My Mom passed away peacefully in her sleep, at home in her own bed, on March 17, 2013. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009, had refused conventional treatment and instead embraced alternatives such as Protocel, MMS and the well known, common, and inexpensive antibiotic, Doxycycline to prevent spread to the bone.
My Mother was a true pioneer in health and nutrition all of her life. She taught me so much about health and healing and was a constant resource for new ideas and thoughts, I couldn't imagine how I would ever go on without her as that amazing resource. She was my go-to person for any questions and feedback on my own health pursuits. She had keen observation skills and used them more and more as she became older. Partly because of her mobility issues, her world became smaller and she focused on an increasingly smaller realm around her. She continually studied and experimented with her health and sought to further the body of knowledge surrounding health science and mind-body connectivity with her individual discoveries.
Two nights before she passed away, we had had supper together and I left and went next door to my house to bed down for the night. At around 1AM she woke me calling to say that revelers have been in her room and that this has been going on for some time. People are beautifully dressed, smiling and waving to her, she feels no pain and is in their bright and soothing company. She said that they want her to come with them, and she thinks she might go with them. She said if I come over in the morning and find that she is not there, I will know where she has gone. She said she loves me and to give Kurmit, my brother, a hug for her. I was perplexed at that moment, not wanting to let her go, I knew she was trying to tell me it was OK, better than that, in fact, it would be beautiful. So I collected my self enough to wish her well and to let her go. I said I love you Mom, you have been a great Mom, have a wonderful journey. Remember our pact, you will come back and visit me right?
She said "yes, if they let me I will."
She encouraged and prompted me for years to write our health stories. When I was in middle age and too 'busy' working, I bought her a computer and vowed to teach her to use it as I had taught my mother in law. She always said she would write and make contributions to our book and wanted to see 'the movie'. But the computer was too foreign, and writing would not be in her plan...she was relying on me to get it done. Me, with my abundance of thyroid hormone... So this is her blog, post humus. She speaks to me still and I can hear her voice in my heart when I write these words. This is our book, as it conveys from part memory on my part, part channeling, part direct thought transfer from her in what I can only describe as automatic writing. The words stream in and well up inside me and I can't type fast enough when the information is being transferred. We only speak our own experience here. So any information is from that perspective and should not be taken as individual advice. These are lessons learned, health-related stories direct from our lives, spoken from a mind-body-spirit integration we thoroughly recognize. We will naturally illuminate certain questions and insights, these are gifts to be shared.
A nurse trained in Oklahoma during the 1950s, in the goiter belt of the mid-west, Pan had avidly studied and practiced directly from the works of Adele Davis. Her own thyroid woes began in high school, she thought, after looking at pictures of herself as Valedictorian of her senior class, revealing 'puffy face and big arms', tell-tale signs of hypo-thyroid according to her observations.. She recalled being always tired and in sort of a cloud or mental stupor, slow to catch on to things that were going on around her. My brother and I marveled at how she was top of her class even with the adversity in her life...Always cold, with a sluggish metabolism, and with 'bad skin' she struggled even more when she lost her mother at age 14, a grave trauma for a child. According to David Derry, MD, Ph.D, in his book, Breast Cancer and Iodine, such early trauma can damage the body's immune system and suppress the thyroid gland giving rise to cancer and other life threatening diseases later.
The new thyroid test had just come on the market and was being used in labs Mom's first or second year of nursing school. This was a foray into a hugely divergent path from the traditional observation-style medicine. Now, to think doctors could rely on a test instead of or in addition to examining and looking for signs in the patient, this would revolutionize medicine....and as we've seen, it has to some degree. So she thought she'd go and have her TSH test done to see what her thyroid function was.....
The test read-out said over 200, when normal was between 2 and 6. The doctors threw out the results claiming the new test had some problems to iron out. No one could have a TSH of 200 and still be functioning, this person would have to be catatonic. Where were the signs? She claimed she was always cold, tired, skin was grainy and large-pored, she had trouble with weight gain, but her hair wasn't falling out in great gobs?
Where does a doctor go from there without a test? Medicine was practiced differently. You tried something to see if it helped. So for her condition she was prescribed the current antidepressants of the day, no thyroid supplementation....It helped a little but other bodily systems began to suffer without the thyroid hormone she needed so desperately for so long. She became hormonally imbalanced in other areas and would rage against herself, against others and against the world. She was so unhappy, unbalanced, always screaming, it seemed to relieve a pressure valve in her head.
I remember as a child, one day she screamed, ran around the house, and took a hatchet to the back door. Hacking that screen door to bits, as I, a three year old standing on a chair in the kitchen, watched in amazement. Valium was prescribed for her raging.
So when the test was considered more reliable in the early 1960s, she tried it again and was found to have had severe hypo-thyroidism, guessing that for probably more than 20 years this had been the case.
During that time she had worked in a psychiatric ward in a hospital and had seen truly catatonic people living in the wards for years in the mental hospitals fully recover after being administered a simple dose of dessicated pig thyroid hormone. Drooling, mumbling, unable to communicate, yet painfully reaching out through a fog to their caregivers. These poor souls, labelled insane or demented, the hypo-thyroid among us, rotted away in institutions, until one day they were given a new test and then a new pill.
The thyroid hormone revolution had begun. Doctors began to understand how important and how widespread this disease had become and had been all along....
My Mom would cite all the crazy women of literature, the mad woman in the attic, in the Wide Sargasso Sea and so many others depicted as insane, as in actuality probably having a thyroid problem. A lot of PMS and other depressive disorders could all boil down to the thyroid gland, she thought. Brain fog of all kinds, allergies, and all the 'new' diseases of our time where just fancy terms for obscure manifestations of hypo-thyroidism.
Hyper-thyroidism on the other hand, could explain diseases such as fibromyalgia, joint pain, anxiety disorders. The implications of the new knowledge of the thyroid hormone could permeate throughout society. Even nasty dictators and their megalo-maniac personality disorders could stem from thyroid issues....it seemed that pervasive.
Of course regulating the dose of the new drug, derived from dessicated pig thyroid gland was going to be the next challenge. My mother received too much thyroid hormone in the beginning, and her body could not handle it. She was in terrible pain from any small injury or exertion and ached all over most of the time, tense and unable to sleep, until they cut her dose down. The T3 and T4 found in the natural pig thyroid was so bio-accessible that it soon overloaded her system and the body painfully stored it in the soft tissues. Forgivably, with the zealousness surrounding the new found wonder drug, replacement thyroid hormone, severe hypo thyroidism was terribly easy to over-treat. When the synthetic thyroid came out in the T4 form, she tried it but found that her liver and other cells did not 'see it' and convert the T4 to the T3 that she needed. So she was still tired and foggy on the synthetic variety and unable to lose weight. Perhaps, we think, because she had been virtually without adequate thyroid hormone levels for so long the pathway in the body to convert T4 to T3 may have been shut down. We've found, the body doesn't spend energy on stuff it isn't using.