June–July 2003
Michael
As the weeks passed from the day of my diagnosis, Marilu and I became more determined to find another urologist and also an internist to help me turn my life around. Marilu is very plugged into the medical community. As a writer of books on health, and as a celebrity actress, she has access to the best doctors and healers in the world. With her help, I was able to break out of the circle of medical malpractitioners who had treated me up to this point and find people who had open minds and healing hands. She found me a new urologist, Dr. Sharron Mee, who allowed intuition to be part of her diagnostic technique. This new urologist looked at my charts and agreed with my previous doctor that I could go awhile without another cystoscopy. But we insisted that I get another cystoscopy as soon as possible. Somehow we realized that the previous doctor had not been as thorough as he should have been. Dr. Mee sensed that we were onto something and agreed to do an examination quickly, but still we had to wait six weeks after my cystoscopy of May 22 before I could undergo anesthesia again.
In early June I took a trip with Marilu and her brother Lorin to Costa Rica to visit an organic sugar plantation. I was in a haze at this point with the diagnosis fresh in my mind and my health still at a very precarious stage. We got to San Jose and found our driver. I spoke to the driver in Spanish the entire two-hour trip while driving through the city streets and out through the countryside. As we got closer to the plantation, we could see a volcano looming in the distance. We arrived at a hotel that seemed to exist only for the plantation’s guests. As we drove up the dirt road to the hotel we saw a fair-skinned man doggedly jogging along the path in the tropical heat. I turned to Marilu and said, “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”
We got to the hotel and met our hostess, Pauline, an Irish lady, who asked us if we had seen her English husband, Nigel, taking his run up the road. Indeed we had, and I shot a knowing glance at Marilu. We settled into our room and made love in the sultry heat. The walls were thin and it was easy to hear our neighbors trying to do the same thing we were doing. But it felt good being away; I felt like I could escape the cancer.
I realized during this trip how different Marilu and I had become over the many years since the University of Chicago. I had lived in Brazil for ten years, my first wife was Brazilian, and my children had been raised bilingual, English and Portuguese. I was very much at home anywhere in Latin America. Costa Rica seemed so familiar to me, but not for Marilu, who had lived in America all those years. But despite her success and fast-paced lifestyle, she was still the Marilu I knew back in Hyde Park, the girl from Chicago who wanted to dance and sing all of the time. Now I could see firsthand her love of family, her openness, her affection.
It was hard to relax, even in this beautiful setting, when I’d realize with panic that I should be getting some treatment, any treatment! I kept wondering what I could be doing to increase my chances of survival. Would I start to piss blood again? If I did, what would that mean? Was the cancer growing inside me even while I tried to change my diet and get the stress out of my life? Was it possible to destress while worrying about an active cancer growing inside your bladder? These thoughts were the constant backdrop for my trip as Marilu and I fell deeper in love.
Without Marilu, I would have lost my sanity. What was so reassuring was that she had accepted me for the poor cancer-ridden fool I was when I arrived on her doorstep. She did not step back in horror as some told her to do. She never hesitated, even though she knew the risk that I could be surgically mutilated or even die.
We took a tour of the sugar plantation. I was struck by the fact that this huge plantation, hundreds of acres of cultivated sugar cane, had only a few acres of organic sugar. The contrast illustrated what the world is up against to truly change the way people eat and the way agriculture raises food. We saw the workers wielding machetes, hauling the sugarcane out on wagons pulled by ancient tractors. And all the time I wondered, What am I doing and why? I kept thinking that I needed to face my disease, not run from it. Yet there I was wandering around, acting like an ecotourist. But still I tried to relax and enjoy the trip.
It was ironic that we had gone to a sugar plantation, as sugar is one thing that cancer patients must avoid. Sugar feeds the tumors, and especially refined, granulated sugar, even if it is organic. The sugar also tends to make the body more acidic, to neutralize the body’s natural alkalinity. Tumors cannot grow in an alkaline environment, so returning the body to its natural alkaline state can treat and prevent cancer.
