by Jody Berger
On the bike with my oxygen mask, I read about brain health, liver function, vitamins and minerals. Every day, I’d ride and read, ride and read. Gathering information and actively withholding judgment, I felt like I was making progress. I was doing something on my own behalf.
After my ride and read session, I’d fill a pitcher of water and sit in the sauna for thirty minutes. Inside the heat, I watched sweat rolling down my arms and dripping down my legs, and I imagined all kinds of toxins draining out with each drop. During these times, I’d be reminded of how kind Bruce was being—especially since he couldn’t be here yet—and I was again grateful.
Afterward, I’d shower, get dressed and find Christopher outside to go for lunch at some vegan, raw foods palace.
After a few days, I was so relaxed that my shoulders had dropped again to a new resting spot. I could let go of the tension in my neck and back because I was doing my part, and I had a team working with me to help me heal. I still had questions and concerns, only now I felt like I was on an adventure, a quest to get to the bottom of it, a journey with allies to find answers and resolve symptoms.
On day five of the Canadian adventure, Christopher picked me up in Yaletown and drove through Stanley Park across the bridge into West Vancouver. He had made an appointment with Dr. Mack Brown.
An older gentleman, Dr. Brown had been a family physician for decades. His small waiting room overflowed with characters of a standard family practice: a mother with her son, an older couple, a receptionist talking on the phone while simultaneously answering questions from people in the room. He had old magazines, a few new ones and books.
We waited ten minutes until Dr. Brown ushered us into his office. Comfy in my blue jeans and sweater, I lay down on a gray examination table with a camera overhead. As the mechanical arm moved the camera over me, Brown took an X-ray of my left hip and my lower spine. It took five minutes, and he reviewed the results with me immediately. No anxious waiting, no nasty phone call days later.
“Your spine is normal density for a woman your age, but your hip is a little low,” Brown said. He showed me a small graph with a bright blue bar marking T-scores, or average bone densities in women as they age. Generally, women in their twenties have a T-score of around 0. In the midforties, the blue bar starts sloping down, and then evens out near –2.0 in the early sixties.
Above the blue bar was a dark green color and below it, bars of light green, yellow, orange and red. The dot representing my lumbar spine was in the healthy blue bar, although near the bottom of it. My T-score there was –0.5. The dot for the tip of my femur was below that in the light green. My T-score on that one was –1.4, which means low bone density. Less than –2.5 signals osteoporosis.
Brown asked about my exercise routine, how much physical activity I did and how much of it was weight bearing. I told him I’d been a runner for twenty-some years. I had run a handful of marathons and routinely ran 5Ks and 10Ks.
“Then you shouldn’t be low. You should be above the normal range,” he said. The reason for the discrepancy, he thought, was that I wasn’t absorbing calcium, and the most likely reason for that was a vitamin D deficiency.
“Oh, yeah, I have that,” I said a little too enthusiastically. “That was the one test Silver agreed to do for me before I left Denver and the number was twelve. I guess normal is between thirty and one hundred parts per something or other.”
I had sent all my test results to Christopher, who flipped through the pile of pages he was carrying and handed the vitamin D page to the doctor. “Oh shoot,” Brown said. He knew the test I’d taken and that vitamin D gets involved in almost every bodily function: it’s critical for bone health, cell growth, nerve and muscular strength, immune function and mood stabilization.
“I know,” Christopher said. “When I saw that, I wondered how she could even walk across the floor.”
Brown scanned the page and turned around to get a pill bottle off his desk. He filled it with ten 1-milligram doses of vitamin D, or ten pills with 50,000 international units (IUs). “Take these for ten days, then go to ten thousand IU a day,” he said. The Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) for women my age is 15 micrograms, or 600 IU a day. Brown acknowledged that some people thought 50,000 IU was too much, that it could lead to vitamin D toxicity. He disagreed based on common sense—in direct sunlight, the human body produces 20,000 IU in about twenty minutes—and his own experience.
“I stumbled onto vitamin D about six years ago,” he said. “I was breaking too many bones.”
At the time, Brown had a bone-density scan done and found himself in the orange osteoporosis bar at the bottom of the graph. He started himself on high doses of vitamin D and stuck with it. He stopped breaking bones and had himself scanned again a few years later, and saw a remarkable difference. Now his bone density was higher than expected for men his age. And, he said, taking the vitamin D improved his health in general. He felt better and had more energy.
We talked a few more minutes about vitamin D, and I began to feel like he was another expert I could trust, another guy on the team I was assembling who wanted to help. I was feeling so confident and comfortable that I thought that maybe, just maybe, I could ask the really scary question without bursting into tears or flames or anything else.
I took a deep breath and asked about MS. “I’m really scared,” I said. “I don’t think that’s what I have, but the MRI showed lesions, and the doctor in Denver seemed so sure.”
Brown looked at me, kindly and gently, with empathy and patience.
In a small voice that barely traveled across the silence, I said, “Do you think I can heal?”
“Oh shit,” he said, like an old cowboy. “I’m so radical, I think everything can heal.”
Right then and there, I decided I loved him. I thought about kissing him and decided against it. Instead, I thanked him profusely, took his card in case I had questions and thanked him again.
