by Ann Romney
His name was Fritz Blietschau and he lived with his wife in a tiny bungalow home on Fillmore Street. When I arrived, he welcomed me and invited me in. He was an elderly man, in his late seventies, about five foot eight, with silver hair, a confident smile, and sparkling eyes. A stroke had left him weaker on one side, so he walked with a slight limp. His hands, I noticed, seemed a little gnarled, and his thumbs were unnaturally curved. There were two folding chairs opened and facing each other in the small bedroom where I would have my treatment. Well, this certainly is crazy, I thought. I’d gone from being treated by some of the finest doctors working in the most sophisticated medical facilities in the world to sitting on a folding chair in a tiny house in Salt Lake City facing an old man about to manipulate my feet. If this were a movie, I wouldn’t believe it for a second, I thought. Okay, this is a little nuts, but he seems like a sweet man and he is trying to help. Well, I’m already here, I thought. I might as well give this a shot. At least I’ll get a nice foot massage out of it. I smiled nervously and sat down.
He gently took my foot in his hands and began pressing his thumbs into it. His thumbs were as strong as iron, and pain instantly rocketed through my body. He smiled sweetly at me, but did not ask how it felt: It felt like a vise squeezing my foot. It was near agony. I couldn’t believe this sweet elderly man was so strong. Each time he pressed into my foot, I thought it had to be the most painful thing I’d ever endured—until he moved to the next spot. Then I wished he would go back to the last spot, because that was less painful. As he worked, he explained what he was doing; he was stimulating the nerves, he said, which was why it hurt so much. I really couldn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying; I was busy holding on to the edge of the chair while grimacing in pain. After about forty-five minutes, he put my foot down on the floor and said, “Better.”
Of course it felt better. He had stopped pressing his thumbs into my foot.
I was so happy to be done with that. Maybe this was a little nuts, I kept thinking. At least I had tried it. I suspected this first foray into the world of alternative medicine would also be my last. But when I got up I felt something completely unexpected: nothing. The pain in my back had been greatly reduced. I was standing up straight, which I hadn’t been able to manage without pain in several weeks. Well, this is interesting, I thought. This actually helped me.
“You need to come back,” he said. “One treatment is going to help you only a little bit. I can fix it good.”
Well, I knew it was worth the ten dollars. There was something so warm about him, so compassionate—plus the reality was that I actually felt better. I agreed to come back. Having gone through it once, I figured, it couldn’t possibly be so painful the next time. Later that night, when Mitt asked me about it, I described Fritz to him and admitted that this unusual treatment had helped my back—and as I was explaining the treatment to him, I realized something far more exciting. My exhaustion had been lifted for a brief moment. I also had a strong reaction to the treatment, and was sick. As I look back, I know that toxins were being released. I couldn’t ignore the fact that something had happened. Let’s see how I feel after my next treatment, I told Mitt.
I felt much more comfortable with Fritz the second time. It took only a few minutes for me to realize I had been wrong about one thing: I’d thought this treatment wasn’t going to hurt as much the second time. Yet the pain was intense. It hurt so much that I started sweating.
“Let me tell you something,” Fritz said. “I have feeling in my hands. I get feedback from what I feel. You’re not good, you’re all blocked up.” He started going through a list of organs that weren’t working right: my adrenal glands weren’t working, my liver wasn’t functioning correctly, and my kidneys were weak. “They’re all sluggish.” He looked up at me and asked, “You’re very sick, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I said.
He nodded. “Yah, I treated another woman like you. And she had MS. These things I’m feeling, it feels like that. Do you have MS?”
“I do, yes,” I admitted. I was incredulous. I could not believe he had figured it out by touching my feet!
Normally when people learned I had this chronic disease they looked at me with some combination of fear and uncomfortable pity. But not Fritz. He smiled with satisfaction that he’d figured it out. “I knew it was something serious,” he said. And then, looking directly at me, he said, “I can help you.”
If someone had been telling me this story, I would have found it difficult to believe, but that is just the way it happened. More than that, when he told me he could help me, I believed him. I know it sounds preposterous, but I believed him. “But I have to see you much more. Three times a week, maybe two hours. We can do good.”
What’s the harm, I thought. I have nothing to lose by trying it.
“It’s going to be a little painful, too,” he warned. “We have a lot of work to do.”
No kidding, I thought. We raised his fee for the two hours to twenty dollars. At first he refused to take it, but I insisted. Just about the only way I could get him to take it was to threaten not to come anymore if he didn’t.
I started seeing Fritz at least three times a week. He was right about his treatments being painful; at first my feet were black and blue. And while the pain never completely disappeared, as I got a little stronger it was greatly reduced.
Fritz was a truly lovely human being. Within a few days I began to think of him as my oompa, my German grandfather. Having my feet crunched continued to be excruciatingly painful, but I always looked forward to our sessions. And gradually he began to include other types of therapy. I learned later that he had started studying MS, speaking to other practitioners of alternate medicine, trying to figure out other treatments that might help me. We did breathing exercises. I know now that this is therapeutic.
