Drug companies don't want cures. If we had cures, their medications would become worthless. Imagine a world where cures were commonly available. If that were the case, we wouldn't need high priced doctors and surgeons (except in the case of accident victims), high priced chemical medications, high priced medical supplies, expensive hospital stays, and so on. A real CURE stops a disease from destroying a persons health. As it stands today, we all are at the mercy of doctors and drug companies. We're really not given another choice by the medical community. We do have the choice of alternative remedies, but even there, many of the natural cures and remedies available are questionable, and that is because there are profiteers everywhere trying to tap into a market whether their product works or not. If they can strum up good advertising, they might just stand to make a bundle. So who do you trust?
The true bottom line is profit. Sadly the entire system is built on greed, and the few who are in it to find real cures and heal people are overwhelmed by the tremendous corporate mentality of getting as rich as possible on the dying carcasses of victims of disease in this rapidly degenerating society. The sense of super-power in America shrouds these truths and citizens are easily duped into using the existing system of chemotherapy and over-medicating themselves in order to try to get free of the disease. They feel powerless to stand up against a system that is the established protocol of "healing" in our country. What can one man do? Indeed.
In the months before I was diagnosed with Hepatitis C (HCV) I was going through the usual daily routine of being a Dad and working in a telecommunications office in my career as a CAD Draftsman. I had the rotten luck of being involved in an auto accident a half a block from my workplace. A Scottsman was in town on business and he drove directly into my path, causing the t-bone collision in which both vehicles were totalled. I spent the following two months at home recuperating from my injuries, and upon my return the company hired me on as a permanent employee, and gave me a bonus check for the Christmas/New Year holiday. Sometime around the middle of January I had a complete physical, in the hopes that they could tell me why I had been feeling so run down. I'd felt a heavy fatigue for months, and chalked it up as probably being something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or God knows what. I also had some memory loss and concentration difficulties since the wreck, but other than that I was doing fairly well, or so I thought.
I was at work when I got a call from my doctors office asking if I would come back so they could take more blood. I did so, but then a day or so later they called again to have me come in once more for the same reason. I was wondering why they couldn't get it right the first time, and asked the doctor, who replied that they thought I might have Hepatitis C, and that I should see a Gastroenterologist soon to have him verify their findings, and prescribe treatment. So I saw the Gastro doctor and he indeed verified the HCV and arranged for me to have a liver biopsy, and to begin treatment in a week or two, once he'd gotten the results of the biopsy. The biopsy showed the extent of damage in my liver, and the doctor told me that I was genotype 1A. They measure the damage in two factors, inflammation and fibrosis.
In the case of HCV the liver is attacked by all these rotten little buggers (virii) over a period of many years, often two to three decades before the patient begins to have any symptoms at all. My biopsy showed that I was at stage 3 and grade 3 inflammation and fibrosis. I was told that there are only 4 stages and grades, so I was at the 3/4th level of liver damage. If not successfully treated, the next point a patient gets to is cirrhosis of the liver, and there are I think 4 levels of that, and then finally, and more often than not, cancer. If you've gotten to that point and haven't been selected for a liver transplant, the chances are that your life has reached it's end. So when a person finds him(her)self faced with this kind of thing, it behooves him(her) to do everything imaginable to changed all aspects of nutrition, diet, excercise, and any habits related to healing and living a healthier lifestyle. This would include bad habits being dropped immediately.
At the time I was facing this insanity I had no real bad habits. I drank a beer on very rare occasions, but that was it. I was trying very hard to maintain my status as a single father working a steady job and maintaining our home life, and keeping harmony in the life I shared with my son. I had goals and was true to them, even to the point of sacrificing the things that some dads in my position might well indulge in just so they can feel whole. Like dating, for instance. My life since my divorce many years earlier was strictly focused on the good parenting I thought I had to do being a single dad, and I'd lost the desire to have a female companion (other than for animal reasons) since my divorce. The pure inconvenience of the "hunt" was enough to just put it out of my mind altogether. I guess my worst bad habit was to eat pizza and microwave foods, and my diet had been lacking any substantially healthy regular intake for quite some time. I also never drank water, and only drank coffee and an occasional Sprite or fruit juice.