I’m so radical, I think everything can heal. I must have repeated the line a hundred times that night. I thought about Brown saying that and I thought about Lance Armstrong. Seemingly a hundred years ago, in my sportswriter life, Nike had invited me and a dozen other journalists to visit its campus in Oregon and spend time getting to know its cycling gear. In other words, Nike loaded us up with shoes, shorts and jerseys and loaned us bikes for a couple of days to test drive.
To sweeten the deal, Nike brought in its biggest cycling celebrity, although he wasn’t that big outside of cycling at the time. This was a few years before Lance had won any Tours de France, so he was just a cocky Texan who rode by us one day on the road. At night, we all went to dinner. The Nike PR staff sat with the journalists, and Lance sat with his girlfriend at another table. Since we were all in the same restaurant, this counted as our dinner with Lance. A week later, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer that had spread through his brain and lungs. Doctors told him it was over. His coach later told me, “He was circling the drain. Doctors told him to get his affairs in order.”
I don’t know what Lance said to that, but in my imagination, when the doctors told him he was going to die, he responded, “Yeah, thanks. I’ve got other plans. I’ve got a few Tours de France to win.” Then he pulled himself together, found the treatment that worked for him and got on with life.
As I thought about Lance and heard Brown saying, “I’m so radical, I think everything can heal,” I wished I could rewrite history so that I too could have said something defiant in the moment of diagnosis. Silver would say, “You have MS,” and I would say, “Yeah, thanks. I’ve got other plans.”
No matter, I was making other plans anyway.
CHAPTER 7
The Trauma of It All
I have explored every city I’ve lived in by foot. Even Los Angeles I learned by walking and running. I’d never lived in Vancouver, but after a week with an apartment, a project and a routine, I wanted to remedy th
at mistake. I geared up in running clothes and my beloved Brooks Adrenalines. I’d been running in this same brand of shoes for five years, buying a new pair every four or five months when the old ones went flat. The shoes were as familiar as any item I’d ever worn. I’d run in them in hot weather and cold, slush and sand, on three-hour slogs and ten-minute mind-clearing jogs.
Three months, however, had gone by since my last run. There were reasons, of course: brutally cold days in Denver, the MRI, the diagnosis, and then the crazy-making steroids that wreaked havoc on my health. My feet still felt a little awkward. There was no tingling, but something was tweaking the nerve between my toes, giving me that weird flip-flop feeling still. But I felt so inspired by my meetings with Daniel and Brown, and I had stopped taking the steroids, so I decided it was time to hit the pavement again. Perhaps by now, the steroids were fully out of my system because I discovered I could notice the feeling in my feet without obsessing over it.
I laced up and headed out the door and down the block into Stanley Park, which rivals New York’s Central Park in terms of beauty—and it may win, because it has more hills and water on all sides.
As I cruised along, hearing the familiar and hypnotic one-two beat, I looked at the harbor on one side and the dense trees on the other and thought how glad I was that I’d come. Even without Bruce, Vancouver felt like a warm hug. I was eating healthy food, inhaling crisp and clean air, and stuffing my brain with liberating concepts.
The next day I woke with the familiar feeling in my quads, that slight touch of discomfort that’s only physical. Mentally, that little burn was as comforting and reassuring as sunlight after a storm. That subtle stiffness told me my body had been working and that I’d endured and overcome the combination of pavement, lactic acid and an hour of elevated heart rate. The feeling was an old friend saying I was stronger today than I had been yesterday.
I finished my morning routine and met Christopher in Yaletown just before lunch. He had one more doctor for me to meet, Guillaume Martin, a charming and good-looking Frenchman with dark, dark hair and dark, dark eyes and an office full of photos of stealth bombers and jets flying in formation. On each of his shelves, model airplanes stood ready to take off.
“I’ve got a thing for planes too,” I said. “I learned to fly Cessnas when I was in college. And I got to fly in an F-18 with the Blue Angels.”
His eyes lit up. “Really?” he said, sounding more like a little kid than a respected doctor with spacious offices in a sophisticated city.
“Someone from the team called the paper I was working for and offered to take a journalist for a ride. My editor knew I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
“I would have done it too,” Dr. Martin said. “I was a flight surgeon for the French Air Force.”
He pointed to the planes on his wall and told me how he got to ride with the great athletes who piloted them and how working with the air force spurred his interest in human performance. The pilots who flew those jets competed at the highest levels of human capability; their reactions were instantaneous and precise, their vision clear and their nervous systems calm in the most harried of situations. As Dr. Martin got to know the pilots, he wondered if everyone couldn’t go through life with the same poise and perfection, if they received the proper training and education.
Intrigued by this idea, Dr. Martin studied neurophysiology, human performance and the barriers to peak performance. Since trauma ranks among the biggest barriers to performance, he studied its impacts on the nervous system. And the more he learned, the more he wanted to know. He wanted to measure the impacts of physical, cognitive and emotional trauma to see if the impacts of all three were reversible.
Dr. Martin’s curiosity led him to accumulate degrees, diplomas and accolades from Western medical institutions. In addition, he studied Eastern healing traditions, including acupuncture. In creating his practice, he worked to provide a drugless, noninvasive and holistic approach to healing.