Fritz had thrown me a lifeline, and I was holding on tight. “Take a deep breath in through your nose, hold the breath, then a deep breath out through your mouth. Repeat five times.” We also did very simple yoga poses. He would sit in his chair like a drill sergeant and direct me: “Stand on one foot. Get your foot into a tree position.” Then on to the next exercises. “Spin in one direction five times.” I couldn’t do any of them. Spin? I could barely go around once slowly without losing my balance. If I moved too fast or tried to do too much I would lose my balance completely. But when I regained it, he would repeat his direction. “Good. Now do it again. Three times.”
We worked very hard, and it was so good for me. Within a short period, I could stand on one leg, at least briefly. I could get into the tree position and I could turn around two times, then three times, four, five, six times. I could see that I was making progress. Eventually I could turn ten times without losing my balance. There wasn’t a lot of medical logic to some of it, and some of it seemed silly—except for the fact that I started feeling better. Whatever we were doing, it was having a positive effect.
It was because of him, I felt certain, that my day began expanding. My days were simple, structured, and limited. I’d get up early, spend time with Margo and the girls at the equestrian center, get a reflexology treatment, and collapse in exhaustion. The rest of the day was a series of small bits and pieces, in which I was able to accomplish very little. Sometimes I would go for a walk, trying to push myself just a little farther than I had the last time. But sometimes it was hard for me to gather enough energy to walk at all. My world had shrunk to that. But after working with Fritz, I could feel the difference. I was making measureable progress, taking small steps, yes—but at least I was moving forward.
After several months I made a big decision. While the cortisone had stopped most of the numbness, it had not made me feel better. It continued to make me feel terrible. And I was getting really tired of being really tired all the time. I felt that the steroids had done their job and now that Fritz was working with me I had something else to hang on to that was safe. So I decided to try to wean myself off the steroids.
I called Dr. Weiner and told him what I wanted to do. If he had advised me against it, I’m not sure what I would have done. But he didn’t. He actually was thrilled for me that I felt well enough to do this. “The important thing is we know it works, Ann,” he told me. “That isn’t always true for everyone. But we’ve got a weapon to fight this thing. If you start going backward again, we know what to do.”
So I jumped in full throttle with my wonderful Fritz. I had gone into this world thinking it was totally crackers, but I had gotten so desperate I was willing to try anything. But when it worked, I became totally curious. I wanted to know so much more about reflexology, about all the different forms of alternative medicine. Fritz was knowledgeable about that whole unusual world.
“When you came in for the first time,” he told me in his thick accent, “your aura was practically black.”
I stopped him. “My what?” I had no idea what an aura was. I had to ask him several times to repeat the word, and when I still didn’t understand him, I asked him to spell it. Even then, I had no idea what he was talking about.
“From one shoulder to the other there’s a light all around you that some people can see,” he explained. “It’s a projection of your electrical energy. The darker it is, the less energy you have. And when you came in, yours was black, which is how I knew you were so sick.” He told me about something called Kirlian photography, a method that supposedly captures an aura on film.
When I asked him if he could teach me to see auras, he shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you how I do it myself. I just see it.”
I’ve tried to learn, but honestly without any success.
Yes, I do know how crazy some of this sounds. But I don’t care. This is the story of how my life was saved, and changed. And my Oompa Fritz was in the middle of making it happen. After a while I stopped questioning any of it. I accepted it and appreciated it.
From time to time, Fritz would tell me he was noticing a slight change in the color of my aura. “It’s a little bit gray,” or “It’s lighter,” or after several months of our being together, “I saw a spot of blue.” One little spot of blue. And without fail, his comments always would reflect how I was feeling.
We would have long, fascinating conversations as we worked. His grandfather, he told me, had been in charge of the stables for some well-known baron, and Fritz had inherited his love of horses from him. After the war, he escaped from East Germany and came to Salt Lake City because he was a member of the Mormon Church. At some point he had been in China, where he had learned reflexology. We became so close that he began referring to me as his sweet little granddaughter. Eventually he told me that his mission was to cure me of my disease before he died. I would make a joke out of that, but he was serious. He intended to cure me.
There certainly was very little financial gain in it for him. There was no value I could put on how much he was doing for me, but he would never let me pay any more than twenty dollars a session. I offered, I pleaded with him to take more, but he absolutely refused. His ethics were beyond reproach: He expected to be paid for the work that he did and nothing more. At a time when a nice spa visit might have cost one hundred dollars or more, he wouldn’t even consider charging more. He knew he had a gift, and his great satisfaction was sharing it.
Coincidently, our middle son, Josh, moved into a house only a few blocks from Fritz and his wife. On occasion he would meet me at Fritz’s house and sit with us while Fritz did his work. Initially, like everyone else in my family, Josh was quite skeptical about reflexology. The only type of holistic healing he knew anything about was acupuncture. For him, modern medicine took place in big, brightly lit hospitals. How could an aging man with gnarled fingers accomplish more than the best doctors in the world? I explained it to him as best I could: In holistic medicine, practitioners treat the whole body. If someone has cancer, or even MS, they shouldn’t go to a reflexologist expecting to be cured. That’s not what it is. It doesn’t replace Western medicine; it can be used in addition to science-based treatments. After chemotherapy or, as in my treatment, steroid infusions, it can help you feel better. It’ll provide energy. Josh remained skeptical. In fact, all my boys did, but as long as I believed I was getting something out of it, they were willing to humor me. That’s just Mom. Although, as Josh later admitted, he was pretty surprised when he saw that I had more energy and was able to do certain things I hadn’t been able to do before being treated by Fritz.