I came back from Costa Rica and had my first appointment with my new internist, Dr. Soram Khalsa. Dr. Khalsa, I learned from Marilu, is an internist from Cedars-Sinai who has a private practice in Beverly Hills. Khalsa is from Cleveland, but converted to Sikhism as a young man. He practices a combination he calls “the best of East and West.” The medical technology of the West has resulted in the greatest diagnostic tools available. Unfortunately, with this diagnostic power has not come wisdom. It seems like the more precisely a doctor can diagnose an illness, the less he can prescribe a cure. Western medicine has literally gotten lost among the noise of symptoms, the clutter of test results, and the temptations of capitalist medicine, so that it cannot find the path to healing. This idea that we are going to turn off one gene to stop a disease or create some miracle drug that will go into the bloodstream and zap all of the errant cancer cells is wishful thinking and helps the patient and the doctor avoid considering the cause of the cancer and the possible natural cure. In contrast, Dr. Khalsa takes the diagnostic tools of the West and then relates their findings to the body as a whole. He seeks to strengthen the body’s own defense mechanisms, to encourage the body’s immune system to ward off disease. This natural way of healing, aided by modern medicine, allows him to move a patient toward health, and, as he does, the body can then heal itself.
I immediately saw the logic in Dr. Khalsa’s methods. I was used to problem solving, and understanding the entire system before suggesting changes or improvements has always made sense to me. Dr. Khalsa (and Marilu, of course) had done the research. They had thought about how a person’s actions impact their body and their health, from their diet, to their personal hygiene, to how they discharge waste. And Dr. Khalsa truly enlightened me to the way that all of the bodily functions working together can greatly strengthen the immune system, which is key to treating a cancer, any cancer.
Dr. Khalsa began with an exhaustive diagnosis of my body and my lifestyle. He tested my blood, my urine, and my stool. He muscle-tested me to determine my level of stress and the state of my adrenals. He hooked me up to a machine and checked my vital organs for toxic stress. He then looked at the parts and related them to the whole. When he challenged me to write an autobiography that focused on my toxic exposure, I began with my childhood, my mother convinced by doctors not to breast-feed, but rather to give me formula since I was a twin and she would never be able to handle breast-feeding us both. With her doctor’s approval, my mother smoked right through her pregnancy. Raised in Utah as a young man, listening to radio reports of fallout clouds wafting over the city from the nearby nuclear test grounds of Nevada, I was told to stay indoors on certain days to avoid the worst effects of the radiation. Living near the polluted Jordan River, I—along with the other kids—chased the pesticide-spraying trucks spewing out their DDT to keep down the mosquitoes. Working in my teen years at a nursery, where I used formaldehyde to clean planter boxes until I got sick from chemical poisoning. Riding in the car with the windows rolled up while both of my parents smoked in the front seat. My own smoking habit beginning when I was only fifteen. Working in the engine room at sea, breathing benzene and diesel fumes. Working with chlorine and ethylene. Living in the pollution of New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Rio de Janeiro. How could my poor body not become a toxic waste dump?
Dr. Khalsa diagnosed me as the most stressed-out, intoxicated patient he had ever seen. But my stress was not only chemical related. The stress of a failed marriage, children out of control, parents out of control, and business partners out of control all affected me deeply. Maybe I kept things in; maybe I made things worse for myself. But the worst part was that I did not know how to change my behavior. With this health crisis I was finally going to have to learn or die because my normal was killing me.
Marilu
The month of June was spent getting the core of Michael’s medical team in place. His first meeting with Dr. Khalsa was everything I’d hoped it would be: Khalsa determining how serious Michael would be as a patient and Michael’s willingness to do whatever it took to save his life. When I commented on what a good patient he was turning out to be, he knowingly explained, “Listens to and follows directions.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“ ‘Listens to and follows directions’ is the box my first-grade teacher checked on my report card. She gave me a check plus, in fact,” he said with pride. This from a seventies radical contrarian who loves bucking the status quo and challenges everything. I knew he was getting on board with this whole new way of living his life when he was eating my kale, arugula, and spinach salad on a regular basis and eschewing alcohol almost entirely.
