21 Pounds in 21 Days (2 page)

My Testimonial

HOW DETOXING SAVED MY LIFE

I didn't set out to become an expert on either weight loss or detoxification. In the spring of 1987, I was an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. I was thirty-two, married, a mother, and happily following my calling as a registered nurse. We lived in Southern California, where my husband and I owned and operated three nursing homes providing health care to medically fragile and developmentally disabled youth. But unbeknownst to my staff and patients, I had begun experiencing medical problems of my own.

In retrospect, my health challenges actually began about two years earlier, when I had started feeling a bit off kilter. I noticed that I was getting occasional headaches that, over time, became more frequent. Since I was very busy at home and at work, I just chalked it up to stress and popped an aspirin. No big deal, I thought. Then, I started feeling a little pain in my joints—nothing too uncomfortable or disabling. I would ignore these indications that something was wrong, down another aspirin or Tylenol, and go on about my life. Little by little, things started getting worse. My joints started aching; my muscles began to hurt; I started having night sweats; my heart started racing.

I sought help, beginning with my internist, who did not know what was wrong and suggested I see another doctor. Over the course of several years, I saw close to thirty physicians: my primary, different neurologists, immunologists, a rheumatoid arthritis expert, several heart specialists, a psychiatrist, a gastroenterologist. None of them could figure out what was going on. Was it lupus? Multiple sclerosis? Cancer? A bone disease? Crohn's disease? A boatload of viruses? Over time, different doctors suspected many ghastly, horrible things, but nobody was certain about what was happening to my body. At first, they told me to keep taking aspirin to relieve my symptoms. Then they started handing me prescriptions: antibiotics, arthritis meds, steroids. At one point I was taking seven different drugs. In the meantime my symptoms kept getting worse and worse—and instead of occurring individually they started happening all at once.

Before long, whatever was going wrong with me took over my body and life. I lost my appetite. I lost weight. I got so constipated that I was only having a bowel movement once every week or two. My thinking became slow and muddled—sometimes my brain was so foggy that it felt like I was stuck in a Coca-Cola bottle and couldn't get out. My body was bloated, my skin hurt, and so did my eyeballs. At one point it felt like bugs were crawling all over me. Needless to say, as my body and life spiraled out of control, I sank into a deep depression.

By 1989, I had basically become bedridden. On one of the rare days that I dragged myself out, I apparently drove in circles for hours while taking my three-year-old daughter Whitney to school. When I snapped out of it, I had no idea where I was, where I'd been, or where the time had gone. That's when I knew something was desperately wrong. I admitted that I had a serious problem. I knew that if I didn't get help, I would be in serious trouble.

You might wonder how someone like me could find myself in a situation like this. As a nurse and a nursing-home owner and administrator, I certainly knew a lot of doctors. I, of all people, should have been able to obtain proper care. So it would seem.

But like many people who develop a chronic illness, I had unknowingly strayed onto what health care providers secretly call “the sick wheel”: you go from doctor to doctor to doctor, none of whom knows exactly what's wrong or has the complete picture of what's going on, though each prescribes an additional medicine. When you're on the sick wheel, you end up taking drug after drug after drug—one for the physical symptoms you originally showed up with, then another to cover up the symptoms, or side effects, the first drug causes. After a while your kidneys start hurting from trying to filter the man-made chemicals from the first two drugs out of your system. The kidneys are like the body's trash cans, filtering waste and toxins from the blood, creating urine, and helping to regulate blood pressure, but they aren't designed to process synthetic substances like pharmaceutical drugs. Once they start aching (and if you're on two meds, they eventually will), the doctors typically prescribe a third drug to mask those symptoms. Before long, you have to take a fourth to cover up the symptoms caused by the third one. You reach a point where so many things are going wrong with your body that no one really knows what the problem is: the drugs or the disease.

