Some people think I’m crazy for saying this, but being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis was the best thing ever to happen to me.  It was without a doubt, the single worst news I had ever received in the entirety of not only the 38 years before I was diagnosed, but the 9 years that passed since then.  I’ve had people that I loved dearly suddenly befall an untimely tragic death, or when my parents divorced when I was 14, both of which were emotionally heart-wrenching milestones of my life’s timeline, surely.  But compared to the first of a three doctor trifecta MS diagnosis, they were merely unfortunate events that just kinda sucked.  Horrible and devastating as it was, it was also liberating and empowering. But let me share with you what I went through in hopes that perhaps it can inspire you to take your life back too. Because after the initial shock, there’s the matter of taking your life back, not just from MS but from the doctors, from the insurance companies, and ultimately from your own previously conceived limitations and expectations.

The diagnosis process itself was a nightmare all its own because it seems like every typical doctor handles everything exactly the same way.  You come in and tell them what’s wrong with you and right away they start in with the drugs.  They don’t even necessarily know what’s going on inside of you or talk to you about what you have and haven’t been eating, your vices and habits, your disposition or possible stress sources that may or may not be contributing to your symptoms, and right away they go into the “let’s try this” routine and write up a script for your symptoms.  Not only that, but you’ll be put through the gauntlet as well. You’ll start with a general practitioner who referred me to an E.N.T. (ear nose & throat) specialist, whom referred me to a neurologist, before it was officially established that I have Multiple Sclerosis. By this time, the side effects of the smorgasbord of pharmaceutical drugs.  Steroids such as Prednisone for the pins and needles and whatever inflammation that was making me unable to tap my foot in an even rhythm nor play a piano scale two handed; motion sickness pills such as Meclazine for the incessant symptoms of vertigo I was experiencing; the nose sprays, Omnaris and Flonaise, for whatever polyps that the E.N.T., stated might be causing the absolute dentist injection level numbness on the entire right side of my face and head, and the injections of only God knows what directly into right side of my face to bring down the inflammation of the trigeminal nerve that might be causing my facial neuralgia.  You should’ve seen me, I was a wreck.  I was slurring my speech, getting double vision here and there, and couldn’t really function normally, not to mention that the steroids made me more than a little bit grumpy.

So, Mrs S, she says to me, “just humor me a little bit and stop using those nose sprays,” and I did.  Within 24 hours I was back to normal again. I was so irritated and frustrated that I stopped taking all the drugs and when my neurologist first attempted to treat me with yet another drug, I refused treatment for my first 10 months.  In fact, for the first year that I had MS, I had refused any kind of pharmaceutical treatment whatsoever.  I felt like these Doctors didn’t know dick about nutrition, didn’t even ask or anything, yet they wanted to treat me like a guinea pig and pump me full of all sorts of drugs based on conjecture and guesswork.  Well let me tell you something, this is why you should always know that no matter what television and media try to tell you, contrary to popular belief, doctors do not walk on water. I may have mentioned this on another post, but if you ever wanted to know just how badly you’re getting ripped off by your insurers and healthcare service providers, know that my wife accurately diagnosed me with MS before 3 trained and highly educated medical doctors, and my wife was an art major.  Let that little nugget sink in a moment.

I thought my life was all over, that I was all finished.  I thought that everything that I had ever dreamed of myself doing when I first came out to Los Angeles was never going to happen and that I’d end up alone in a wheelchair somewhere.  All sorts of emotions and memories can start racing through your mind when you get diagnosed with a disease that all mainstream medical professionals agreed is “incurable.”  I’d lived a lurid life before meeting Mrs S., sailing the seas of consequence since getting kicked out the Navy back in 1992 for smoking weed to mentally and emotionally process a major traumatic event that got 2 shipmates killed.  I’m not going to get into ten years worth of amusing Tarantino re-imagined Forrest Gump reboot anecdotes, but all I could think about was every skanky ass behavior, every nasty remark I’d ever made, every individual I’d ever hurt or made feel anything other than respected or liked.  In fact, every possible moment in which I had ever been anything other than a good and decent person raced through my head nonstop.  I couldn’t even think of too many moments, either, which took me down even further into a deep depression. I was crying almost all the time from October 2009 through about half of January 2010.

