I’m in a tornado like Dorothy in  “The Wizard Of Oz.”  Four doctors, who are circling around me, direct me to go with them. I sense I’ll meet death. Their voices sound like the ringing of only one giant gong. The deep-echoing sound emanates from all four of their mouths, quadraphonically. It makes my heart pound until I think it’ll burst from my chest. It’s odd that the ringing doesn’t disturb my ears and head, only my heart.

            I refuse to go with the doctors. Suddenly they all wilt and die. I am happy I didn’t go with them. But the ringing continues and my heart pounds. I become aware that the phone is ringing and I reach for it. I anticipate that the airline has an earlier flight. Then I realize it is already morning.

            I lift the receiver. I remember my dream and the fear of death. I dread what the voice will say.

            “Hello.”

            “This is your mother.”

            “Hi,” my voice cracks.

            “It’s pouring here and I thought you should bring your boots and a raincoat. I have lots of umbrellas if you need one.”

            “Please! Mom, don’t greet me with, ‘This is your mother’ ”, I want to say. She seemed apprehensive, as if she were going to tell me Jeff is dead. It scared me! I take a deep breath and calm down.

            I recall her umbrellas being flowered, bright and feminine. “Thanks, Mom, I’ll bring a coat and my own umbrella.” I take another deep breath, “Have you seen Jeff at all?”

            “I’m waiting until you get here and we’ll all go together. I called the hospital and talked with the head nurse. She said the doctors all agree his signs are worsening. Too much water has collected in his brain and there’s no hope he’ll pull through with this kind of brain damage.” She takes a breath, “I just want you to be prepared. We’ll see you this afternoon.”

            We say good-bye.

            I have avoided Jeff since he was two-years-old. I have been afraid of getting attached and losing him again. Have I lost all chance to get to know him?

            The alarm goes off and jolts me back to the physical world. I rise and go to the couch. I stretch and lean my head against the arm. I cross my feet tightly. I hug a pillow.

            Okay, okay. Mom’s a nurse. Like most nurses what she knows is what the doctors know. Whether from illness or injury, medical science believes that virus and germs, like bacteria cause disease. That is their “germ theory”. They believe that germs are enemies of healing.

            The standard approach is to attack virus and germs (bacteria and other microbes) with medical drugs and poisons to stop them. These drugs simultaneously attack, destroy and deteriorate the body. Drugs are like bombs, they most often kill, cripple, harm or destroy everything within their influence. They cause subtle or obvious mutations. The least harm that they do is create imbalances.

            Medical science ignores that bacteria inspires healing and that drugs kill bacteria, and therefore, that drugs prevent healing.[1]

            My approach is that bacteria, yeast, mold and virus are all part of a natural process for detoxification. Bacteria, yeast, mold and virus decompose body obstructions, such as dead or weak cells and tissue. When the body has too many obstructions, it has disease. The body encourages the detoxification process so it can cleanse itself of accumulated wastes that cause weaknesses, or damaged tissue in cases of injury. They also dissolve and eliminate foreign substances, like rust from taking iron supplements. That is, if the body is fed the proper nutrients during and after the detoxification processes.

            For example, colds and flu are like changing the oil and flushing a car's radiator. If the body is allowed to take its course with colds and flu several times a year, or whenever necessary, an increase in health is the natural result. That is, if at the same time one feeds his or her body good nutrients. For instance, oranges and/or bananas blended with raw eggs, raw dairy fats and unheated honey; a smoothie. However, if these cleansing and renewing processes are interfered with or stopped by using medication, the body advances faster toward deterioration, aging and disease. I remind myself that instead of attacking the body, I nurture it.

            I feel comforted that Jeff’s doctors’ prognosis isn’t based on what I know. And that Jeff is still alive. I will work with Jeff’s body to cleanse the dead and damaged tissues, and to regenerate new cells to replace them.

            I am sitting at a window seat not far from first-class on this early morning flight to Cincinnati. I am facing the partition wall that separates the classes. It reminds me for a moment of the wailing wall in Israel. I feel a little claustrophobic. Will I celebrate life? Or will I be wailing for the dead? I have to stop thinking like that.