On June 3, 2003, less than a week after Michael’s urologist insisted, “Come back in September,” we were in the offices of another urologist, Dr. Sharron Mee, who had been recommended by my BFF and favorite hypochondriac (and psychic-lover) Sharon Feldstein. Dr. Mee was a blond bombshell with colorful clothes and a take-no-prisoners, Erin Brockovich attitude. She recommended the immunotherapy BCG and was surprised that we were insisting on another cystoscopy so soon after Michael’s recent one. She explained that we might not get a legitimate reading since the area of resection—the “I lopped it off” part—would still be inflamed. She wanted to wait at least six weeks to go back in there, which seemed reasonable enough, except that I wanted answers as soon as possible. But Michael’s travel schedule during that time was already packed, so it made it easier to wait out the time for answers.
Michael’s business takes him all over the world, so not only was Japan on the calendar, but he and I had two trips of our own booked—one to Costa Rica and another to Europe at the beginning of July when Rob was taking the boys on a vacation. The cystoscopy was set for July 24 with the hope that Michael’s doctor was right, and that CIS would not be present. Regardless of the outcome, Dr. Mee advised that BCG treatments, once a week for six weeks, would commence immediately after the cystoscopy and that six rounds of BCG would probably be enough to take care of all of it. I was hopefully optimistic, but the more I read about bladder cancer, the more I felt Michael’s doctor had misdiagnosed the big picture.
Days after meeting Dr. Mee, we were off to the Sucanat plantation in Costa Rica, which couldn’t have been more exotic and romantic. Pauline McGee of Wholesome Sweeteners had invited me after seeing me on The View demonstrating Thanksgiving recipes using Sucanat, an acronym of sugar cane natural. It’s from the sugarcane plant, but it is completely organic with only crushing, heating, and drying as processes (as opposed to most refined sugars, which go through several processes including being bleached, cooked in cow bones, and stripped of 90 percent of any nutrients they may have). Sucanat is also healthier than even brown sugar, which is just sugar with a dye job. Sucanat is definitely used for what I like to call pleasure food like desserts, but you end up using less of it because it tastes like a real food, rather than the sickeningly sweet chemical-like flavor of sugar. I first discovered Sucanat in 1985 when I was looking for an all-organic sugar for dessert recipes, and at the time, it was the easiest and healthiest sweetener for recipes that called for sugar.
It seemed strange going so far away while we waited for Michael’s next results, but with Khalsa and now Dr. Mee on board I felt we were on the right path. Besides, when I asked Dr. Mee about whether or not we should go on vacation, she stopped what she was doing, looked at me seriously, and said, “Don’t cancel your trips. You two should be going away when you can. You don’t know the future.” I knew she meant anything could happen with Michael’s health, so seize the opportunity to travel when you can. But I was feeling so sure that with the right information and protocol, Michael would not only be okay, he’d be better than ever.
Costa Rica was everything that we expected and more. We completely bonded with our hosts and were impressed with the tour of the Sucanat plantation, with its simple and organic farming. Every meal we ate was vegan and another example of clean, fresh organic ingredients beautifully prepared in a simple way. As I’ve said for years, “Learn to love the food that loves you.” And this food loved us. And, more important, Michael was falling in love with the food and the whole idea of no meat and no dairy. We walked through the hills near our hotel, talking about how to figure out a plan of action, brainstorming about what he had to prepare for his health history, and talking about marriage and what it means to be truly committed to someone even in the face of adversity. Walking through fire, as it were. And how so many couples we knew were either breaking up or having affairs to get through it all. We were so new to each other and had been through so much with other people that we couldn’t pretend that relationships weren’t difficult, and we promised concerted effort and open communication at all times. To this day, Michael and I refer to that walk in Costa Rica as one that solidified our commitment to each other. In sickness and in health is not where most people start a relationship, but we were both honest about what we were getting into and embraced the challenge.