My diet was the first thing to be scrutinized. I became obsessed with the need for knowledge about the disease and spent many, many hours on end, sometimes never sleeping, in order to become accurately informed. I developed an acute case of insomnia that would last the next couple of years. I couldn't eat. Not that I wasn't hungry, but I was filled with fear of what to eat and what to avoid, and not knowing completely, I plowed into the Internet for information on every aspect of dealing with Hep C and developing a healthy diet. Fear not only kept me unhealthy, but it drove me to stay the course on researching tons of information related to my disease. I read every label and ingredient listing on every item of food I bought at the grocery store. I began to eat a lot of raw vegetables and fruit. I started drinking a gallon of spring water daily. I took Milk Thistle, an often recommended herb that is supposed to be good for the liver. I discovered that iron is bad for patients on treatment for HCV. That meant no raisins, spinach, and any foods with a high iron content. The visage of this monster was becoming bigger and darker as time went on, and I lost 20 pounds in the first week. I lost 40 pounds total in the first month. Fear was killing me.
I became weak and undernourished, and felt sicker and sicker as time went on. The first week of treatments was the worst, and I felt I wouldn't be able to make it through to the end. I'd started taking Interferon and Rebetol(TM) in early February, as prescribed. Interferon was the only thing going for years, and then they discovered better success by combination therapy of Interferon and Ribavirin. That was the best thing going at that time, so I had little choice but to go for it. Since I had missed so much time at work from the accident, I thought it best to inform my boss of my HCV, and to let him know that I would be taking meds and probably having a series of doctor visits throughout my period of treatment which was to last 48 weeks, and follow ups beyond that time frame. Having experienced a certain atmosphere of compassion during my recovery time from the accident, I was under the impression that the company cared about its employees, and was generally compassionate toward employees stricken by illness or injury. An engineer had developed cancer, and everyone sent him flowers and cards, and the company bigwigs forwarded us all emails of his progress at the Mayo Clinic where he'd gone for treatment. Between that and the way they'd handled my recovery time from the wreck I was given to believe the best.
Two days after telling my boss, he called me in to his bosses office for a conference. There I was informed (by his boss) that I had better start looking for another job because I was being given a two week notice of my termination. According to him, my work had been so screwed up that they had to throw away weeks of my drawing efforts and have another draftsman do them correctly. They said I had missed entirely too much time from work and it was unacceptable. Oddly enough, just a few weeks before they hired me permanently, and given me a nice bonus check saying my work was beyond reproach. I had been in my career as a CAD Draftsman for 20 years, and was the senior draftsman at the company. Other younger draftsmen had to ask for my assistance in many cases because I was the expert there, and could always be depended on for instructions and solving CAD software and engineering design related issues. Yet here was a man telling me some cheap, fabricated story of why I was now a loser and being discharged. I looked at him squarely and asked if he thought I was stupid, and said that it was painfully obvious why they were really terminating me. He denied it had anything to do with me having just told my boss I had Hep C. I was flabbergasted.
I defied the termination and demanded to have a conference with the head of Personnel, and in two weeks they'd scheduled me to come in and sit with her and with the company vice president. By the time our conference ended, I was given 6 months severence pay and 6 months extension on my insurance. I'd spoken to my attorney and they knew it. But 6 months wouldn't carry me through to the end of my medical needs, and this was very frightening. I had no idea how I could afford to continue the extremely expensive medications and doctor visits I would be required to have, and this added to the monstrous fears I was already facing. I had one thing going for me though, and to this day I maintain my level of faith in myself, in God, and trusting both completely. I've discovered that without faith, my life would already have ended a long time ago. And even with strong faith, the medicines I was taking and the high stresses were causing me to develop chronic depression, the likes of which would continue to threaten my very existence. I spent many hours crying uncontrollably, alone in my house, filled with fears and doubts and seeing major losses on the horizon, knowing I would soon be in a downward spiral of losses that would eventually rip my son and I apart for the first time in his life, leaving me homeless and floundering in despair. I sat with a loaded, cocked .380 Beretta semi automatic pistol in my mouth for what seemed like hours, tears flooding out of my face, sobs of anguish and emotional distress, trembling with fear. I did this more than once, and I think it must have been God that stopped me each time, because I really just wanted so badly to end it all right then and there. I was in a chemically and emotionally induced state of suicidal ideology. And it took strengths I never knew I had to come back away from that dark precipice. I have since sold the gun.