            I feel excited by the gravitational pull as we climb. I notice outside the portal window that the smog isn’t too bad on this golden sunlit Los Angeles morning. With amusement, I take it as a good omen. We loop over the Pacific Ocean. The plane levels off in the direction of our destination. The flight attendants push their carts down the aisles.

            It’s Saturday, four days from October, a time that marks a measurable decline of tourists in Los Angeles. The thought comes that I am a tourist visiting Earth. Whenever I talk to someone who doesn’t know me about my view on health and my life-style, I’m considered bonkers.

            I look around me and I see so much bodily suffering. I feel compassion for the people I see who aren’t happy because they lack health. An unhappy-looking woman wheezes, then swallows three pills. At least seven people are already drinking or being served alcohol.

            I recall when years ago I drank to relax and feel good. I couldn’t go to sleep at night without drinking a bottle of bourbon or gin.

            I was nineteen years old and had been living in Los Angeles six months. I was making good money. I yearned for Mary and Jeff, even though I knew I was too emotionally distorted to make family life work to anyone’s benefit. So I partied a lot and enjoyed freedom from all responsibilities except work and child support. I wouldn’t admit alcohol was affecting my work and studies and I ignored the symptoms that it was hurting my body. It relaxed my memories and guilt.

            I think about Jeff being in the hospital and I recall my advent into cancer. It was a Sunday night in March, one month from my twentieth birthday.   I had just returned from a weekend in Tijuana, Mexico, with friends. I was dizzy from drink. I stood over my toilet to urinate. I became dizzier and nauseous. As I collapsed to my knees I whacked my penis on the cold porcelain (I remember I had been accident prone as a child). A surge from my stomach curled my body and put my face in the toilet. Blood trailed with the vomit.

            The doctor pointed to a very dark spot on my X-ray, “It’s probably only an ulcer. You’re too young and strong to have cancer.”

            “Don’t let looks fool you. How do we find out?”

            “It’s an ulcer,” he decided, “and we’ll treat it.”

            After six months of drinking bottle after bottle of Maalox, I decided I should have stock in pharmaceuticals. Instead of being addicted to alcohol I was addicted to chalky Maalox. Maalox didn’t have the good taste and didn’t give me the feeling that alcohol did. I was sure that if I died a chalk factory would make a fortune with my remains.

            In November, I was looking upward from an operating table. The ceiling was blurred and I was becoming unconscious from anesthetic, going into surgery to remedy my stomach ulcer. After “recovering enough” from surgery (the doctors had said), I received radiation therapy for five or six...or was it ten weeks. (My memory went into a slump during my year of cancer therapies and has never fully recovered.)

            After returning from the August family reunion, I underwent chemotherapy for leukemia for my blood and bone cancers. With each chemo session I got sicker. Finally, after three months of the treatments I wouldn’t tolerate it. That was eighteen years ago. I was only twenty-one but I remember as if it were yesterday.

            “The cancer’s not responding to the chemotherapy either. We’ll try again in three weeks,” Dr. Goldman said matter-of-factly.

            “Doctor, I seem to be missing the point here. Let’s retrace what’s happened to me. I had a stomach ulcer. I had surgery to correct it. As a result of the surgery, I haven’t been able to digest anything very well. Food seems to just sit in my digestive tract. I have lost my sexual drive. If I happen to have an orgasm it can be extremely painful. How in the world was my penis effected by stomach surgery?”

            “I don’t know,” he said.

            I thought for a moment and then continued, “I have terrible acne (the one common problem I have never had before). My waist line has gone from twenty-eight to thirty-four inches. And I have redeveloped very painful muscle spasms around my heart.

            “Then I had radiation therapy to stop the keloidal tissue from growing. As a result of the radiation, I have burns that are mainly scar tissue. My spine is cauterized and I can barely turn to either side and I am always painful. I now have psoriasis and bursitis. I have inflamed, sore and bleeding gums. I have come down with chronic weakness, exhaustion and joint pains. I couldn’t, and still can’t even lift a large dictionary with my right arm because my shoulder and elbow ache so badly. My knees ache, too. They are always cold and numb--”

            “We’ll continue the treatments because there’s always a chance we can stop the cancer from doing any more damage,” he said.

