the residents in the assisted living center! The staff was in shock with this amazing change. We began going to lunch before her appointments with the osteopath. Laughter and meaningful conversations, even talking about finding a new place for her to live if she continued to improve, are memories that I treasure dearly.
Her last visit with the osteopath was December 13. His office notes say “had a regular conversation with patient for the first time“. Her belligerence had disappeared…a strong statement that this treatment is not dependent on belief. It just is – the potentiality and the artistry of skilled and trained hands.
I was surprised when he called me after this December visit to suggest that I make an appointment for my mother with a cardiologist. He was concerned she had a heart problem. This was the week before Christmas. I booked an appointment for her in early January. The Osteopath was not working during the holiday and little did we know at the time that this would be her final appointment.
Another unexpected call came on January 6 at 2:00 am.
I was informed that my mother had passed
that morning after complaining of indigestion.
My gratitude is boundless for these memorable last months of my mothers life.
In Honor of my Mother
May 2025
In retrospect, forty-two years later as Mother’s Day comes and goes, I remain astounded with the events that unfolded during the last eight months of my mother’s life.
Her response to cranial osteopathic care ignites a fire within me for many reasons. The family events that unraveled during the years after her death were anything but positive. My husband, an attorney, moved out of our home seven weeks after her death, one week before my son’s twelfth birthday. This was only the beginning of the marriage dissolution that ended three years later in a custody battle with ‘medical politics’ at the core and uncompromising charges of incompetency as a parent.
In 2019, her death and medical history developed into a paramount issue within our family system. And it became clear much misinformation had been transmitted. Circumstances led me to relay information to clarify; however, there was no clarification…only chaos.
In 2024, this website began to evolve.
The Cranial Connection (1986), my research paper that became a publication, had to be updated.
This update was driven by the family happenings during December 2019 and the subsequent fallout.
The validity and benefit of cranial osteopathic care needs to be disseminated from a patient perspective. My years of treatment and experience are my ‘credentials‘.
The lack of understanding and inability to listen to
a different medical perspective,
– a form of care and treatment with a
structural and functional approach to wellness –
tore my marriage apart in the 1980’s,
and years later, my family.
This should not happen to anyone.
My mother’s short experience of unbelievable progress
is a testament of what can happen against all odds.
Forty-five years later,
this form of treatment is world-wide.
Many patients are fortunate to be literally
‘in the hands of’ a health care practitioner who practices within the perspective of Osteopathy in the Cranial Field,
the legacy of William Garner Sutherland
…HelpingHands.