I drank the undiluted Noni juice straight, water chaser, for at last 18 months. Part of my brain wants to say it was closer to two and a half years. At that point, I switched to Noni capsules, which were less expensive and certainly easier to swallow. Same effect. I felt good.
I still had to deal with some lingering problems, of course. My balance didn’t. The stasis stayed. The headaches changed their visitation schedule at will. My night vision came and went, as if it was family (fish and family stink after three days, my mother-in-law always reminded me. My night vision must have had the same mother-in-law). And I took on a new wrinkle: optic migraines. Very pretty albeit completely distracting while they’re happening, usually 20-25 minutes, after which the headache made its regularly scheduled appearance.
Tom, Bera, and I tried to look at the creep that had invaded my systems from different angles, and made some logical deductions. We conceptualized MS as akin to an electrical problem. My impulses weren’t making it through my wires. Why? It all came down to two basic problems: inflammation and spasm.
To reduce inflammation, I relied on arnica. I used both the homeopathic tablets (Hyland or Borion, didn’t matter which) and the topical gel. I prefer Roberts Research Laboratories Arnica Gel; it’s excellent, absorbs quickly, and smells nice. If things got severe, I could take more tablets and reapply every fifteen minutes. If that didn’t work, I defaulted to some left-over naproxen. But naproxen isn’t good for my internal organs (I forget which one it affects—liver? Kidneys? Gallbladder? One of those. Maybe the stomach. Whatever), so I stalled on taking it except in extreme instances.
BTW: my mother used arnica gel on her leg after her knee-replacement surgery. It always helped bring down the swelling, which relieved the pain. It only didn’t help when she didn’t use it. I have found this to be true across the board: if you don’t rub it in (or dissolve it under your tongue, depending on which form you’re using), it doesn’t work at all. Not even a little. Doesn’t sound reasonable, does it? But I’ve done this experiment over and over, and the result is always the same: use it, it helps. Don’t use it, it doesn’t. Amazing, eh?
Bach Rescue Remedy took care of the spasms probably 97.86% of the time. Three dropperfuls under the tongue repeated as often as necessary, which was usually not more than two or three times per flare-up. Again, in extreme, incorrigible episodes, I popped a left-over robaxin. I’m sure my supply of both allopathic drugs were long past their expiration dates, but they still worked on those rare occasions when the arnica and Rescue Remedy didn’t pull it off.
When I got too fatigued, my husband ran out and bought potato chips. Not the healthy baked or vegetable kind. The old-fashioned, greasy, salty kind. The salt-grease combination make me feel better, stronger, and less tired. Why? Because…. That’s it. Because. It worked. I didn’t think I needed to know why it worked.
BTW: yogurt—not so much. Yogurt, which was suppose to make me feel better and feed the healthy bacteria in my gut just made me queasy. Go figure. Bera says my body is backwards: everything I did according to Hoyle didn’t work. Everything I did that shouldn’t help, did. Tom says some doctor once told me I was a drug reactor. I always took his word for that, because I don’t remember it. (Were he here physically right now, he’d roll his eyes, heave a massive sigh, and walk away, so just take that as given.)
Between the Noni, arnica, and Rescue Remedy to combat the MS and the cayenne capsules to keep the Reynaud’s at bay, I did pretty well for a couple of years. I certainly handled my more debilitating symptoms better than most of the other people I knew with MS. It felt like I’d pushed the interloper back to remitting/relapsing with just a few always-present exceptions: the visual distortions and limitations, the lack of balance, the tenuous sphincter compromise, and blah, blah, blah. BUT—if I lived carefully, which I mostly did (mostly), I’d get along for the rest of my life without any canes, wheelchairs, or allopathic interventions. That’s what I was aiming for, that’s what I got.
In early 2003, a former client sent me a new client: wacky, wonderful Ron. Wacky, wonderful Ron lived on the other side of the country from me, had a great story to tell, and was part owner of a now-defunct supplement company that owned the patent on a Superior Antioxidant Oral Chelation Formula he said I just had to try. Besides a long list of vitamins and minerals, it had a proprietary blend of minerals and nutraceuticals (don’t ya just love that new made-up word?) that would change my life.
Yeah, right.
But it was free, and as Arthur Godfrey used to say, for free, you take. So I took. When the first bottle showed up I sent a copy of the label to Bera, who said, “Go ahead. It won’t hurt you.”
Oh, goody, because I just loved taking handfuls of supplements. But I’m diligent if nothing else, so I followed the recommended build-up program: one mornings and evenings for a week, then two twice a day, etc., until I reached maintenance of two in the morning and three at night. It became part of my daily regimen, just another couple, three tablets in my cup of pills that, of course, included the cayenne and Noni capsules, a Omega-3 gel cap to improve brain function, and an Aloelax capsule for…obvious reasons.
It’s a girl thing.
Ron kept sending me bottles of Chelation, I so kept taking it. After a couple of years, I noticed my night vision getting better. A few years later, I noticed I felt stronger—a strange thing to feel I admit, but remember I used to be a drummer: I knew what it felt like to feel strong.
By the time Tom’s mother died in May 2005 (the day after my birthday because I asked her to please, don’t die on my birthday, I’ve already lost a cat on my birthday and if she died on the 27th, I would never be able to eat chocolate cake again, so God bless her, she waited until the next morning), I felt pretty darn strong. Vigorous, even—remember “The lusty month of May”? From Camelot? Geez, now I feel old—and able to do something about it, too. Eighteen months later, I’d had the pedal to the metal so hard for so long that we were, for the first time in our marriage, completely out of debt.
It was an occasion, I tell you. A veritable triumph for a disabled ghostwriter who, although she made a lot of money per annum, was married to a musician, which thus negated most if not all gains tax season after tax season. For the first time since we’d walked up the steps of Chicago City Hall, thanks to having more vigor than I’d ever had before in life (Noni + Chelation equaled energy4), the credit card debts were gone, the financing debts were gone, and the IRS had Offer-and-Compromised out.
It didn’t last, of course, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault. Sometimes shit happens. In October 2006, stuff that had nothing whatsoever to do with me or my squatter-infested body came along to strain our finances, our marriage, and our life in general.
It all ended as badly as humanly possible, but thanks to Tom’s and my connection via the zero point field, I shed the last vestiges of MS.
Which is a whole ‘nother story.