by Jody Berger
He looked at my hands, which were on the table. “Are you right or left handed?”
“Right,” I said, looking at my hands to see what he was seeing.
“Yet you wear your watch on the right wrist.”
“Yeah, when I started wearing a watch, no one told me not to wear it on the right, so I did and got used to it. If I need to write something, you know with a pen,” I said, scribbling an imaginary signature, “I take it off and put it on the table.”
“I think you were left handed, or ambidextrous, and you trained yourself to be right handed,” Guy said. “And that causes a little confusion or hesitation between the hemispheres of your brain.” The brain and body, he said, work more efficiently if we work with their natural tendencies.
Guy and I talked a little longer and I asked him about the lesions—braver now since Brown said everything could heal. Guy said he’d look at the MRI, so I gave him the CD with the images that the hospital had sent me in Denver, thanked him and said good-bye.
That night, I had dinner in the neighborhood with a friend named Nikki. It was great to spend time with her, this friend from another part of my life—we’d met at surf camp in Costa Rica—and to talk about politics and surfing and men. Then, of course, the conversation turned to health, and I’d forgotten that Nikki had once done some sleuthing for her own health. She’d been feeling fatigued and achy and went through a few frustrating rounds with physicians. Each had different ideas and none could help. Finally a naturopath helped her determine that wheat was causing the problems. She changed her diet and life improved.
“I guess grains aren’t always part of a healthy diet,” I said.
“They aren’t for me,” Nikki said. “And I swear by my naturopath. Here’s her card.”
If I really lived in Vancouver, instead of just “borrowing” it as my city for a few weeks, I’d have made an appointment immediately. Absolutely, I would have. Instead, I stayed on the Christopher plan until I went home.
The next morning, I went through my usual routine: stretch, meditate, protein shake, twenty-five minute walk to Yaletown for a bit on the bike and time in the sauna. Christopher picked me up from Daniel’s office, and as we were driving to lunch, he told me he was going to meet with Guy that afternoon and he’d let me know what they recommended.
“You’re going to do what?” I said. “The two of you are going to get together and talk about me…without me? No, if there’s going to be a meeting about my health, I should be there.”
Christopher looked hurt and stunned—and truth be told, I was nearly as surprised by my outburst. Christopher had been nothing but nice to me and had done nothing but share his experience and hard-earned wisdom. Same for Guy. And yet I was afraid they were going to talk about me behind closed doors, then come out and tell me what to do. Weren’t we supposed to be a team here, working together to help me get better?
“Did you speak to Bruce too?” I asked.
“He wanted to know how you were doing,” Christopher said, thinking he’d been helpful and looking confused.
I sighed. “Look, if we’re a team working on my health, I really have to understand all the decisions. Giving up control is still too scary.”
Bruce, Christopher and Guy had been incredibly kind and taken a lot of time to try to help me get to the root of this issue. But my earlier experiences still haunted me.
“Look, I’d like to take that appointment. He was going to tell me what he saw in my MRI and if he can recommend a treatment. If you need to talk to him about other things, can you do it another time?”
Christopher looked braced for battle and then relaxed. “OK, fine,” he said, as if it wasn’t worth the fight. We drove on in silence.
When I walked into Guy’s office, he led me into the conference room and took a seat opposite me. “I looked at your MRIs,” he said, “and they are very good pictures, very clear. The lesions are certainly there, and yes, it could be MS, but it could also be many other things. Trauma could explain the lesions, or they could come from vascular issues, a lack of oxygen to the tissue, for example.”
There was a range of other explanations, he said, adding that illness is a degenerative process, worsening over time.
“Trauma may lead to illness but it doesn’t have to,” Guy said.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Traumatic events could trigger a downward slide into a long-term illness but they don’t have to,” he said. “Judging from the exam, your history, the MRI and how you move, I’d say you are more trauma than illness. You are not ill, and this is a good thing.”
For the second time in one week, I wanted to kiss the doctor and stopped myself. I am not ill? Wahoo! This was not only a good thing. It was a very, very good thing, an excellent thing, among the greatest things I’d ever heard, right up there with “everything can heal.”
“Even better,” Guy said, “the effects of trauma can be reversed.”
A wave of energy, a warm surge of power, came up from my belly into my chest and filled me with joy. The effects can be reversed? Where I do I sign up? I am ready, let’s reverse this weird ride. Let’s get going now.
“Great,” I said. “How do we do it? When can we start?”
Guy smiled and his eyes softened as if to say, “Hold it there, tiger.”
“This is not an overnight process,” he said. “You spent years accumulating the trauma and the effects. We’d have to do more extensive testing to design a program for you. Typically, my clients work with me for three months. They come in two or three times a week for a combination of acupuncture, nutritional coaching, exercises and other therapies, depending on their needs. This is a very specific, individualized treatment plan.”
Three months? I’d have loved to stay, but I had a house, work, a dog and a life in Denver. “I’d have to move here for three months?”
