Читать книгу Sweet Poison - Janet Starr Hull - Страница 18

CHAPTER 6

Detective Work

Back into the “mom” routine, I stopped with the boys at a friend’s house a few afternoons later. Sitting on Deb’s deck in a backyard full of trees always seemed to me like taking a vacation. Deb was a good friend from years past, and I always loved going to her house. So did the boys. They played happily taking turns in her hammock for hours. Over a cup of tea, Deb and I talked about my mysterious health problems.

“You know, I’m going to Doctor Steve Fugua, a renowned nutritionist in Dallas. My parents have been going to him for years, and they’re very healthy and young looking.” Deb told me. “Here.” She handed me a piece of paper and a pen. “Write down his number and call him.” Deb didn’t have to twist my arm.

“I’ll call Doctor Fugua tomorrow,” I replied.

I didn’t wait until the next day. As soon as I got home and put the boys down to nap, I picked up the phone and dialed his number. The phone rang. “Hello. Is Steve Fugua there, please?”

After a few seconds, a gentle voice answered, “Yes. This is Steve Fugua. What can I do for you?”

I introduced myself as a friend of Deb Crombie’s and outlined my dilemma.

“I tell you what,” Steve responded. “You come see me tomorrow morning at nine. I think I can help you.”

Elated, I called Deb and asked if she’d watch the boys for me.

“Of course I will,” she said. “Are you going to another doctor?”

“Nope,” I answered with enthusiasm. “I hope I’m going to see someone who will help me once and for all.” I didn’t tell her it was the very person she’d recommended just in case it didn’t work out.

But the minute I met Dr. Fugua I knew he was someone very special. He was tall with gray hair, a gray goatee, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a smile that immediately made me feel comfortable.

Steve Fugua was raised in his family’s health food business, but his Ph.D. is in geology. Because of my master’s degree in environmental science, we shared much. He taught me his unique knowledge of nutrition based on the influences of natural and synthetic chemicals. He drew his knowledge from over sixty years in the nutrition field. My knowledge of nutrition began with him.

After that first appointment, I saw Steve regularly. Sometimes the kids were with me, sometimes not. Every time I visited his shop, he seemed to be counseling someone. “Jan!” he often said as I walked through the door. “Come over here and tell these people about your Graves’ disease. Jan is my best student,” he would say to the people. Already feeling much better, I always smiled with warmth and admiration.

I had been avoiding anything containing aspartame since the day I’d returned home from the hospital. Under Steve’s counseling, I decided to stay away from as many processed foods as possible, too, selecting instead whole foods at the grocery store for both snacks and meals. I replaced drinking all sodas with over fifteen glasses of bottled water a day. I became a food detective. I studied all food and drink labels. I learned what preservatives really are and how they are made. I became very protective of everything I put into my or my family’s bodies, and modified their diets along with mine.

Sometimes when Chuck was home to watch the boys, I worked with Steve in the evenings. And I came to feel that other than my dad, there is no other male I admire as much as Steve Fugua. His ability to help people heal nutritionally is remarkable. I was fortunate that Steve took me under his wing and taught me the importance of nutrition.

Steve taught me more than any textbook could have about vitamin supplements, food additives, whole foods, and modern-day malnutrition. I asked question after question.

I began to understand how people pollute their bodies in the same way they pollute the environment. Chemicals aren’t meant to be eaten and can accumulate in the body like toxic waste accumulates in a river. Hidden chemical food additives dominate the food supply, and fat-free, sugar-free food substitutes tempt us to forget basic eating rules. Instinctively, our bodies require real food—not food substitutes. I learned that I had been saturating myself with unhealthy chemicals.

Steve spent hours not only with me but with each of his clients. He taught us about nutrition and shared his knowledge openly. Coincidentally, he had two other clients diagnosed with Graves’ disease, both of whom he followed to complete recovery. I was number three. As our working relationship and my knowledge expanded, I supplied Steve with enough details to document patterned similarities among the three of us: two females and one male.