I had gotten notices from my mortgage company warning me to catch up on my payments, and that my house was in pre-foreclosure. I tried repeatedly to hold down a job but always ran into the same difficulties... my memory and concentration were worse than ever due to the enormous stresses I was living with. The depression was making me forget even simple software commands and my work began to flop. I even broke down sobbing a couple of times at work, and eventually told my new boss about my Hep C since I had to explain my bouts of sadness. In 5 months I lost that job, and then, needing to find some kind of work, I hired on at a taxi company on the beach. I'd driven cabs when I was younger, and it was pretty easy work, though the pay was very meager at best. That job ended when I became argumentative with fares and found I couldn't lift the heavy luggage of a family of tourists. My back injuries were still enough that it was just too much for me to even try to lift anything of any weight. Three times my house went into foreclosure, and the third time I couldn't make it through. I was forced to put it up for sale, and sold it at a tremendous loss to a realtor. I lost approximately $17,000 in equity. This all was happening when the housing market was beginning to climb to historically high levels. If I wanted to buy a house in my old neighborhood now I couldn't touch an empty, undeveloped lot for the amount I sold my house and land for.
One of the worst side effects of the treatments is rage. It is common and can be deadly. I was no stranger to this uncontrollable side effect. I'd gotten around $2300 cash from the sale of the house, so I set out to find a shed of some quality where I could store the few items I was able to salvage when I lost the house. I purchased a good shed which ate up all my money, and had it placed in my brothers back yard with his permission. I became homeless when the house sold, and had no backup plan. I was driving through town at night with my Jeep filled with whatever I could pack into it, and my two little dogs, Milo and Pippin, with the worst feeling I'd ever felt in my life... I was homeless. I found myself driving aimlessly, saying aloud, "I'm homeless". The extreme stress I was apparently displaying outwardly was to have a terrble effect on poor Milo, and he began to have many terrifying seizures... I think he had 7 in a 48 hour period. During each one he would lose control of his bladder, so I had to constantly be on guard to be able to quickly pick him up and place him somewhere where his pee wouldn't get all over upholstery or other items that would be hard to clean. Milo had been my closest companion, so these seizures were just another dark piece of my ever growing mountain of stress. My life was certainly becoming an ugly puzzle, where pieces didn't fit, and colors were washing out.
I had to drive 250 miles north to my mothers house but couldn't afford the $40 in gas, so my old friend John allowed me to sleep at his house temporarily until I could get the few dollars for the trip. In a few days my mother mailed me a check for the gas, so I drove to her place for shelter. She welcomed me as she always had any time I was in need, but I felt terrible to have to put her in my mess, knowing my emotions were so out of control. I had registered at the local VA clinic back home, so when I got to my mothers house I had to drive 52 miles to the nearest VA hospital to sign on for follow up treatments and general healthcare there. Immediately I was a burden for my poor old Mom, and the guilt wasn't helping my state of emotional well being. God answered prayers for me so often it was like He was my keeper. If a need arose, He always seemed to come through. I'd been praying for some kind of job, and was refferred to one by an engineer friend of mine via email. He told me of a company that was looking for a CAD Draftsman and said I could work from home and email the drawings back and forth. At first I balked at it, thinking my memory/concentration difficulties would stand in the way. But then, as if someone told it to me, I decided that it was worth a try.
