Stay Outside, Avoid the NHS, Safe Life

 I am what is known in the current climate as "shielding". This is due to an inherited chronic condition delightfully known as Crohn's Disease.

I have experienced well known symptoms of this inconvenience since I can remember, certainly since I was around ten years of age. They have gradually become more severe during my life, but the first really bad attack happened when I was sixteen. I was out on my bike with a friend, we were delivering "Imperial Cancer" lottery tickets, and having finished the round, we were celebrating with a visit to the sweet shop. I was waiting outside while my friend Rob was buying his sweets, minding his bike, I was straddling the crossbar of my bike, and wham, the nastiest pain that I had ever felt bent me double, and I screamed in pain.

I managed to get home and my mother called for the doctor. GP's used to make home visits in those days, I was given an anti-histamine called Phenergan, and I went to bed and eventually fell asleep as the drug overcame me. I slept for close to eighteen hours, and woke feeling drowsy and hung over, but without those crippling waves of excruciating pain.

The story repeated itself at intervals over the next few years, mostly in the autumn/winter months, during which I left the parental home to live in flatland Fulham with a work colleague. Through him, I met my future wife and lifelong friend, Rosie. She was an ITU nurse at the new "Charing Cross hospital" in north Fulham. Several times we went to that place after we had finished our shift at the computer services bureau that we worked at. We would marvel at the nurse's dedication to their work. One patient, in particular sticks in my memory to this day, she had been unplugged from the ventilation equipment and was being cared for, as she was fading away. The talk amongst the nurses was interesting in that since that decision had been made, she had started to pick up, and a couple of weeks later she was sent home, having made a full recovery.

I digress... We married later that year in Ireland, I was twenty-one, we returned to the Fulham flat, my former flat mate had also married and set up home elsewhere.

Life went on and I continued to experience gut pain, and eventually that year, I received the diagnosis of Crohn's disease, my wife sobbed, since it had been one of her specialisms that she studied as a student. She went to Fulham library and looked for books that might be of interest, and found a little blue PVC covered paperback by an American chap called Jack Goldstein, who had had his life ruined by his doctors attempting to hide the very nasty symptoms related to Ulcerative Colitis, which is closely related to Crohn's, but only affects the colon. Crohn's can affect the whole gut, but mainly the small bowel and often the junction of the small bowel and the colon (Caecum). The book concentrated on what one eats and how one behaves during attacks....

Goldstein's health had been ruined by perpetual ingestion of strong corticosteroids, which was the normal allopathic "therapy" at that time

He had learned and wrote that food should be ninety percent raw and consist mostly of leafy green vegetables, salads, fruits and nuts (not peanuts, which are peas). The avoidance of meat and dairy was implicit, although the occasional raw egg was accepted, as a quick concentrated protein meal. He had chanced upon this during bouts of illness, and through the auspices of a nature cure practitioner "Dr. Herbert Shelton". He was a dour man, who had been relentlessly attacked for his views and treatment, even though he was trained as a doctor. He had become disappointed at his interventions as a regular doctor, along with the crude resort to surgery that his colleagues practised, and turned his back on regular medicine. He read old books and studied animals in their natural environment, and noted that there had been many health practitioners who had made similar discoveries as far back as the early 19th century. He had written many books on the subject, but due to the nature of the American closed-shop system of conventional treatment, he was dismissed as a nutcase, and even sued, when ONE (yes one) of his patients died. 

This so-called conventional treatment is where doctors treat symptoms, what is known as allopathic medicine, rather than taking an interest in the whole person standing in front of them. The system works by giving a drug for a particular symptom and then adding another drug for the ensuing side effects.... and so on.

The nature of all drugs is that they are poisonous, and the body does what it can to shout at the recipient to stop, most people have never read about what has become known as nature cure, and so they walk around zombie like until they take to their beds and fade away.

Nature cure understands that the body is self healing, a cat for instance, when feeling sick, will eat some grass, vomit, hide away and fast for a few days. Hence the epithet.... nine lives.

Practitioners of nature cure pursue a similar avenue, they ask attendees at their institutions to go to bed and fast, only drinking a couple of pints of room temperature (or tepid) distilled water at regular intervals. The emphasis on total regenerative rest, while the body heals itself, the doctor watches closely, monitors the vital signs, breathing, blood pressure and eye colour, looking for tell tail signs that health is returning. There is point where they understand that to fast any longer would start to undermine the cure and they break the fast (breakfast huh!), and slowly begin to teach the body how to feed on food rather than body fat, patience is required at this stage since it can take another week or so after the fast has been broken.

