A little background, please?

This story chronicles our family's experience in dealing with a cancer diagnosis. We learned a lot about how to deal with the diagnosis in a way that doesn’t leave the patient and their loved ones feeling hopeless and helpless. We learned about the importance of taking control of your health and not just following doctor's orders. Many people find it easier to follow the doctor’s orders when diagnosed with cancer. If you are like my husband and I, you may have difficulty with that. I have always been the kind of person who takes comfort in educating myself when I am confronted with something for which I have no experience or frame of reference. My husband was still caught up in the devastation and depression of the diagnosis. It was my responsibility to learn as much as I could about his condition so that I could find a way to take back our lives and rid ourselves of this disease called cancer.

I know it may sound like I am trying to “cure cancer”, something that has supposedly been perplexing doctors and researchers for many, many years. Who do I think I am that I, someone with absolutely no medical background, could possibly find some way to cure or at least slow the progression of this disease?

Over the past 10 years, I had started to develop a distrust of the medical profession, specifically beginning with an experience that affected my son.

As a young, first-time mother, I had always been led to believe that you should trust your doctor. When Ronnie was born, he had one pediatrician, Dr. Gary, a wonderful man, from birth to about 2 ½ years old. Dr. Gary actually transitioned his practice from a union health center, which was highly regulated by the insurance companies, into private practice where he would no longer accept health insurance. He felt very strongly that the insurance companies had too much say in how physicians should treat their patients and he had had enough. At the time, I was about 30 years old and all I knew was to trust your doctor. My mom, who was raised in the South, had plenty of Southern remedies for minor things so I believed somewhat in those types of old-school remedies. But I was very impressed with Dr. Gary and trusted him immensely. So when Ronnie no longer had him for his primary care physician I was a little upset. I set about replacing him with another doctor in a practice closer to my home at the time and used this new doctor for both my kids until an incident occurred that upset me greatly.

Since my son Ronnie was about 2 years old, he’s suffered from seasonal allergies and ear infections that seemed to plague him all year long. Previously, Dr. Gary would occasionally prescribe Amoxycillin for the ear infections but suggested saline flushes for the allergies, which did well to quell the symptoms. He often cautioned us on using antibiotics for too long, mentioning that they oftentimes caused more problems than they were worth. The ear infection seemed to be a result of the allergies and he suffered from them all year long. Many nights, I walked past his room and cringed when I heard his labored, phlegm-filled breathing as he slept. The new doctor continuously prescribed Amoxycillin for the ear infection (which seemed to come back within a month after the medicine was completed) and Claritin all year.

Fast forward 5 years later and Ronnie, now 7, is an athletic, fun and talkative little boy who is still suffering from seasonal allergies (which aren’t seasonal) and chronic ear infections. The new doctor is still prescribing Claritin and Amoxycillin for these ailments, which are renewed at least 3 times a year as they seem to only quell the symptoms but never get rid of the underlying problem. By this time, Ronnie has been joined by a little sister, Taylor, who is about 3. One day, as I was picking them both up from summer camp, I was disturbed by the noises that he was making in the backseat. Noises that I described as “sing-song sighing” that I felt he was doing just to annoy me! The more I asked him to stop, the more he insisted that he couldn’t. When we got home and I bustled around preparing dinner before Ronnie had to go to basketball practice at the local Y, he announced that he didn’t want to go to basketball.

Now, you must understand that my son lived, breathed and slept basketball. Since he was given a Little Tykes basketball net at the age of 2, he has always been in love with the sport. If ever there was something I wanted to use to motivate him, it was always basketball. Ronnie has never, even when he was sick, turned down an opportunity to play basketball. Often he spent days on the basketball court in camp and then went home to basketball practice, he never tired of the sport. So when he announced that he didn’t want to go, I was immediately concerned.

When I questioned him, he told me he told me he didn’t want to go because he couldn’t stop making the “sing-song sighing” noises and he “felt crazy” and he just didn’t want to go. And then he burst into tears. I tried my best not to cry also while I tried to find out what he was feeling. What he described to me sounded like a classic case of Tourette’s Syndrome.

Now, you must understand at the time I had been in the process of reading a book called “Icy Sparks” by Gwyn Hyman Rubio, an Oprah’s Book Club book. The book broke my heart as it chronicled the experience of a little girl who suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome and how she was mistreated and misunderstood in her backwards, ignorant town in Kentucky. Now, mind you, the book was set back in the ‘50s and ’60 when people were not so enlightened about disabilities such as this. But the book affected me profoundly and I felt so much compassion for this child. The thought of my child suffering this way was too much to bear. I thought about this as I hugged my “sing-song sighing” child and assured him that everything would be okay and I would fix this for him. We skipped basketball that night and I resolved to learn what I could about Tourette’s Syndrome.