Many people in the medical community know this cycle by a more ominous name: the “death ceremony.” It's only a matter of time before the synthetic ingredients in the drugs wreak havoc inside your body, which becomes burdened with substances it wasn't designed to process and, therefore, experiences as toxic. Eventually, these chemicals exhaust the kidney and liver. Many people end up on dialysis or a transplant list because medicine has damaged their organs. And lots of folks actually die of so-called “side effects” rather than of the disease they're being treated for. In fact, the fourth leading cause of death according to the Food and Drug Administration is cited as “Adverse drug reactions.” Not surprisingly, people become depressed as they lose their quality of life and hope. Within medical circles it's a well-known practice that the last drug they give you is Prozac.

Since I worked within the hospital system, I knew I was waltzing a dance with death. I felt lost and alone. My husband, who traveled out of the country on business a fair amount, wasn't always around to support me. When he was there, he looked to
me
for the answers on health matters. Aside from my mother, who would nurture and pray for me, I hid my problems from loved ones. I believed that I was supposed to have all the answers since I was the health practitioner in the family. I knew it was my moral and professional duty to help others, but for some reason, I thought that I wasn't supposed to get sick. Now that I was ill, I felt fearful, ashamed, and isolated, which, of course, made my situation worse.

One of the few people who knew what was going on with me was my girlfriend Deborah Williams. I let Deb talk me into getting a colonic, a holistic health care procedure where a trained practitioner flushes out your colon, or large intestine, with water. The colon is the primary organ that eliminates waste and toxins from the body. When the colon is clean the body is able to purify itself more easily. At the time, hospitals still gave people enemas to clean out their bowels and to help them use the bathroom more easily, so a colonic was nothing but a glorified enema in my mind. Since nothing the doctors were doing was helping and Deb had offered to pay for it, I figured, “Why not?”

During my appointment, colon therapist Eloise Buckner of Agoura, California, explained how the procedure helped remove toxins from the body. (You can learn more about colonics in Chapter 6.) Afterwards, I actually felt a little bit better, although I didn't want to admit it. Still, I let Deb treat me to a second colonic.

“You're overproteinized,” Eloise told me.

“Nonsense,” I thought to myself. My typical diet consisted of meat and potatoes. “How can you eat too much protein?” I wondered. Yet I had to admit that I felt better after that colonic, too. And she wasn't trying to give me any pills, which was a relief after my previous experiences with medication. Over time, I began to trust Eloise and continued to see her regularly.

Since Deb was right about colonics, I decided to take her advice to go see an herbalist, a health practitioner who treats illness by using plant-based remedies administered as teas, tablets, capsules, and tinctures. The herbalist was shocked to see the list of prescription medications I was taking—and even more surprised that I didn't know why I was on them. The more he asked about my medical treatment, the more I realized I didn't know the answers to some very basic, yet vital, questions. This made me feel both scared and inadequate. I was a nurse, after all! I should have had answers. Prescription drugs, while helpful, are serious business and are not to be taken lightly.

“I know this is going to sound crazy to you,” I said, “but my mind is so foggy I feel like I'm in a Coca-Cola bottle.”

“You're not crazy, you're sick,” he told me. “We're all exposed to many toxins—in the environment, in our homes, and in our workplaces. You're carrying a huge toxic load in your system and your body is being compromised.”

That made sense to me. I explained that in my hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, butterflies and ladybugs and little insects were always flying around. But in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, California, where I now lived and worked, nothing flew, nothing moved. It was an agricultural area. Crop dusting was prevalent; herbicides and pesticides were ubiquitous. California also has among the nation's most stringent rules involving pest control in nursing facilities. We were always getting sprayed for something.

“Aha! That's the problem: your body can't take this stuff anymore,” he told me. “All these drugs you're on are making things worse. We've got to wean you off of them. And your digestive system is very bad. We have to put you on baby food.”

The idea of getting off my meds was a big stretch to me. I didn't want to be overmedicated, but at the same time I didn't think it was safe for me to be completely medication free. The thought that I had to eat baby food sounded outrageous. What Dr. Taylor was saying and the way he was thinking were foreign to me, but the more we talked, I sensed that he was right. I felt relieved and hopeful for the first time.

