Isnt that like burning down the forest to save the forest?
There is no other way to stop the formation of keloidal tissue or cancer. Disease is not nice, you cant treat it nicely, he argued.
I also heard the professor say that for every one cancer cell that chemotherapy kills, at least one billion healthy cells are killed. I put that statistic together and what I came up with is this analogy: If three or four humans were declared cancerous to the human race, the medical profession would be willing to kill four billion people - the entire population on Earth - in order to destroy only three or four individuals. Thats an extreme and barbaric perspective, dont you think?
Im trying to give you more time to live, he said, annoyed.
Doctor, as a result, I have cancer. I didnt have cancer before receiving the cancer-causing therapies. I merely had an ulcer. I feel like the walking dead. Food doesnt taste good. Nothing pleases me anymore. Why didnt you tell me my quality of life and disposition would be miserable; that Id be a semi-invalid as a side effect of the treatments? Why didnt you stress that the side effects would be a hundred times worse than cancer when you frightened me into taking your therapies? And now Im going to die anyway.
Im sorry. It isnt possible to predict how anyone will react, he said belligerently.
That doesnt make sense. Yesterday I looked up the side effects in the Physicians Desk Reference and books on radiation research. All of mine and a hundred more side effects are listed. You never showed me any list. And the Physicians Desk Reference is right there on your shelf. Do you admit that the radiation treatment for keloidal tissue gave me cancer?
Look, theres still a small chance that your cancer will respond to the chemotherapy.
Did you hear what I just said?
I know how you must feel, he said.
Finally I realized that medical methods are barbaric. Surgery is butchering. Radiation is burning. Chemotherapy is poisoning. Why didnt it dawn on me before?
Doctor, have you ever been cut and burned and poisoned to help you get well from cancer?
No.
I threatened to sue because the doctors didnt tell me that the therapies would kill much more of me than would any cancer. I would have taken my chances with cancer. Several attorneys said the doctors would all testify that I was dying anyway and that I had signed a release. How can they get away with that?! I wondered.
One month later, I discovered several successful alternative methods for healing cancer. All of them were pleasant by comparison. But because the doctors had said all the alternatives were hoaxes, I hadnt bothered to investigate them.
Education, religion, the media and government taught me to revere doctors. The doctors could deceive and frighten me, slowly and painfully kill me, get paid handsomely for it and go to heaven for good intent. It didnt make any sense.
Because I was left disabled, I couldnt afford child support. Ben adopted Jeff.
Please fasten your seat belts. We are beginning our descent to Cincinnati Airport. Thank you for joining us and we hope__
I tune out the pilot as I look over the rain-glistening, rich green landscape of Kentucky. I wonder why it is called the Greater Cincinnati Airport when its across the river at Stringtown, Kentucky. I suppose that if it were named the Stringtown Airport no one would ever fly there.
The sun emerges through the passing rain clouds. The First Book: We Want to Live! the Primal Diet Im in a tornado like Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz. Four doctors, who are circling around me, direct me to go with them. I sense Ill meet death. Their voices sound like the ringing of only one giant gong. The deep-echoing sound emanates from all four of their mouths, quadraphonically. It makes my heart pound until I think itll burst from my chest. Its odd that the ringing doesnt disturb my ears and head, only my heart.
I refuse to go with the doctors. Suddenly they all wilt and die. I am happy I didnt go with them. But the ringing continues and my heart pounds. I become aware that the phone is ringing and I reach for it. I anticipate that the airline has an earlier flight. Then I realize it is already morning.
I pick up the receiver. I remember my dream and the fear of death. I dread what the voice will say.
Hello.
This is your mother.
Hi, my voice cracks.
Its pouring here and I thought you should bring your boots and a raincoat. I have lots of umbrellas if you need one.
Please! Mom, dont greet me with, This is your mother , I want to say. She seemed apprehensive, as if she were going to tell me Jeff is dead. It scared me! I take a deep breath and calm down.
I recall her umbrellas being flowered, bright and feminine. Thanks, Mom, Ill bring a coat and my own umbrella. I take another deep breath, Have you seen Jeff at all?
Im waiting until you get here and well all go together. I called the hospital and talked with the head nurse. She said the doctors all agree his signs are worsening. Too much water has collected in his brain and theres no hope hell pull through with this kind of brain damage. She takes a breath, I just want you to be prepared. Well see you this afternoon.
We say good-bye.
I have avoided Jeff since he was two-years-old. I have been afraid of getting attached and losing him again. Have I lost all chance to get to know him?
The alarm goes off and jolts me back to the physical world. I get up and go to the couch. I stretch out and lean my head against the arm. I cross my feet tightly. I hug a pillow.
Okay, okay. Moms a nurse. Like most nurses what she knows is what the doctors know. Whether from illness or injury, medical science believes that germs, like bacteria and virus, cause disease - the germ theory. They believe that germs are enemies of healing.
The standard approach is to attack germs (bacteria and virus) with medical drugs and poisons to stop them. These drugs simultaneously attack, destroy and deteriorate the body. Drugs are like bombs, they most often kill, cripple, harm or destroy everything within their influence. They cause subtle or obvious mutations. The least harm that they do is create imbalances.
Medical science ignores that bacteria inspires healing and that drugs kill bacteria, and therefore, that drugs prevent healing.
My approach is that bacteria, yeast, mold and virus are all part of a natural process for detoxification. Bacteria, yeast, mold and virus decompose body obstructions, such as dead or weak cells and tissue. When the body has too many obstructions, it has disease. The body encourages the detoxification process so it can cleanse itself of accumulated wastes that cause weaknesses. Or damaged tissue in cases of injury. They also dissolve and eliminate foreign substances, like rust. That is, if the body is fed the proper nutrients during and after the detoxification processes.