Drugless? Noninvasive? Holistic? Given my aversion even to Tylenol (let alone those awful steroids), Dr. Martin and his team sounded like my kind of people. They worked to get rid of symptoms and restore function by understanding how the brain responded to incidents in life. Instead of viewing each symptom as a separate event with a separate treatment, they explored and considered whether one problem could create multiple symptoms or whether many issues could contribute to one symptom. In either event, they looked to remove the cause of the symptom instead of merely masking the symptom itself.
I liked what he said and the way he spoke. To me, the human body seemed too complicated and too interconnected for the restricted, linear logic I felt Silver was selling: tingling plus lesions equals MS, and if it’s MS, then take drugs. And Dr. Martin, it seemed, agreed with me. He told me to call him Guy, which rhymed with tea, and said he’d like to interview me before a physical exam. For ninety minutes, he asked about all aspects of my life. We both took notes as he asked about falls, illnesses, broken bones and surgeries—anything that could have contributed to the tingling or the lesions. He asked if I could recall hitting my head or tumbling off a bike.
“Sure,” I said. “I’m not a particularly good athlete, but I don’t let that stop me. I went over the handle bars on a bike about ten years ago, and I fell off a horse or two, years before that.”
“And tell him about the time you were hypoxic,” Christopher added.
The day before, I had told Christopher about a trip to Ecuador where a brilliant photographer named Tony DiZinno saved my life. On assignment for ESPN magazine, Tony and I were assigned to shoot and write about an epic adventure race in which teams of four hiked, mountain biked, kayaked and climbed their way through a 250-mile unmarked course in the Andes. They had to reach thirty checkpoints along the way using a compass and topo map. Early in the race, one checkpoint was the summit of Cotopaxi, a 19,347-foot volcano.
In the quest for a great magazine story, Tony and I chased the teams to the base of the volcano and started slogging our way to the warming hut at seventeen thousand feet. At eleven o’clock at night, it was below freezing and snow was falling. Tony seemed to be moving much more quickly than I was. So I sat down.
Tony turned to me and said, “What are you doing?”
“You’re moving so much faster, I don’t want to hold you up.”
“So, what are you doing?”
“I’m just going to wait here,” I said.
“Wait for what?”
“Daylight.”
It made perfect sense to me and zero sense to Tony. He connected my backpack to his on a short rope and hauled my ass to the warming hut. It was no more than five minutes up the trail but, loopy as I was in the elevated air, I would have sat in the snow all by myself all night long just five minutes from safety. Inside the hut, Tony found hot cider for me to drink, gave me a sleeping bag to wrap up in, and rubbed my hands and feet while asking questions to check my sanity. Somehow, it returned.
Still, Tony was taking no chances. In the early morning, around three, when teams were gearing up to leave for the summit, Tony told me I was going nowhere and assigned someone else to look after me while he hiked up and shot some of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen.
I told Guy this story in case it somehow had contributed to my health issues. He nodded and jotted it down.
The conversation went on, covering the greatest hits in the Jody calamity file—the time I fell off a rock while bouldering; the time I got clobbered by a runaway windsurfer; the time I tried windsurfing myself and banged into the mast. We covered the extensive orthodontia I had as a teenager and the crazy anti-pigeon-toe thing my mother had me wear as a toddler. I told stories that I had never told—not even to myself because they had seemed inconsequential and unconnected—or embarrassing. But as I told and told, no one looked surprised, and Guy took notes.
When he’d concluded the interview and we were read
y for the physical exam, we went into another room where the walls, floor and ceiling were painted black. Barefoot, I stood on a platform on one side of the room, where white spots on the walls allowed Guy to measure my height, the height of each shoulder and how everything lined up from the side view. The wall directly across from me had a series of white dots in a cross, like the center of a riflescope.
The platform itself measured balance, wobbliness and pressure under my feet. I stood as still as I could with my eyes shut, and then with them open, while Guy wrote down the measurements. Good balance, he explained, shows that information is running smoothly through the nervous system from the feet to the brain, and from brain to feet. Essentially, if I had good balance, it was unlikely I had MS.
After a few more balance drills, Guy stood before me and had me follow a pen in his hand with my eyes only. Then, the same drill with one eye covered and then the other. Finally, he had me cover one eye as he moved the pen up and down and asked me to identify, looking through the tip of the pen, which spot I saw on the wall. I wanted to get it right and knew that was impossible. No right answers. No wrong ones. I just told him what I saw.
Guy was kind, relaxed and more than a little sexy. And I felt like we were in this together. If all doctor’s appointments were this encouraging and entertaining, I’d go more often—I was sure of it.
When the exam was over, I put my shoes on and we went back to the conference room. Guy told me my static posture could be improved with therapy. And that my balance was good but could also be improved. This was a relief, because in my mind, anything that could get better couldn’t be part of a permanent degenerative disease.
“I noticed,” he said, “as we continued the drills and your eyes became tired, there was some hesitation, some fluctuation between the left and right eyes. It was as if your brain couldn’t decide which side was dominant.”