If I were to contract cancer, I would never turn to a certain standard for the therapy of this disease. Cancer patients who stay away from these centers have some chance to make it.
–Professor Georges Mathé, “Scientific Medicine Stymied,” Médecines Nouvelles, 1989
The first night home, I sat on the porch of my bedroom, and as I looked out at the calm, beautiful view below me, I was stunned by the week I had just experienced. I was weak and unable to eat. I had lost ten pounds in seven days, I was dehydrated, and my usually strong, confident voice shocked those I spoke with on the telephone. “You don’t sound like yourself,” my sister Maureen said over and over.
I couldn’t “get it up” for anyone. The sadness was overwhelming. It permeated my cells. Thinking that I was going to die, thinking that life was over, had gotten into my being. I just couldn’t shake the sadness. My cat, who is an outdoor cat, somewhere between wild and domestic, and usually stays outside all night hunting, insisted on coming into our bedroom and sleeping curled up next to me. He stayed there for days. Very strange behavior for him. Sweet Ficus … I love that cat.
I couldn’t watch television. Obama had been elected president, and I had missed it. I never saw any of it. I had no energy, I had no happiness. I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t going to die; they had been wrong. Yet I couldn’t shake the sadness. The diagnosis had scared me to death. I was shaken and I had to figure out a way to recover.
The only thing they did right was to save my life in the emergency room, which was no small thing. I am grateful for that; they were wonderful. They reacted fast, they made me feel that they were in control and were going to take care of things, and they did. I needed them.
After that I should have been sent home. Instead, that was when the nightmare began.
Two weeks went by. Bruce and Caroline came over and brought yummy lamb shanks and mashed potatoes for dinner. The tastiness of Caroline’s great cooking helped me begin to get my appetite back. Having my grandchildren doing their homework at the dinner table was part of my healing: normalcy, the routine of life, nothing fancy, just loving family and good nutritious food. That was what brought me back.
Ficus followed me everywhere. He didn’t seem to want to go outside and hunt in the evenings. If we put him outside, he sat by the window and cried until we let him back in.
We celebrated Bruce’s birthday with a cake my granddaughter made. It was so important to me to be with them, to be home, to be safe, to be normal. These things heal a traumatized heart. They knew it, and it also helped them to see me get my strength back.
“Dr. Internist is on the phone,” Alan said one day at about the two-and-a-half-week mark.
My heart started pounding. “Hi,” I said anxiously. I knew he had information on the cultures.
“Well, good news,” he said. “You don’t have TB or leprosy!”
I felt like laughing, I mean, geez … leprosy!
“We don’t have all the cultures back,” he continued. “But seeing these results, I feel real good that the rest of the cultures are going to be clear. Dr. Infectious wants you to continue taking the medicine until the cultures come back from the CDC, and that will be another four weeks.” I listened to him but I had already decided not to take the medicines. I know of patients who were on them and they developed terrible side effects, including blindness, neuropathy, and jaundice. Why would I subject myself to that?
I sensed he knew I wasn’t going to take medicines without a definite diagnosis. Finally, here was a doctor who, when outside of the hospital setting, was trying to be straight with me. Doctors in the hospital are muzzled by hospital protocols.
Two weeks later, Dr. Internist called again.
“Something interesting came in today from the lab. One culture, just one of the many, came back with a rare strain of valley fever.”
Wow! There. We had it. It was just as Caroline had suspected and what she had questioned the doctors about repeatedly but had been brushed off.
Valley fever, coccidiomycosis. Symptoms: fever (check), chest pain due to intense constriction, shortness of breath (check), anaphylactic shock leading to death (check), chest pressure resembling heart attack (check), chills (check), night sweats (check), fatigue (check), joint aches (check), red spotty rash, painful red bumps and welts all over the body (check), residual infection as in pneumonia (check), can look like cancer on X-ray if not diagnosed properly and can lead to biopsies (check and check), can be seen as TB if not properly diagnosed (check).
In the hospital I kept saying to the doctors, “I’m having an allergic attack or I was poisoned.” Dr. Oncologist repeated over and over, “This is cancer. No herb could do this.”
Valley fever is a fungus prevalent in the desert Southwest, prolific among migrant workers because they work in soil. The spores in this fungus live in the top two layers of soil, and people who work in their gardens (I work in my organic garden at my desert home constantly) or those exposed to dust in the New Mexico regions (I go on archaeological digs with my friend Forrest Fenn on his property outside of Santa Fe regularly) are more likely to get it. Imagine, just a few questions could have opened up the possibility that I did not have cancer and that we were dealing with something else. Obviously, somewhere between my digs and my garden, I had breathed in this fungus. It may have been dormant in me for years, but it is clear that something had knocked out my immune system.
I went to Dr. Galitzer’s office in Santa Monica to have an IV of vitamin C and glutathione. I needed to build up my body. The vitamin C would strengthen my entire system after all the trauma and physical damage that had been done, and the glutathione would start the detoxification I was going to need over the next few months. While I was there he said something that immediately stopped me in my tracks: “I used to be an ER doc and when a patient came into emergency, we automatically did a CBC blood test and we always checked for eosinophils.”