After Costa Rica, Michael was off to Japan for work, and I was busy getting the boys ready for a summer camp near the house and shooting the Pilates DVD to go with my Body Victory kit. I couldn’t believe how much had happened since the Body Victory shoot in San Francisco just three months earlier. For years I tried to do a health program as an infomercial, but I was told over and over again, “Nobody wants health.” After years of begging and trying to prove to Bill Guthy and Greg Rinker that health was the new frontier, they finally took a chance and allowed me to develop a twenty-one-day program based on The 30-Day Total Health Makeover book. They were still worried that nobody wanted health, so there was a lot riding on the early test results for this Body Victory infomercial. But it wasn’t only an eating program with recipes; the package was also to contain motivational tapes and the Pilates video I was shooting that week. Since my first class on Thursday, January 4, 1979, Pilates has been my favorite form of exercise. Whether I was getting in shape for some project or warming up before a performance of Chicago on Broadway or Annie Get Your Gun on the road, the only way I could warm up both my body and my voice was to do a Pilates mat workout. This was the routine I was including in the package and shooting this week. It still strikes me as ironic to be told “Nobody wants health” when I was trying to save Michael’s life with health at the same time.
Michael’s second visit with Khalsa was two and a half hours long and he discussed the personal health history that we wrote about in his health manifesto. Dr. Khalsa also thoroughly examined him and muscle-tested him for supplements. Now that’s the kind of thorough doctor I was used to! At the end of it, Khalsa asked Michael what he did for a living. When Michael answered, “I’m a publisher.” Khalsa said, “No. You’re a cancer patient. Are you here to survive for five years? Or are you here to live a long and healthy life?” I knew what Khalsa meant. It’s not enough to put your cancer in remission for five years, only to have it recur because you not only didn’t change your normal, but you’d also compromised your immune system to the point where it couldn’t fight off anything.
After his long meeting with Khalsa, Michael and I had a flight to catch later that day to London, where we were traveling to Europe for the first time together and meeting many of his friends and coworkers. Full of excitement, we knew it would be the same kind of sexy, intimate trip Costa Rica had been, but this time Michael was armed with more information, a better plan, and a ton of supplements. We were taking control.
Michael
I thought I knew what I was battling—bladder cancer—and that it was a relatively clean fight. Thankfully, the cancer was contained in my bladder and had not spread. There was a proven treatment, the immunotherapy known as BCG that afforded me a decent chance of beating the cancer. I was relatively young and strong compared to most men who get this disease.
When Dr. Khalsa told me during one of my initial examinations that if I wanted to survive this thing, I needed to take it seriously and make my life’s work be about beating it, I thought he was being a bit melodramatic. I still retained some of the bravado that I had had when first diagnosed. The severity of my situation had not sunk in. I thought I was special, that somehow I would escape this disease without losing part of my body. I was glad I did not have prostate cancer, the cancer that all my friends seemed to get, but how did I know that bladder cancer was any better? There was no point in choosing between cancers.
A powerful technique Dr. Khalsa taught me was visualization, something I had heard about before in other contexts but only saw clearly as an option now. I learned that there are two parts to visualization for the cancer patient. As difficult and unnerving as it may be, it helps to try to understand where your cancer came from. Each cancer is unique to the person who has grown those errant cells. No two cancers are alike; they are like snowflakes. Cancer grows out of one’s body, and if one is not willing to accept the cancer as a part of one’s self, then that person is doomed. So attempt to accept that the cancer grows out of you. This acceptance can mature into love that enhances your appreciation for your body and your life. The cancer is a manifestation of imbalances that must be corrected if you are to survive. Visualization, which is a form of meditation, allows you to go deep into the body and see the cancer and from where it came. This process is continual, in that, once started, the visualization can come during a prolonged silent meditation or sporadically as you dwell on other things during the day. Once you have seen the cancer, it no longer seems so frightening. Seeing where it came from allows you to see the path to the cure. The second part of visualization is imagining or seeing the cure: visualizing the tumors drying up and the healthy tissue returning. This visualization has healing powers, as it orients the body in a positive way and helps to relieve stress and anxiety.