Every day I grew more conscious of what foods my body needed to maintain perfect health and which disguised artificial foods to avoid. I realized that my eating habits should be more like my grandparents’ diet one hundred years ago. Eat real food: that’s what the body demands. I realized how far from common sense I had wandered.

Steve kept a journal of all his nutritional case histories. He had documented over sixty years of cases he still referred to. One day as I arrived at his shop, Steve grabbed my arm and whisked me out the door. “What are you doing?” I asked with a smile. “Steve, where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he said with a sheepish grin. We got into his car and drove a short distance to the print shop. Unaware of what he was up to, I jumped out of the car and followed him inside. His stride reminded me of a teenager’s. We walked over to the counter. Steve presented the clerk with a box filled with papers neatly stacked, though each page was slightly dog-eared and worn. He requested his entire journal be photocopied for me. I was speechless. He was giving me his life’s work, the greatest gift he could ever impart. My throat quivered as I held back tears of gratitude.

“Steve,” I said with a hug, “I am overwhelmed. Thank you so much.”

He smiled.

For decades, Steve had helped clients rid themselves of all kinds of ailments. Now he added my story to the list. As we stood there, he handed me my own case study. I began reading:

“But Graves’ Disease Can’t Be Cured”

Jan is a very active thirty-four-year-old mother of three young boys. She has been perfectly healthy all her life, doing what she feels is right by eating little saturated fat, no butter, no eggs, few sweets, and consuming little alcohol. She teaches aerobics six to ten times a week, instructs environmental science classes at the local university, and maintains her household after working hours. She has fallen into the typical “fitness mode” of working out too much and eating too little in order to maintain a lean, strong body. She consumes a lot of diet products sweetened with the artificial sweetener NutraSweet. Due to her busy schedule, she eats sporadic meals at irregular hours, eating too many “low calorie” hydrogenized foods.”

It was very strange seeing it all in print but I wanted to know all Steve had concluded and read on, intrigued.

“For almost a year, Jan’s weight has slowly increased pound by pound. She keeps working out and eating less as her weight continues to climb. Her heart has begun to race, she sweats a lot, and her menstrual cycles are irregular. Her vision is worsening, she has retinal tearing in both eyes, and her skin and hair are drying out. As her body changes, she eats more diet and processed foods. She blames her mood swings (PMS all month long) on stress.

“Finally Jan ends up in the hospital with a racing heart rate of 180 beats per minute. She is stricken with a serious upper respiratory infection and hyperthyroidism. Her doctor diagnoses her with Graves’ disease.

“Jan is told that she will die if she does not get her thyroid under control, and it is recommended to her to drink radioactive iodine (the radioactive cocktail) to destroy her thyroid gland. She then will be put on artificial thyroid medication for the rest of her life to keep her alive.

“Jan refuses to let her doctor permanently destroy such an important part of her body. She wants to fight to keep her thyroid. She checks herself out of the hospital after three days on an IV and goes home.

“Upon hearing from a friend about the successes of nutritional counseling, Jan comes to me with her prognosis of Graves’ disease. She has a hair analysis performed. All of Jan’s mineral and nutrient levels are very low, most likely due to the chemicals saturating her body, and she shows a lack of stomach acid available to dissolve them. Her chromium, zinc, selenium, manganese, magnesium, B-6, and vitamin C levels test dangerously low. Two other clients have been previously diagnosed by their doctors as having Graves’ disease. Interestingly, all three are deficient in the same minerals and nutrients: vitamin C, PABA, selenium, zinc, B-6 and chromium.