I got the job and it was the highest paying job and the easiest work I've ever done in CAD. It was as though God had custom tailored this job for my every need. I could do the work at my own pace, and if I felt too sick I could lie down and rest a while. I used the insomnia to get the majority of the work done at night, and would try to sleep during the day. I say "try" because my senses were raw, and my hearing kept me from ever actually getting any kind of rest at all. Even the silence would have sound... a sort of high frequency hiss, and it drove me absolutely nuts. My thoughts would race non stop, and it was like I was a computer, with multiple thoughts slamming all together like there were 50 of me inside my head all talking at once, talking full speed, overlapping one another. It was like being in a party where everyone is talking at the same time, and you can't quite make out what anyone is saying, just bits and pieces of a wide variety of conversations. I began to think I was going insane. I'd explained it to my doctors at the VA hospital, and my Psych doctor prescribed me some terrible medicine that made me sleep through a three day spell, unable to get up to do anything but go to the bathroom. I couldn't take that medicine and get any CAD work done, so I stopped taking them.
I'd recalled how years earlier, when I used to smoke pot, I had no trouble at all sleeping, so I found a friend who gave me a little to try. It worked. I slept like a baby for the first time in what seemed an eternity. It also helped me with my appetite, and with depression. I was able to laugh for the first time since all this started. It was the best feeling I'd had in a very long time. Needless to say, it became my medicine of choice. It even helped with my severe back and neck pains... not aleviating them altogether, but making them a bit more manageable. I told the Psych doctor at the VA hospital about my experiment with pot as a medicinal tool, and she agreed, and said that many veterans use pot for the same reasons. I'd supplied her with a stack of papers I'd printed from internet medical sites which explained from a doctors perspective why cannabis should be available for people suffering with chronic illnesses, and she was very receptive to the concept. I tried to use the same line of reasoning with my primary doctor, an Indian lady, but she took a very negative stance toward it, stating a lot of preprogrammed propaganda about how dangerous it is, and how it would destroy my chances at healing. Her stance was a strict regimen of chemicals, diet, and follow up visits. I'd seen this kind of mentality at the previous VA clinic I had been a patient at and decided in my own mind that the U.S. Government was so adamantly opposed to the concept of cannabis as a medicine that they would naturally have indoctrinated these doctors to hold fast to that lame negative tradition that has kept this country looking the fool for so many years in the eyes of those of us who have ever tried cannabis in sensible amounts and found it to be quite pleasant, never experiencing a bad effect from it's use. It was good at least to see that there are some doctors who are courageous enough to admit that in some cases pot can be a significant aid to those who suffer from insomnia, loss of appetite, depression, and pain, regardless of government gestapo-like ploys to make them say otherwise. For this I gave my deepest respect and confidence to my shrink.
I had only been at my mothers house for about three months when her already failing health took a bad turn, and she had to be hospitalized in an emergency situation. By the fourth month she was gone. My sisters, brother and neice all came to see if they could be of support, but nothing we could do could extend her life. On the day she died, I had been having a heck of a time trying to understand my oldest sisters attitude toward me, and when we got home my other sister had just arrived with her boyfriend and something in her voice made me snap. I had been trying to be as diplomatic and pleasant to my older sister for the many days she was there, giving her money for her expenses, driving her daily the 54 miles (one way) and back to see our mother, and the whole time she kept acting like she didn't like me. This had really been bothering me, and when I saw my other sister and her voice sounded all negative and snide, I absolutely and totally snapped. I was in my room for a short moment, saw my machete in the corner, grabbed it and went after her. I stormed into the living room and swung it to her throat, yelling threats and cursing her, and then cursing my older sister. I felt like a human hand grenade and saw myself in the most horrific manner, acting the complete lunatic. Thankfully I stopped and retreated to my room, locked the door, and sat shaking, holding myself tightly, eyes popping out of my face, wondering how I could have come to do what I had just done. This was the worst case of rage I had ever experienced. It was also a warning to myself that this can happen. I finally understood it as being what is commonly referred to as "Riba-Rage" by those of us who suffer from HCV and take the meds... "Riba-" for Ribavirin. The long list of side effects on the medicines warn of it, as well as suicidal ideology, and a plethora of other horrific sides. Once you begin to understand the depth of those sides, you can begin to try to manage them. But try as I may, I could never really manage well with any of them.
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