For several months baby food was my only form of sustenance. I lost a lot of weight, which concerned me since I was already small because I was sick. My herbalist just told me that if I wanted to maintain my weight to eat more of it. I wasn't exactly in love with the stuff and it's hard to eat 20 jars of baby food every day, but I ate enough to sustain me. Before long I noticed my energy returning. In about three months, I felt noticeably better. And I had started moving my bowels more often, which I knew was an important sign.

Today, I understand that my body was releasing a boatload of toxins. That organic baby food was pure (no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives) and simple enough (just pure fruit or vegetable with nothing else mixed in) that a baby's newly formed digestive system could tolerate it. It was a lot easier for my body to break down than regular food, healthier than the food I'd been eating, and it allowed my digestive system to rest. As my body grew stronger, one by one the herbalist began weaning me off of prescription drugs.

Feeling better and slowly recovering my life, something told me to order a copy of my medical chart. When it arrived, it was huge! I read every page of notes each of the doctors had written from all my appointments over the years. Toward the end of my file, I came
across one set of notations called SOAP (an acronym for
subjective, objective, assessment, plan
) notes, in which the doctor or nurse assesses and summarizes what is going on with the patient, then writes a plan for their care. Here's what my SOAP notes said:

 

Subjective:
“Feeling weak, feverish, my joints ache, and I have a severe headache; I feel like I am in a Coke bottle and I can't get out.”

Objective:
Well dressed and well-informed female presenting in office once again with multiple symptoms.

Assessment:
Temperature: 99.2; Pulse: 88; Respiration: 20; Blood pressure: 98/60; Weight: 128 lbs; Skin: warm, dry; Affect: flat.
Plan:
Prozac 40 mg QD, RTC in 90 days.

 

The word hit me like a ton of bricks:
Prozac
, the death ceremony. The doctors had placed me in it. I felt like I was being stabbed in the heart. My medical peers had given up and written me off, as I'd seen happen to many other patients.

“My God! If I don't save my life, no one will save it for me,” I realized.

From that point on—even though I was still a registered nurse—I lost faith in my medical peers' ability to help me get well. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I realized that I had to go on a rampage to save my own life.

By this time my marriage had fallen apart and I was a single mother. I was desperate, scared, and slowly losing my business. My childhood friend, Tony DeLuz, came to California, rescued me, and became my business partner and husband. Tony helped me hold on to my business, which allowed me to focus on getting better.

After about a year of working with Eloise and my herbalist, one of them told me about a clinic in Mexico that offered treatments you couldn't obtain in the United States. Deb and I went there for about two weeks, while Tony and my staff held down the fort.

At the American Biologics Clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, health care was approached very differently than in the United States. Instead of prescribing medications, the clinic used natural remedies to improve my immune function, thereby allowing my own body to fight the toxins and viruses invading it. I tested positive for a few latent viruses that live dormant in your cells, including cytomegalovirus (CMV), which they explained was compromising my liver, as well as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and fibromyalgia, neither of which I had heard of. CFS is characterized by devastating tiredness that prohibits you from performing common activities. Fibromyalgia affects the muscles and joints and the endocrine and cognitive systems, causing anxiety, chronic pain, apathy, confusion and irritability.
Years later, I would identify myself as having environmental illness (EI), where exposure to environmental hazards like chemicals, allergens, pollution, and other toxins makes you sick or aggravates existing medical conditions.

All these conditions are common among people whose bodies are overloaded with toxic chemicals, but at that time American medical professionals were just learning about them. If you were experiencing their symptoms, most doctors would tell you that it was “all in your head,” when, in fact, they require a multispecialist approach since they affect so many different organs and systems. In Mexico, I received many different treatments that I hadn't known about before—live-blood-cell therapy, intravenous vitamin drips, coffee enemas—and, yes, more colonics. I was stunned to discover that there were many more ways to help people heal than I had been exposed to in the United States. When I left Mexico, I was still very sick but I felt hopeful, noticeably better, and was able to begin working again.