“Once Jan brings these mineral levels back to normal, her Graves’ disease disappears. Within thirty days, her heart and thyroid return to normal. Jan must maintain a high acid level in her stomach, however, in order to digest her food, her vitamins, and her nutrient intake. After more than thirty years of eating alkaline foods such as white flour and margarine products, Jan’s acidic level within her stomach is too alkaline. After meals, she now takes a digestive enzyme rich in papaya or eats a raw lemon, drinks a rich red wine, or takes a betaine hydrochloride supplement to aid in the digestion of her food, especially if she chooses to eat red meat or a meal heavy in fake oils. To support the stomach lining, she eats raw cabbage at least three times a week to keep the mucin cells lining the stomach walls thick and healthy. Research supports the theory that stomach ulcers disappear when raw cabbage is eaten to rebuild the stomach lining.

“Jan eats 75% raw food with each meal, including high fiber grains, eats little or no red meat, drinks an abundance of water, and maintains a regular supplementary program of the following vitamins and minerals: chromium (picolinate and glucose tolerance formula [GTF chromium]), zinc picolinate, PABA, pantothenic acid, vitamin C, liver tablets, selenium, manganese, calcium-magnesium, primrose oil, B-complex and extra B-6, along with a natural multivitamin.”

I hugged Steve in appreciation of all he’d done for me and made a promise to myself that if I ever had the chance to help people who were ingesting sweet poison to regain their health and attain a healthy lifestyle, I would.

Each week as I had promised, I got a blood test at the ER doctor’s office. We looked at the tests differently. I gauged the results of my personal efforts not to irradiate my thyroid gland at the same time as the doctor continued to make plans to irradiate my thyroid.

At my weekly examination one month after leaving the hospital, my astonished doctor announced somewhat sheepishly, “Your thyroid levels have returned to normal.”

“Doctor,” I said as he shook his head, “what do you think? Am I getting rid of this Graves’ disease?”

“Well,” he sputtered, “it’s too early to tell. We might not have to destroy your thyroid,” he said grudgingly. “But let me warn you,” he went on as if looking for something wrong, “your thyroid levels will not remain normal. Absolutely not! No one has ever cured Graves’ disease,” he proclaimed with authority.

I refrained from comment. We’ll see, I thought.

As my body continued to stabilize, I graduated to having blood tests every two weeks instead of once a week. I felt stronger physically and emotionally. “I am defeating this disease,” I told myself hopefully, but I still had some concerns that the doctor’s prognosis might come true.

After a few more weeks, just when I was becoming comfortably optimistic, something did go wrong. I developed uncharacteristically dangerous reactions, worse than before my hospitalization.

My skin began to break out in grotesque acne. My hair fell out in bigger and more frightening clumps. My eyes weakened to the point that I had difficulty focusing on anything, and my night vision was completely elusive. I looked and felt worse than I did when I first got ill.

I was horrified but I tried not to panic.

Breathe deeply, Jan, you have to gain control. Time to rethink. Are the vitamins tricking me or is the medicine impairing my immune system?

I went over all I was doing to try to find the culprit. Could taking both the medication and the vitamin supplements be overloading my system? I wondered. I knew my doctor would blame the vitamins. I could hear his reprimands: How dare you go against this advice? That’s what you get! I would be penalized for displaying self-assertiveness, and I would become even more sick. That’ll show me, I thought.

Nevertheless, it could be the medication, not the vitamins. After all, I was warned the medication was so strong it could destroy my immune system.

And so I decided to take another bold step. I would stop taking my medication. I eased off it slowly, cutting back my daily dosage.

I established a target goal of three months to stabilize my condition, relying solely on good nutrition and vitamin therapy for recovery. If at that point my condition was still this bad, I would have to reconsider the doctor’s treatment. I continued to supplement my diet with the vitamins in order to restore the damage caused, I was sure, by the aspartame. But I took no prescription drug, not even aspirin.

Without doubt, I was taking a chance following my instincts. I do not recommend going against a doctor’s advice, but, in my case, I felt I knew something he didn’t.

If I regained good health and maintained it for the next few months, I would know the dietary cleansing and vitamin therapy had healed my body.