Finally, Josh became very curious. I practically dared him, “Go and get a treatment and see what you think.” So he went to Fritz for a session, more to learn about reflexology than for treatment. Just as I had several months earlier, Josh sat down in the chair expecting to get a hard but relaxing foot massage. I can still see him holding on to the sides of the chair with both hands, his teeth gritted, his knuckles turning white, beads of sweat forming on his forehead as Fritz smiled and dug into his foot. When he started complaining, Fritz told him, “I’ll go a little easier, but your mother never complains about it.”
Eventually Fritz decided that he would teach Josh the basic principles. When I’m gone, he told him, your mother is going to need some tune-up, and I’ll teach you how to do it. Josh became a good student, and eventually began to believe that these treatments released pent-up or blocked energy in the body. Fritz taught him how the different points on your foot related to other parts of your body, and how to break the blockages there. I didn’t know it at the time, but Fritz told Josh that he didn’t expect to live that much longer and he was worried about what I would do after his death. He wanted Josh to know enough to be able to continue my reflexology therapy.
Sometimes at night, when I was very tired, I would ask Josh for a treatment. He would pull up a chair near the couch and practice what he had learned. While treatments with Fritz would last an hour or more, after fifteen or twenty minutes Josh’s hands would start to cramp.
While Josh felt that giving his mother a treatment was a little bit awkward, he knew there were real benefits to it, and that was far more important to him. Admittedly, the concept of an adult man treating his mother by pressing points on her feet is odd.
Mitt was usually sitting there with us, and slowly Josh lured him in. While Mitt continued to believe that reflexology was, in his own words, “a bunch of hoo-ha,” his curiosity eventually trumped his intellect. Of course he didn’t understand any more than I did why it was working, but he had to admit that it was working. He could see the difference standing right in front of him. Eventually he began to ask Josh to show him what he was doing, where to press his thumbs and for how long and how hard, and after he learned, he would work on my feet sometimes, too. After all our years together, most of the time I had a very good idea what he was thinking. But as he sat there pressing his thumbs into my feet, I decided that this time it would be better not to know.
Eventually, though, Mitt did something I never would have anticipated. He made an appointment to see Fritz himself. He had a terrible sciatica attack; he was practically doubled over in pain. I told him, “Go in and see him. It’ll either help or it won’t.”
He was stubborn. “It may work for you,” he said. “But it’s not going help me.” He was pretty sure about that—right up until the time he walked out of Fritz’s house standing up straight.
Fritz got the biggest kick out of that. He loved telling people, “You should have seen Mitt come hobbling up. He couldn’t even stand up right. He leaves straight as an arrow, off he walks!”
After that Mitt had to find out why it worked so well. That’s him: he needs to know. I remember listening to him as he tried to explain it to someone: “These nerves are all connected. If you touch this point in your foot, it’s connected to this point in your back or your liver or your kidneys or your different glands.” Mitt isn’t satisfied until he understands the logic of a process.
I eventually became dependent on Fritz’s treatments. Thanks to him and Margo and Dr. Weiner, and the contin
ued support of my family, my health was improving. I used to imagine that I was dragging my bag of rocks up a steep incline. It was difficult and it was slow, but I was making progress. After more than a year of paying just twenty dollars a session, I wanted to find a way to show my appreciation to Fritz, but he made it so difficult. He insisted that he and his wife had what they needed, and he wouldn’t take anything else. During our conversations, though, I found out that he had wanted to go back to Germany for a final visit. I decided that was the one thing I could do for him. “This is the deal, Fritz,” I told him. “You know you’re getting older, you want to see your family, so this is my gift to you: I’m sending you and your wife to Germany.” When he started to protest, I stopped him. “You’ll really hurt my feelings if you refuse my gift. You’ve been giving me a gift all this time, and I haven’t refused you. You don’t have any choice.”
With a little persistence I finally turned his no, no, no’s into a “yah.” He “vould” go, he agreed, but only for me. I was so pleased—until the reality sank in that my Fritz was going away for six weeks. Uh-oh, I thought, what have I done? What am I going to do without him? That’s when Josh offered to step in; and while Fritz was gone, Josh and I met regularly. While he certainly didn’t have the knowledge or experience Fritz had, he did a fine job as a substitute—and I didn’t have to pay him the twenty dollars.
Mitt and I had come to Salt Lake City three years before the Olympics. The Games were a mess, and I was a mess. Now, with only months to go, so much had changed. The Games were on track, the world would soon be arriving, and I was loving life. I was regaining my strength. My mornings were spent with Margo and the horses, my afternoons with my wonderful Fritz. And then Fritz had a heart attack. I knew he was dying. It was just terrible. Between taking care of me, working with Josh, and getting to know Mitt, he had become an important part of our family. We were all devastated.