This was all well and good. But, as I saw when I tried to modify my diet a few years previous, change can be difficult for family and friends. As I altered my lifestyle my cruel father noticed that I did not drink like I had before; I did not pig out on barbecued pork ribs. He would often say to me, “You may not live to be a hundred, but it will seem like you lived to be a hundred.” He thought that my life would drag by as I gave up all of the small pleasures that gave his life meaning, that made it go by quickly. No more meat, no more cheese, no more strong alcohol. No more smoking dope, no more gluttonous orgies of eating burnt flesh. To be faced with so many lifestyle changes and to also have to listen to the world belittle you, that is something most healthy people do not imagine when they think of serious illness. The desire to return to normal in your life, to leave the illness behind and act like it never happened, becomes the overriding concern of most people. And if you are trying to return to normal, the world treats you with sympathy and respect. But if you try to change your life to save yourself—to move forward instead of backward—the world treats you like a traitor.
On the other hand, I was now entering a lifestyle where people were trying to heal me and themselves. There were so many positive messages, so many kind and gracious people, that it overwhelmed the negativity I felt from others. And then there were the positive effects of the changes. How much better did I feel, did I look! How quickly my body responded to the good treatment it was getting. There was no going back, as I now could feel my body strengthening each day.
Marilu was used to the awkwardness one feels when people are so concerned to find the right food for the vegans, the food “that you can eat.” It is so odd that the implications of food choices, none of which have anything to do with health and nutrition, are so important to most people. But nutrition, which would seem to be the point of eating, is hardly thought of at all. Not eating meat does not mean I can’t sit at the table with meat eaters or barbecue a chicken at my house. It is way too complicated to try to talk people into eating any way other than what they want at that moment. Any other thoughts contradict their need to have what they want when they want it. So people must want to change, and that usually only happens when someone gets a wake-up call, like a stroke or cancer.
There is an entire industry dependent on people trying to get back to normal. Artificial hips and knees, elbow surgeries, hair implants. Most doctors have a stake in the status quo; their jobs, or so it seems to me, are to return the patient to their normal lifestyle. How many times do we see commercials on television where the emphasis is on getting back to your job, to your life, to the golf course as the ultimate goal of cancer treatment? The doctors just don’t believe that their patients are strong enough, or motivated enough, to change their behaviors, so they dumb down their “cures” and thereby condemn their patients. Add to this the fact that doctors are generally so ignorant about nutrition, it can make one wonder what inspires them to go into medicine in the first place. What can be more obvious than the fact that food is the most important contributor to health or illness?
Hippocrates said: “Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food.” Marilu says, “Learn to love the food that loves you.” I learned from Marilu’s books that food is what you take into your body every day; it is the building block of your body and thus your life. As I thought more and more about my diet, I realized that I had been poisoning myself for years. On airplanes I went from ginger ale, to cranberry juice, to water with no ice. The longer I went without sweetened or salty food, without meat or fatty milk, the cleaner my taste buds became. I was able to taste my food, and with that came a big change. I was able to finally free myself from the salty-then-sweet pendulum and go for nutrition. And how grateful my body was for this relief!