            “Please, listen, I’m leading to something. Then I was diagnosed with cancer of the blood and bones. I am receiving chemotherapy. As a result, I’m as pale as a ghost. I vomit no matter what I try to eat. I can’t be away from a toilet for five minutes without a diaper. I’m bloated from head to toe. My acne is so bad that a film-director friend described my face as looking like raw hamburger. I have only a few sparse patches of hair and it’s graying like I’m an old man. My teeth are rotting. My diabetes is worse. Homicidal and suicidal thoughts plague me--”

            “Your anxiety and anger are side effects of the chemotherapy. It’s normal,” he interjects.

            “Normal? Yesterday, I heard one of the biology professors say that radiation, especially radiation therapy, transforms certain body substances into toxins that are cancer-causing. Why would you treat keloidal tissue with a treatment that causes cancer?”

            “It’s like fighting fire with fire,” he said smiling.

            “Isn’t that like burning down the forest to save the forest?”

            “There is no other way to stop the formation of keloidal tissue or cancer. Disease is not nice, you can’t treat it nicely,” he argued.

            “I also heard the professor say that for every one cancer cell that chemotherapy kills, at least one billion healthy cells are killed. I thought about that statistic and derived this analogy: If four humans were declared cancerous to the human race, the medical profession would be willing to kill four billion people - the entire population on Earth - in order to destroy only three or four individuals. That’s an extreme and barbaric perspective, don’t you think?”

            “I’m trying to give you more time to live,” he said, annoyed.

            “Doctor, as a result, I have cancer. I didn’t have cancer before receiving the cancer-causing therapies. I merely had an ulcer. I feel like the walking dead. Food doesn’t taste good. Nothing pleases me anymore. Why didn’t you tell me my quality of life and disposition would be miserable; that I’d be a semi-invalid as a side effect of the treatments? Why didn’t you stress that the side effects would be a hundred times worse than cancer when you frightened me into taking your therapies? And now I’m going to die anyway.”

            “I’m sorry. It isn’t possible to predict how anyone will react,” he said belligerently.

            “That doesn’t make sense. Yesterday I studied the side effects in the Physician’s Desk Reference and books on radiation research. All of mine and a hundred more side effects are listed. You never showed me any list. And the Physicians Desk Reference is right there on your shelf. Do you admit that the radiation treatment for keloidal tissue gave me blood and bone cancer?”

            “Look, there’s still a small chance that your cancer will respond to the chemotherapy.”

            “Did you hear what I just said?”

            “I know how you must feel,” he said.

            Finally I realized that medical methods are barbaric. Surgery is butchering. Radiation is burning. Chemotherapy is poisoning. Why didn’t it dawn on me before?

            “Doctor, have you ever been cut and burned and poisoned to help you get well from cancer?”

            “No.”

            I threatened to sue because the doctors didn’t tell me that the therapies would kill much more of me than would any cancer. I would have taken my chances with cancer. Several attorneys said the doctors would all testify that I was dying anyway and that I had signed a release. How can they get away with that?! I wondered.

            One month later, I discovered several successful alternative methods for healing cancer. All of them were pleasant by comparison. But because the doctors had said all the alternatives were hoaxes, I hadn’t bothered to investigate them.

            Education, religion, the media and government taught me to revere doctors. The doctors could deceive and frighten me, slowly and painfully kill me, get paid handsomely for it and go to heaven for “good” intent. It didn’t make any sense.

            Because I was left disabled, I couldn’t afford child support. Ben adopted Jeff.

            “Please fasten your seat belts. We are beginning our descent to Cincinnati Airport. Thank you for joining us and we hope__”

            I ignore the pilot as I look over the rain-glistening, rich green landscape of Kentucky. I wonder why it is called the Greater Cincinnati Airport when it’s across the river at Stringtown, Kentucky. I suppose that if it were named the Stringtown Airport no one would ever fly there.

            The sun emerges through the passing rain clouds.