“Not necessarily; I work with out-of-town patients. They typically come one week a month and we do a number of treatments the week they’re here.”
Hmm. That sounded possible, though expensive. “How effective is it?”
He said he’d worked with similar patients in the past and that since he opened the clinic in 1997, for all patients with a range of mysterious symptoms, he’d had an 85 percent success rate.
I liked those odds. “What would it cost?”
“Depends on the treatment program and the number of different therapies,” Guy said. “Three months usually costs around fifteen thousand dollars.”
That was the sum total in my bank account. But then again, this was my health and I was tired of tingling. Plus, I would have paid anything to know for sure it wasn’t the sign of a chronic, often painful, potentially fatal condition. And he was saying, for $15,000, we could solve the problem, not just mask it. We could reverse the effects of this trauma. Mentally, I did a quick calculation to compare his plan with Silver’s. The former was noninvasive and drugless, with an 85 percent chance of success for a cool $15,000. The latter included routine injections of a toxic substance that didn’t even attempt to solve the problem. Not permanently. At best, interferons (the likely treatment I’d have to go with) merely slowed the descent into hell in about one-third of the people who tried them. And they cost $3,000 a month for life, which for me, could be a while. All my grandparents had lived into their nineties. Three grand a month, twelve months a year, forty-five years—that’s $1.6 million with no guarantees.
As I did the math, I forgot completely about all the other data I had been accumulating. I didn’t compare Guy’s or Silver’s options to what Daniel and Dr. Brown had been telling me earlier: that basically, I was fine; I just needed to change my diet, do a few other things and take vitamins. That all sounded great, but despite second-guessing Silver, I had bought into his idea that I had a great big problem and needed a great, big solution, like Guy’s.
I even fo
rgot what Christopher had said before: that most people want to be told what to do. I apparently wanted a neurologist to tell me what to do—I just didn’t want it to be Silver or for the directions to include drugs. To me, fifteen grand and time with this French doc seemed a far better option.
But I wasn’t quite ready to commit. So I told Guy I’d figure out if I could spend time in Vancouver and be in touch.
That night, Bruce arrived from Mexico. I was eager to see him and tell him the latest, and ecstatic to see how excited he was to see me too. We met on a street corner and before I stepped onto the curb, he picked me up with a bear hug and then held my hand as we walked along the waterfront. When the dusk became darker, we went for a drink, then dinner, and another drink. He came back to the apartment, and we shared an exciting and sleepless night together. The next morning, he caught a cab to an early business meeting, and after a few hours, Terry came to give me a ride to the airport. A brief but beautiful visit.
On the flight, I sat by the window and watched the scenery for three hours and 1,400 miles. The sun was out, everything looked clean and new, and my attitude was infinitely better returning to Denver than it had been when I left.
I landed overflowing with ideas. Could whatever’s going on with me be attributed to a vitamin deficiency? A heavy metal toxicity? Lyme disease? Trauma? An alignment issue? Or anything that could be reversed? I was certain that one of those things was the real issue and that my immune system was not attacking me, only doing what it was supposed to do—clearing away bugs and head colds and everything else the environment could toss at me.
Hope, optimism and questions spilled out of my pores. In Vancouver, I had learned a new model of working with doctors, of teaming with them to move me toward health. I liked feeling that I was part of a problem-solving crew, and I felt confident that a variety of expert opinions could zero in on the solution more quickly and more completely than anyone alone.
However, while I loved my team in Vancouver, they were still in Vancouver, which would make it expensive and difficult for me to coordinate my care. I figured Silver was my doctor in Denver and together we could recruit other experts also covered by my insurance and re-create something similar here. Why not? We both wanted me to heal, didn’t we?
I called his office. He had said, “If you have questions, call me. I will call you back within twenty-four hours.” I was eager to reach a solution, and although we hadn’t known each other long, he knew more about my health than any other doctor in Denver.
No response.
So I waited twenty-four hours and called again. Nothing. I called the day after that and still nothing. But I still thought he could help so I called every day for two weeks and received no response.
I was confused. I understood that he was a busy man, but a promise was still a promise. Plus, Silver had seemed so eager to call me at home and deliver the diagnosis, had even volunteered to stay late that day to explain the bad news. But now that I had questions and thought I could heal, he was nowhere to be found?
It didn’t make sense to me, and I really wanted an answer, or at least some kind of closure from him, so I kept dialing. At the end of the second week of daily calls, I resorted to one of my least favorite tactics I learned as a reporter. I never liked doing it, and yet sometimes “phone banking” was the only option. I called Silver every hour starting at nine in the morning. I called at nine, at ten, at eleven, and on and on, until three in the afternoon. When I’d talked to the same nurse eight times, I asked her if it was making any difference.
“Is he getting these messages, and is he any more likely to call me back? Or am I just making your life miserable?”
“Well,” she said, “he knows you’ve been calling.”