I learned from Marilu’s book Total Health Makeover that if food is contaminated with chemicals or pesticides then those pollutants go into your body. If the food is dead meat, killed under harsh conditions, then that dead meat will bring death to your body. The larger the fish, the more mercury, as the bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and thus concentrates the mercury in its body. Likewise with animals. If we eat cows then we concentrate all of the pollution found in the cow in our bodies. The same is true of dairy products. The more concentrated the dairy product, the worse it is for the human body. Butter is worse than milk, cheese is worse than butter. How can anyone believe that curdled and aged milk can be good for anyone? How did we reach this point of disconnect with our bodies? If the food is alive, like green vegetables, sprouts, seeds, then that food gives life. There is nothing in a meat diet that cannot be found in a better and more pure form in plants. Think: in the same way that a child recoils from the smell of alcohol and finds it disgusting, the child also recoils from the putrid smell of “quality” cheese. The child knows better; the adult has grown ignorant.
By learning how to eat properly I stopped poisoning myself on a daily basis. And it did not take long for the benefits to appear. Despite the strain my body was going through dealing with an active tumor, I was actually getting stronger. As I learned to make my food my medicine, my food began to nourish me in a way that it had not ever before. (Remember, I was never breast-fed.) The net effect was much larger than simply cutting out a bad habit; I had substituted a bad behavior with a good behavior.
Detoxification is a normal bodily function that is also practically ignored by the medical community. Like a well-designed engine, many of the major systems of the body are there to carry away waste material that in our industrial age includes dangerous chemical residues and heavy metals that should not be left in the body. A Ferrari with a rag stuck in the tailpipe will not go far. The circulatory system, the urinary system, the lymphatic system, the pulmonary system, and the digestive system are all involved with waste management and discharge. If any of these systems is disrupted or does not work optimally, then the entire organism is endangered. Yet how much time is spent by the average physician, and by the average patient, on unclogging these systems? They are preoccupied with what goes in the body, but pay no attention to what comes out (or does not come out). A doctor will prescribe stool softeners and laxatives to a person with constipation but will react in horror to the idea of a colon cleansing that addresses the problem directly.
The ancient Romans were very much aware of the healthful benefits of keeping the colon clean, and in the United States colon cleansing was considered an essential part of healthcare through the 1930s. But somewhere along the line, with the encouragement and connivance of pharmaceutical companies and doctors, constipation became a condition to treat with drugs. Similarly, indigestion is treated with pills, rather than looking for the cause of the indigestion, which almost invariably is food related.
As a full-time cancer patient, I realized that detox is the one sure way to address what “caused” the cancer—no one ever gets to know for sure what exactly caused his or her individual cancer. The truth is that many different things caused my cancer, though there may be one specific activity that can be singled out as the main culprit. Mine was smoking. Bladder cancer was smoking related. But how can that be? Lung cancer and cigarette smoking are linked in an obvious way, since you pull the smoke through your lungs as you breathe. But bladder cancer? Using visualization, I was able to ponder how the smoking impacted my bladder. It is a long way from the lungs to the bladder. But smoking is dehydrating, which is one reason it is so bad for the skin. When the body has less water, it produces less urine. Visualizing this process, I saw that the contaminants from the cigarettes are flushed through the body (leaving traces of tar and other pollutants along the way) and end up in the bladder, mixed with the urine. This toxic brew then sits in the bladder waiting to be discharged. I know this was true because I smelled the toxins in my urine as I began to detox. They smelled metallic from the heavy metals such as lead and mercury that I had in my bloodstream. The worse the contamination, the worse the smell. As I poured gallons of water through my system I felt the tissue begin to clean. The return to a responsive suppleness made me feel younger and less brittle. How could I not be encouraged by all this? And why would I not continue my health journey, especially because I got to take this journey with Marilu?
Dr. Khalsa recommended that I get an ultraviolet sauna to help detox out the fat cells that hold the toxins, because fat is a poison carrier. I placed the sauna in my garage, and it was big enough for my brother Rob and me to sit in it. It was a real sauna made out of wood, but using light to heat up the body instead of heating the air to heat up the body.
One day I was having a sauna when the doorbell rang. As I got out of the sauna I saw my ex-girlfriend Gloria down at the garage door, and she was very worried about me. She had heard about the diagnosis and was there to make sure I was okay. It was a strange encounter as I was now embarked on a whole other life, yet how close the past life seemed.