Mrs S., whom is like what you would get if you were to genetically splice Liz Lemon with Chloe O’Brien, and Daria, no exaggeration, truer words have never been written.  But she

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picked me up some books from Amazon, which I’ve observed is usually the first thing a lot of people do after they’ve been diagnosed with MS.  They pick up a bunch of books on Multiple Sclerosis because according to Rumor Control Central, it usually starts with the MS diets, of which we’ll go into detail along the way in subsequent posts.  But I kinda started out with the Swank diet, which of course started me on an anti-fat crusade that had us doing a lot of measuring and limiting my consumption of oils and fatty foods, which is a halfway decent place to start, sure.  But I was still dealing with all sorts of symptoms, too many to digress into details.  But when we purchased Healing Multiple Sclerosis, by Ann Boroch, on Amazon, my eyes had really opened to something that everyone forgets is slowly killing you 24/7, sugar.  I learned about how MS and a whole laundry list of other autoimmune conditions such as ALS, Fibromyalgia, Hodgekin’s Disease, Lupus, Leukemia, and Rheumatoid Arthritis, are directly or indirectly caused by Yeast/Fungal Overgrowth, particularly candida albicans.

MORE TO COME…

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Having already been heavily influenced by the late and great Ann Boroch, who wrote Healing Multiple Sclerosis, this particular TED Talk turned out to be quite the game changer for me.  When I first got hit with the MS humdinger upside the head, I went for the Swank Diet, avoiding the fat and all.  This didn’t do shit, I still had severe vertigo and was seeing funny, stumbling an bumbling.  Ann Boroch’s book really helped a lot, starting off with the candida cleanse, starving my body of sugar in every form and all.  I would get so strong, so fast and felt so good and then suddenly I would go overboard and end up having a relapse that would end up with me having to use a can to talk for about a week or so and would have to go back to the doctor and get on a course of steroids again until I got back to normal over about a 2-1/2 month period from onset to remission.  Ultimately after 2 progressive remissions I ended up prescribe me a 20ml daily injection of COPAXONE.  It got rid of most of my symptoms, but I was still experiencing these bouts of a rush that went from the right side of my head down my arm all the way out to my fingertips.  A rush that I really couldn’t give you an honest differentiation from whether it was an extremely violent vibration, extremely cold like ice, or acid coursing through my veins.  It would wake me up and I’d have to drink a small glass of water and maybe do some tai chi exercises for a few minutes before I could successfully get back to sleep upstairs.  Oddly enough, my dear friend and Dentist offered to remove the mercury fillings from my teeth and the result was almost a night and day difference.  I rarely experienced symptoms at all and after some life hurdles I let myself become complacent, allowing myself to eat the fun foods that I’ve been talking about in previous posts.

It was all fun and games, a three month party over having quit a job that ended up making my left hand go numb going halfway up my arm.  Before, the routine was to go to the doctor and get myself on a heavy course of steroids that had their own laundry list of annoying side effects.  But by then, I had just watched this TED Talk and bought her book, incorporating her principles of “minding your mitochondria” into my diet, and I started by doing two things…

First, we started by adding cooked kale to every meal.  I know there was a big kale fad and people were eating a lot of raw kale.  But too much raw kale can lead to hyperthyroidism, and your thyroid is one of your most important organs in your whole body.  Don’t do that.  The other thing I did that Dr Terry Wahls suggested was to eat and organ meat once a month, something like gizzards, beef liver, or like you see in the picture below, chicken liver.

Within 10 days, my hand/arm was back to normal like nothing had even happened.  From that incident, I learned that if you want COPAXONE to be fully effective, you really can’t take your nutritional paradigm for granted and go thinking that you can go back to living the way you used to live.  Remember, moderation in all things, folks.

More to come…