CHAPTER 8
Larger Ideas and Lesser Evils
With Silver out of the picture, I needed to find new options. I wanted people with big ideas and a holistic view of health. I also wanted smart people, so I went to the one place I always find a collection of them: the library.
The downtown Denver Public Library looks to me from the outside like a box of crayons. And the light inside feels like the daylight outside. I walked deep into the stacks to find books on doctors, health and healing. Quickly, I discovered Dr. Andrew Weil, a medical doctor, naturopath and founder of the Institute for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. A prolific author, he wrote Health and Healing in 1983. It was easy to read and made sense to me. I skimmed some of his other works too and liked the way he described integrative medicine as a “healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional and alternative.”
Sounded like the comprehensive approach I wanted, so I used the library’s computer to find local doctors who had trained with Weil.
I found Maureen Duncan, who had a picture of herself with Weil and a mission statement on her website. She said she believed in the body’s natural healing abilities and would work to facilitate that process. As an extension of the Hippocratic oath, and its directive to “do no harm,” she wrote that she always started with the least invasive and least toxic treatments and therapies first.
Now that sounds more like it. I called and made an appointment.
Dr. Duncan had long blond hair and wore little or no makeup. She looked to be in her late forties. She seemed like a mom—not my mom, but someone’s mom—in that she seemed efficient and caring and capable. Her office was big and open, with an exam table near the window, a desk with chairs on both sides, and bookcases filled with titles like Our Bodies, Ourselves; Perfect Healing; and The Vitamin D Cure. She interviewed me for an hour or more, listening, taking notes and asking follow-up questions. I was relaxing a bit and thinking that maybe this was the norm and that the “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” folks at my HMO were the aberration.
Duncan looked in my ears, my nose and my eyes. She tested my reflexes, felt the glands in my neck and felt my abdomen. “That doesn’t feel so good. Is it always that hard? Do you feel bloated after you eat?”
I didn’t know. I rarely thought about my belly.
After the physical exam, Dr. Duncan moved back to her desk and I took a seat across from her. She said that she had several patients with MS and that I didn’t move like they did. She believed there could be other explanations for the tingling, which had shrunk to that flip-flop feeling between my toes. She suggested several tests, including a full thyroid panel, a nutrient analysis and a test for heavy metal toxicity.
“And you should journal about MS and what it means to you,” she said. “I have patients who have it, and it’s not that big a deal to them. You seem really upset by it, so journaling will help you to figure out why it’s so upsetting to you.”
Sounded like a good idea.
“Also,” she asked, “do you have a will? You should have a will.”
Um, no.
Until that last question, I was feeling confident. But I shook off the sinking feeling and made an appointment to return for the nutrient and heavy metal tests, which I’d pay for out of pocket, the same as I’d pay for my time with her. With my insurance, I had to pay if I wanted to see anyone out of network, and the network didn’t include doctors like Duncan, who spent hours with a patient. Still, for the thyroid panel, a fairly conventional test, I figured I could find some way to use my insurance.
Duncan thought I could too, so she wrote down the requested test on her prescription pad. I drove from her office to the HMO’s main hospital ten minutes away. I took the page to the lab and dropped my insurance ID card into the cue on the lab technician’s desk. When the woman called my name, I approached the counter.
“Oh, no, no, no, this has to come from a network doctor or you’ll pay out of pocket.”
I asked what it would cost, and she
didn’t know. She looked shocked, as if I was the first person to request a full thyroid panel. And the first to ask what it cost.
“Well, you could get the test and when you get your bill, you’ll see what it costs,” she said smiling and not joking.
I took the page from Duncan’s pad and walked outside, cursing the system. Simultaneously, I started planning another way to use the system. If I had to get a network doc to prescribe a thyroid panel, fine. I called to make an appointment with Dr. Wise, the curly-haired doctor who sent me to Silver.
The next afternoon, I found myself in the now-familiar waiting room until a nurse came to walk me to an exam room, where I could wait some more.
Just glancing around the room made me a little queasy. Bad memories and all. I started thinking I was sick. Why else would I be in this room? I went through my evidence: a few doctors had said not MS. I was symptom-free without using the MS drugs. No more tingling, no weakness, no numbness, no vision issues. No nothing except for the phantom flip-flop feeling in my toes, but that didn’t bother me so much since I had mentioned it to my friend Lisa. “That’s so cool,” she said. “It’s always summer inside your shoes.”
I sat on the examination table flipping through magazines, waiting for Dr. Wise and wondering if trying to use my insurance was worth it. Just being in the cold room, alone with paper crinkling on the table under my legs, made me nervous. I looked at my watch—it’d been twenty minutes since I had been brought in and thirty minutes since I’d first arrived—and heard the door open.
Dr. Wise looked the same as the last time I’d seen her: dry, curly black hair framed her narrow face, and pale skin stretched tense over her nose. She had thin forearms and was almost birdlike in appearance, a little like my mom.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I’d like to get a thyroid panel,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m seeing another doctor for a second opinion, and she thinks it’s a good idea.”