Now reading this book "Fasting can save your Life" was so radical to me, someone who had been in and out of A&E wards, in London many times by now. However, I attempted to follow the nature cure principals even though it seemed whacky. I found a nature cure practitioner in Essex, called Dr. Keki Sidhwa. He had come to Scotland from India, to study medicine but had suffered from a health breakdown. His mother told him how this had happened to him as a boy following a viral attack. He had forgotten about the incident, but he listened to her (how refreshing), and began a fast, he soon recovered and abandoned his studies to learn the "health science" as it was known at the time.

Anyway I consulted him and he fasted me for two weeks at his institution and sent me home, but I just could not cope with the vegan diet, I was a meat and two veg man, and over the time between being twenty one and twenty four, all my normal habits returned, late nights, hamburgers at work, the occasional pint (I was never a big drinker), and the attacks began to occur again.

The pains were becoming more extreme with every hospital visit, and I was regularly being injected IV with morphine. This is still what happens several times a year. 

At forty-four, I eventually succumbed to the surgeon's most crude resort, which is the removal of diseased gut. I had two surgical interventions, the first was an emergency where my ileum was cut at the first part of disease that the surgeon found, the mass of scarred and damaged gut below was impossible for him to disentangle from seriously vital arteries, so he poked the ileum through my gut wall and formed a stoma, to which I had to learn how to catch the waste in a bag. Seven months later, I had another six hours of surgery and this time he managed  to remove nearly a yard of my small bowel, the caecum and about an inch of colon, and he joined the two pieces together and the bag was no longer needed. Effectively, the colon now acts as the bag, where improperly digested food is stored and delivered to the outside world in the usual manner.

It wasn't long before the pains began again, with two or three remaining parts of the ileum showing up as diseased via the usual diagnostic tools, X-ray, Cat Scan and MRI. No further surgery would possible without being left with only IV feed for sustenance, but there was a new kid on the block, in the form of so-called "biological" infusions, self administered every week into my thigh or belly. This enabled a partial recovery, but I could barely walk, since the treatment had the side effect of pain in my joints, the shoulders and hip pain being really depressing, since it was constant, only fading as I approached the time for my next shot.

My friend, guru and doctor, Keki Sidhwa had moved to my home town, but he was over ninety and shortly thereafter died, RIP.

I have now been losing weight, regardless of how much I eat, and it seems that perhaps my pancreas has ceased to operate efficiently, I have numbness in my feet and fingers, and clearly, I am not digesting much of what I consume. 

I decided to look again at nature cure, but there are no longer any fasting institutes in England, but my daughter is a qualified nutritionist, and she suggested that I try overloading with micronutrients by liquidising leafy green vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, whilst avoiding my adopted diet of white bread, white rice and dairy produce, which have recently been the only foods that I could tolerate without resorting to painkillers or morphine. Fasting would be problematic, since I would have nothing to live on. My last really major attack being a couple of weeks back when an ambulance was called for me and I received this within twenty minutes of calling them.

I was then taken to the wrong hospital, the one that has no record of me, even though I asked to be taken to the nearer hospital where my two foot thick file, and my usual consultant and practise nurse work. 

I laid in a corridor full of coughing covids for several hours, I was told that the treatment protocol letter that my consultant had helpfully provided and kept updated during the last few years meant nothing to them. This specifies that no, I am not an addict, and that yes, I might need a couple of shots of morphine, along with a couple of other drugs to help stabilise my gut, one shot never being enough even though the second should be around twenty minutes after the first, then after a couple of hours laying on a gurney, I should be released back home. They totally ignored the letter and I discharged myself in utter disgust.

I have a very good relationship with my medical consultant, so a couple of days back, I emailed him to ask for an appointment, he responded almost immediately, and shortly afterwards his secretary emailed me with an appointment.

In the mean time, I have continued with my new regime, and I am feeling more energetic, even though I am currently weighing 135lbs, which for someone over six feet tall, means that I am literally skin and bone, there is not a pick of fat on me, sitting is painful, coccyx... meet chair, knocking anything is painful too, since my bones are all just below my skin.

Just now, a "Daniel" called me from my hospital and told me that my appointment was now to be by telephone, so basically a total waste of time, much as I am on friendly terms with my consultant, the management have intervened and told me to stay away. Save the NHS!

To be continued.... Hopefully?