TSC Talks guest Dedee Culley has over 20 years of nursing experience and is the co-owner of 2 Leaf Nurses, which provides alternative & holistic health services from Springfield, Missouri. Culley loves home health for its opportunity to connect with patients and their environment. She is incredibly blessed and she was able to gather up courage and strength to pursue her passion in nursing while stepping out of the ordinary medicinal ways of these modern days and encourage others to be safe and successful at taking care of their bodies from the inside out with natural approaches. She has a loving attitude and an open mind to seek and research various holistic methods to reach a significantly positive result. She has also dealt with personal health issues within her family and has seen significant changes when she chooses to ASK QUESTIONS and be in the loop of the available options and their side effects.
This is her background and mission:
“I am a registered nurse for over 20 years now; a variety of backgrounds. And there came a point when I said, you know what, enough is enough, there’s more to our lives than just ‘the doctor said’, and we do this and we do that. We need to be able to heal our own bodies and we need to work on our own bodies to get them healthy. So, I started a company called 2 Leaf Nurses. And our focus is on the education of patients, as well as businesses, healthcare professionals (our own health care professionals have to have education, bless their hearts), as well as the community. That’s what we really focus on, empowering everybody.”
Whenever I meet someone that’s in the cannabis industry from, you know, more than Midwest, I’m like, it’s got to be a whole different. You know, different, awkward struggle just to get to be legit and it’s hard anywhere just because we’re so ingrained in our way of understanding medicine that it’s hard to get back and I think that as Culley shares her story, what I found is the people that are in the industry is particularly the great nurses. I’m so grateful. I asked her about what made her take this approach:
“So yes, I am in southwest Missouri. We are seven generations deep in this area. My great-great-grandma was actually known as a medicine woman around here because one we didn’t have a whole lot of doctors and those doctors cost money which our farmers didn’t have. So I spent a lot of time with my grandma, and we had to utilize plants and things that we would now call ‘alternatives’. It opened up a world for me that just seemed natural. My grandma used rosewater and glycerin. And so those were all normal to me. It just was normal.”
Dedee Culley says she realized that there are two types of people, the ones that accept what the doctors say and what they say goes, and the ones that question things and wonder if there are better ways to go about something. She is definitely the type that questions, and wonders, and researches and tries to find the best way to solve something and the best way to certainly narrow down a diagnosis. She stated:
“People like me who go, ‘Well, wait a minute, why are we doing this? Why do we have to do that? Why do we have to cut both ends off a ham when we cook it? Why do we do that?’ Those are the kind of things I’m always asking. And I always have gotten in trouble many times for asking why. People take that as you are questioning them, you’re questioning their integrity and their character and their knowledge. And I’m like, no, I’m just asking the question. Because when we get right down to it, there might be another way.”
A doctor once told her to not apologize for asking questions. She was motivated to do so and to dig deeper every time.
She expected to have a simple life, ‘get married, raise a family, and bake some cookies’. But for her, there was more to life than that. She witnessed a cousin have a seizure, and she started asking questions… how, why. While at the time they could only do so much, they blamed immunizations. Her grandmother also helped her see alternative methods other than hardcore pills and medicines. While her grandmother had to be hospitalized for Alzheimer’s, her grandmother had to be knocked out because she was so agitated. But while she could visit, she felt a deep connection with her grandmother since she was able to calm her down with only the touch of her palms. She goes on to explain another amazing experience she had with her grandmother, “She’d be incredibly agitated. I could sit down on the couch, hold her hand, and we would just rub hands. And to this day, I can still feel that and she was totally calm. And she would look at me and I could see grandma. And I know there was that connection. I took a doll… She always took care of all of the babies in the family, all of the kids. So I took a baby doll up there. And she held that baby and she would feed that baby and she would cuddle and calm her down immediately. So no medications were required. You know, they didn’t have to do all of those things. And it proved to me how it improved the quality of her life.
“But it made me question, Why do we do this? And then, of course, that was the thing that took me into nursing. That thing that the doctor told me, don’t ever stop asking questions, that’s how we learn, you know, and encouraged me. When I got into the hospital I was told, ‘No, you don’t ask questions. We are the doctors.’ So I got that message. It wasn’t long after I started in the hospital, I was probably two or three years into the hospital.”
On their fifth anniversary, her husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma. She goes on to share this tangible experience: “This is someone who is crazy healthy at the time he was diagnosed. He was actually training for a military marathon with his brother, he was in the Air Force. My husband is 26 years in the Army, and they were going to do a military marathon. And then this boom, all of a sudden seizures happen and we get this diagnosis. So we got that diagnosis after our five year anniversary. And I thought, ‘you know what, I’m just not cool with all of it, really. I need some other answers.’ And so I began asking why. I started really digging deep and do the research. And cannabis was the only thing that really has shown promise because it’s able to penetrate the blood brain barrier. It’s very selective in what it works synergistically with you. So there’s a synergy between the brain cancer and the THC that it creates an environment that kills cancer cells. Yet it doesn’t kill the good cells. I’ve read it also has this ability to help with the generation and regeneration of some of the healthy brain cells. So, that’s huge.”
In the midst of all these experiences, she found out about cannabis nursing (ACNA). She goes on to explain 2 Leaf Nurses:
“So one of the things that we do at 2 Leaf nurses is not only teaching the body how It’s designed to work. Well, what happens when it doesn’t? And when you understand how your body is supposed to work, and you understand what happens when it doesn’t, it also makes it much easier to understand how cannabis, or anything else, other supplements, other plants, and diet, how that may or may not help you, right? And I always say there are always those caveats that you can’t do it. You know, they’re just, they’re just a certain kind of thing. So we learn about that, but then we take you to the next step of figuring out what you want, what you need, okay? Okay. I can’t tell you that you need to smoke a flower. I can’t tell you. You need to use a tincture. I can’t tell you those things. Only you can make those decisions, right? You just need to be educated about what those things are.”
As an incredible nurse with a passion for others, her own family structured her path to find holistic approaches, which indeed gave her and her family hope for a better life.
“When you’re looking at things holistically, it’s not one thing; you have to look at the whole picture. So mind, body, and soul. So I have to think about his exercise, keeping him out getting him good energies, keeping his spirits up, giving him hope, and encouragement, but we also have to be cognizant of our diet and what we consume and the supplements and things like that. So, it’s been a very, very broad approach. And I will say that for me to start a business, most of it was not in my game plan. I would have just assumed, ‘just stayed back and taking care of him, and let’s call it good.’ That’s not the way it was supposed to go apparently. And you know, a lot of the things that I have done, all started falling into place and wondering what I was supposed to do how I was supposed to do it. It all fell into place. And you know what? I just have to keep helping people. That is my calling, to help and to empower and educate people. So, there we have it.”
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/2-Leaf-Nurses-111026430353251/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/2leafnurses?igshid=8zsfxtspce75
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/2-leaf-nurses-477b49196/
Email: info@2leafnurses.com
Thank you Dedee for sharing your story! All of our podcasts can be found at https://tsctalks.com/podcast/