“What are those?” I asked.
“If the eosinophils come back high, then we know we are dealing with a poisoning or an allergic attack,” he said.
When I got home from Dr. Galitzer’s that day I pulled out all the lab work I had kept in a file and looked at the blood test results I had obtained from the emergency room.
There it was—eosinophils. A normal range was 0 to 5. My level was at 16! It was right there. I had been slammed by this life-threatening reaction, and there it was, the results, right in front of me, clearly for all to see. This meant that no one, no one, apparently bothered to look at the blood test. Had they done so they would have realized they were dealing with a poisoning or an allergic attack, and it might have led them to realize I had valley fever. But instead all the professionals went right to the CAT scan and diagnosed me with full-body cancer, which put me and my family into severe trauma. I was horribly, frankly stupidly, misdiagnosed.
Having a true diagnosis started to relax me. Now I knew what I was dealing with and I could take the steps I was comfortable with to get this fungus out of my body. In reading about it, I realized it wasn’t going to be easy. Fungus is trickier than say, a staph infection that you wipe out with heavy-duty antibiotics. A fungus needs antifungals. And it was very clear that the medical community was not very informed about how to deal with it. But I wasn’t worried. I am a researcher. I would find the right antidote, hopefully herbal, and kill this thing.
I was beginning to feel better, getting my strength back. One day Ficus didn’t want to come in and lie on the bed with me. I smiled and said to Alan, “I’m well. Ficus just told me so.”
Most people would have gone along with the treatments involved in this wrong diagnosis. How changed my life would be today. I shudder to think how often this happens to others.
The only ray of hope I felt throughout the entire craziness of the hospital fiasco, in the darkest depths of being given my death sentence of full-body cancer, was that I knew there are doctors out there who are curing cancer without drugs.
My awful experience became the fuel for the book you hold in your hands. It led me to write Knockout so that, if I could help it, no one else would ever feel as stressed, frightened, and helpless as I did during that week in the hospital.
Had I been a different kind of patient, I most likely would have accepted full-body chemotherapy for what turned out to be a horrible misdiagnosis. After all, my CAT scan showed, proved, full-body cancer. And as we know, the doctor is always right; in my case it was six doctors confirming my demise. When I told them, “I would rather die than take your therapy,” I was treated as insolent, ignorant, stupid, and smug.
There are many tragedies of cancer. And one of them is that there are many patients who walk into the present “standard of care” therapy with complete trust, not knowing the correct questions to ask. They listen to their doctors, who say things like “The tumor will respond nicely.” Well, what exactly does that mean? Or the oncologist will say, “The tumor will shrink.” They never say cure, heal, or destroy. They can’t, because in most cases that is just not true.
Patients are not offered chemosensitivity tests to determine if the chemo they will be administered is even a fit. The patients do not even know to ask about such testing because for the most part they do not know it exists.
Because of my own horrendous misdiagnosis and the fact that I have a louder voice, I feel I must express my outrage at the present system and the “standard of care” protocol that is presented as the only option. This is just not so. There are other treatments.
The forward-looking, courageous doctors in this book are thinking outside of the box. “Standard of care” will always be there, but you owe it to yourself to look into alternatives before making the biggest and maybe the most drastic decision of your life.
Many doctors I have spoken with came to the realization that they could no longer live with themselves by delivering a protocol that completely degrades a person. The present protocol most often creates a quality of life both horrendous and torturous. And at its end it usually leaves behind a ruined immune system, one so devastated that it can no longer perform its intended tasks. The patient is left with a body that no longer operates in any way like a healthy person’s. And the true tragedy is that most times, after all of this torture, the patient dies anyway.
The doctors you will meet in this book have stepped outside of the accepted box at great personal and professional expense, and often have taken a big financial hit as well. But rolling in money does not seem to be their driving force. What they care about is that they are making people well. What’s more, the doctors in this book are excited about their practices and the successes they are having. Again, not all patients have the same degree of success, and some will die. But many patients are making it, while also preserving a good quality of life.
For me this is a better option. It’s a shot, a possibility. These are the odds I want.
Take it seriously. It’s your life—no one will be as sorry as you if you end up sick. No one can do this for you. It’s all up to you. How badly do you want health?
I am not telling you to do anything more than open your mind to the concept that there are other options. If nothing else, writing this book has taken away my fear of cancer. Now that I have not only spoken to these incredible doctors and professionals but also heard from the cured patients themselves, I believe cancer is preventable, manageable, and curable in many cases.
With cancer soon likely to be the number one killer in our country, we have to start now to change our diets and lifestyles if we are to avoid this fate. If sadly, you are one of those who receive a cancer diagnosis, Knockout gives you options for nondrug healing or integrated healing, plus a means to change your life to prevent a recurrence. This is a book to teach us all how to knock out cancer.
One of the first ways to change the future is to fully understand the past. My interview with Ralph Moss (chapter 6) provides a reasoned look at how we arrived here, so that we can own the power to change our future path.