I decided to call my son’s primary care physician for some insight on what I could expect from this illness. When I called his doctor, who I will refer to as Dr. G, and told him what Ronnie was going through I asked specifically what is done to treat this illness. What he told me changed my perception forever of traditional medicine.

Dr. G told me that there was as yet no cure for Tourette’s Syndrome. He said that it was caused by a neurological condition that caused a variety of nervous tics such as strange noises, twitches and even violent outbursts. It was most often treated by antipsychotic drugs such as Haldol. I asked what the side effects of this drug were and I was even more horrified by Dr. G’s response. I could expect my skinny little 60 lb son to suffer from insomnia, restlessness, fatigue, weight gain, dry mouth, constipation, pseudo-Parkinson’s behavior, involuntary twitches which frequently appear after long-term or high-dose use of antipsychotics in children, blurred vision, photosensitivity and a myriad of other symptoms too horrible for me to remember. The thing Dr. G told me that upset me the most was that long-term the most serious side effect would be my son’s affinity for illegal drugs as an adult after being on these antipsychotics as a child. Dr. G shared this information with me without any hesitation and suggested I bring Ronnie in to be evaluated and to schedule an appointment with a neurologist who would begin the process of testing which was nothing more than a process of elimination. First, they would determine what it wasn’t in an effort to determine if it WAS even what I, and by now Dr. G, suspected.

After recuperating from the initial shock, I called my mother for advice. I knew I didn’t want Ronnie on anything with the word “antipsychotic” in the name. Not my sweet, precious, athletic and happy little boy. My mother suggested I go visit an herbal doctor who could advise me on how to cure the problem, rather than treat the symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome.

You should know that at this point in my life I was a paralegal and had been in this profession for maybe 5 or 6 years. If there was anything I was good at, it was research. I set out researching the symptoms that Ronnie was experiencing and I discovered by he could possibly be suffering from an overgrowth of yeast in his little body caused by the years and years of yeast-causing antibiotics for ear infections and allergy medicine.

You see, the body can be overloaded with yeast. In sufficient amounts, yeast is actually good and necessary for the human body. But when one’s body is flooded with yeast and causes the body to be out of balance so to speak, it can result in neurological problems such as ADD, ADHD, autism, nervous tics, incessant eye-blinking and even Tourette’s Syndrome. If you find a way to reduce the build-up of yeast in the body, the neurological system goes back to normal. (There’s that “balance” idea again!) I came across many websites that validated this research, just as many as I discovered that branded the notion as crackpot and ineffective.

My gut told me there was something to this. But when I mentioned it to Dr. G, he pooh-poohed my research and warned me against believing everything I see on the Internet. I was embarrassed and almost wished I hadn’t told him about the research that I had done. But I also felt that maybe he didn’t know as much as he though the did.

My mother had suggested I pay a visit to an herbal vitamin store in West Philly. So, I left work early and went to the herbal store and spoke with the proprietor, Dr. Wyatt. I sheepishly explained what my son had shared with me just the night before and as I explained my research, I apologized for believing what I had read before he had a chance to chastise me for being so naive. To my surprise, Dr. Wyatt agreed with everything that I had shared. He agreed that Ronnie was suffering from a reaction of having too much candida or yeast in his little body and it was beginning to attack his nervous system, resulting in the nervous tics and eye-blinking, etc. He handed me two bottles of herbs (the names of which I cannot remember to this day) and told me to have Ronnie take them for the next month or two and then bring him back with me to be evaluated.

I went home and gave Ronnie the herbs and was amazed at the result. By the following week on the day that he was to go to basketball at the Y, Ronnie had no more symptoms. No blinking, no “sing-song sighing”, no “feeling crazy”. At first, I wasn’t sure if Ronnie was just trying to please me by pretending to be “cured”. He had to know how much I wanted this to work. We had him take the herbs for maybe 3 months to be on the safe side, but there were no more symptoms. As an added bonus, his allergies disappeared for about 6 years after that. The effects of this combination of herbs removed any sign of allergies from my son and he didn't begin to develop seasonal allergies again until about the age of 12 or 13.