For example, colds and flus are like changing the oil and flushing a car's radiator. If the body is allowed to take its course with colds and flus several times a year, or whenever necessary, an increase in health is the natural result. That is, if at the same time one feeds his or her body good nutrients. For instance, oranges and/or bananas blended with raw fertile eggs and unheated honey; a smoothie. However, if these cleansing and renewing processes are interfered with or stopped by using medication, the body advances faster toward deterioration, aging and disease. I remind myself that instead of attacking the body, I nurture it.
I feel comforted that Jeffs doctors prognosis isnt based on what I know. And that Jeff is still alive. I will work with Jeffs body to clean out the dead and damaged tissues, and to regenerate new cells to replace them.
I am sitting at a window seat not far from first-class on this early morning flight to Cincinnati. I am facing the partition wall that separates the classes. It reminds me for a moment of the wailing wall in Israel. I feel a little claustrophobic. Will I celebrate life? Or will I be wailing for the dead? I have to stop thinking like that.
I feel excited by the gravitational pull as we climb. I notice outside the portal window that the smog isnt too bad on this golden sunlit Los Angeles morning. With amusement, I take it as a good omen. We loop over the Pacific Ocean. The plane levels off in the direction of our destination. The flight attendants push their carts down the aisles.
Its Saturday, four days from October, a time that marks a measurable decline of tourists in Los Angeles. The thought comes that I am a tourist visiting Earth. Whenever I talk to someone who doesnt know me about my view on health and my life-style, Im considered bonkers.
I look around me and I see so much bodily suffering. I feel compassion for the people I see who arent happy because they lack health. An unhappy-looking woman wheezes, then swallows three pills. At least seven people are already drinking or being served alcohol.
I recall when years ago I drank to relax and feel good. I couldnt go to sleep at night without drinking a bottle of bourbon or gin.
I was nineteen years old and had been living in Los Angeles six months. I was making good money. I yearned for Mary and Jeff, even though I knew I was too emotionally distorted to make family life work to anyones benefit. So I partied a lot and enjoyed freedom from all responsibilities except work and child support. I wouldnt admit alcohol was affecting my work and studies and I ignored the symptoms that it was hurting my body. It relaxed my memories and guilt.
I think about Jeff being in the hospital and I recall my advent into cancer. It was a Sunday night in March, one month from my twentieth birthday. I had just returned from a weekend in Tijuana, Mexico, with friends. I was dizzy from drink. I stood over my toilet to urinate. I became dizzier and nauseous. As I collapsed to my knees I whacked my penis on the cold porcelain (I remember I had been accident prone as a child). A surge from my stomach curled my body and put my face in the toilet. Blood trailed with the vomit.
The doctor pointed to a very dark spot on my X-ray, Its probably only an ulcer. Youre too young and strong to have cancer.
Dont let looks fool you. How do we find out?
Its an ulcer, he decided, and well treat it.
After six months of drinking bottle after bottle of Maalox, I decided I should have stock in pharmaceuticals. Instead of being addicted to alcohol I was addicted to chalky Maalox. Maalox didnt have the good taste and didnt give me the feeling that alcohol did. I was sure that if I died a chalk factory would make a fortune with my remains.
By November, I was looking up from an operating table. The room was blurring and I was going under for stomach surgery to remedy my ulcer. After recovering enough from surgery (the doctors had said), I received radiation therapy for five or six...or was it ten weeks. (My memory went into a slump during my year of cancer therapies and has never fully recovered.)
After returning from the August family reunion, I underwent chemotherapy for leukemia for my blood and bone cancers. With each chemo session I got sicker. Finally, after three months of the treatments I wouldnt tolerate it. That was eighteen years ago. I was only twenty-one but I remember as if it were yesterday.
The cancers not responding to the chemotherapy either. Well try again in three weeks, Dr. Goldman said matter-of-factly.
Doctor, I seem to be missing the point here. Lets retrace whats happened to me. I had a stomach ulcer. I had surgery to correct it. As a result of the surgery, I havent been able to digest anything very well. Food seems to just sit in my digestive tract. I have lost my sexual drive. If I happen to have an orgasm it can be extremely painful. How in the world was my penis effected by stomach surgery?
I dont know, he said.
I thought for a moment and then continued, I have terrible acne (the one common problem I have never had before). My waist line has gone from twenty-eight to thirty-four inches. And I have redeveloped very painful muscle spasms around my heart.
Then I had radiation therapy to stop the keloidal tissue from growing. As a result of the radiation, I have burns that are mainly scar tissue. My spine is cauterized and I can barely turn to either side and I am always painful. I now have psoriasis and bursitis. I have inflamed, sore and bleeding gums. I have come down with chronic weakness, exhaustion and joint pains. I couldnt, and still cant even lift a large dictionary with my right arm because my shoulder and elbow ache so badly. My knees ache, too. They are always cold and numb--
Well continue the treatments because theres always a chance we can stop the cancer from doing any more damage, he said.
Please, listen, Im leading up to something. Then I was diagnosed with cancer of the blood and bones. I am receiving chemotherapy. As a result, Im as pale as a ghost. I vomit no matter what I try to eat. I cant be away from a toilet for five minutes without a diaper. Im bloated from head to toe. My acne is so bad that a film-director friend described my face as looking like raw hamburger. I have only a few sparse patches of hair and its graying like Im an old man. My teeth are rotting. My diabetes is worse. Homicidal and suicidal thoughts plague me--
Your anxiety and anger are side effects of the chemotherapy. Its normal, he interjects.
Normal? Yesterday, I heard one of the biology professors say that radiation, especially radiation therapy, transforms certain body substances into toxins that are cancer-causing. Why would you treat keloidal tissue with a treatment that causes cancer?