Diagnosis Unknown

252 Pages·2003·1.17 MB·English

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DIAGNOSIS
UNKNOWN
our journey to an
unconventiional cure
by
Randy Smith
A Quantum Reach Publishing
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Copyright © 1997 by Randy Smith
Published 1997, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Republished 2003 in Paperback and E-Book editions
by A Quantum Reach Publishing
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work
in any form whatsoever, without permission in writing from the
publisher, except for brief passages in connection with a review.
ISBN 0-9675448-2-3 e-book
You may order a print version for $18.95
at http://www.diagnosis-unknown.com
Quantity discounts for organizations are available.
For information contact:
A Quantum Reach Publishing
E-mail: [email protected] or
[email protected]
Websites: www.a-quantum-reach.com
www.diagnosis-unknown.com
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This book is for Linda
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for their interest in and
cooperation on this book. My wife, Linda, was not only the
principal actor in our play, but its producer. Her willingness
to allow me to describe the details of her many procedures is
a demonstration of a lack of vanity unusual in so beautiful a
woman. Our son, Noble, the real writer in the family, gave
me valuable suggestions in organization and editing. Our son
Shawn provided a great deal of moral support. My brother,
Dr. Bart Smith, was my closest advisor throughout the entire
experience. My mother, Mary Smith, typed the handwritten
manuscript and made many suggestions. My father, Bob
Smith, offered constant encouragement as he has done
consistently my entire life. I am indebted to more than a
dozen friends who read the manuscript and urged me to
pursue publication. Ernie Martin, in particular, took an active
interest in this project and led me to author Michael
Schulman. Dr. Schulman provided an introduction to Al
Zuckerman at Writer’s House. Al took the book to his friends
at Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.
Now the book will take on new life as an e-book and print-
on-demand publication thanks to A Quantum Reach led by
the vision of Charlotte Anthonisen and ably assisted by Connie
Said. Linda and I appreciate their support and
encouragement.
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Table of Contents
Preamble 07
Chapter 1 The Bite 08
Chapter 2 Our Medical History 13
Chapter 3 We’re Going to the Doctor 28
Chapter 4 Searching for Wellville 41
Chapter 5 Crossing Over 61
Chapter 6 Hydrotherapy 73
Chapter 7 The Wheatgrass Diaries 86
Chapter 8 Toward More Natural Healing 101
Chapter 9 The Wizard of Ozone 113
Chapter 10 The Thief of Vitality 124
Chapter 11 Vibrational Healing 133
Chapter 12 Multilevel Marketing 144
Chapter 13 Cleaning House 154
Chapter 14 Breath of Life 164
Chapter 15 Doug’s Diagnosis 175
Chapter 16 Understanding Energy 185
Chapter 17 Cavitation Surgery 200
Chapter 18 Radionics 211
Chapter 19 Spider’s Song 230
Epilogue 241
Afterward 243
Reading List 245
A Quantum Reach Publishing 251
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Preamble
Linda Smith, a former Miss Seattle, once star of her own regional
TV show, a highly regarded visual artist, performer in many
community theater productions, devoted mother, community
activist, antique collector, tennis player, bicycler, walker and hiker—
a fit and very attractive forty-nine-year-old with no significant
health problems on her resumé, woke up on her birthday with a
dot on her eyelid. She believed it was a spider bite. Within two
weeks the eye was swollen shut. Seven months later the eye was
still grotesquely engorged. A year later she was a virtual invalid, a
prisoner of her bedroom, her body racked with unexplainable
symptoms. She was certain she was dying.
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Chapter One
The Bite
On her forty-ninth birthday, on November 1, 1992, Linda looked
into the bathroom mirror and saw a small red dot on the flesh
between the eyelid and brow of her left eye. She surveyed her
birthday face. She was sensitive about her eyes and had always
been dissatisfied with their appearance.
“My eyes are puffy,” she would say. “Someday I’m going to get
them fixed. I can hardly hold my eyelids up. There’s just too
much extra skin.”
I had known Linda since I was twelve and she was eleven. We
had been childhood sweethearts for awhile in junior high school
and again for a brief interlude in college. She married someone
else but I carried a torch and caught a nice rebound. She always
looked good to me.
“Your eyes are fine,” I would answer.
She stared at the dot. “Come look at this.” I could see tiny red
lines radiating from a center point.
“I think it’s a bite,” she said. Her statement was actually a
question. After twenty-eight years of marriage I had developed
enough sensitivity to read her oblique inflections.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “It will go away.”
“I think it’s a bite,” she continued. “When we walked around
the park yesterday—remember when something flew into my
eye? It’s a spider bite.”
“Spiders don’t fly,” I offered.
“It could have dropped down from a tree. There are lots of spiders
in this house. We should get someone to spray.”
“Poison would be worse than spiders,” I argued. “You’ll be okay.
You have a strong body. Whatever it is will heal.”
“Remember when Steve was bitten by the spider?” she asked.
“They weren’t positive it was a spider,” I replied quickly. “Pretty
sure. They were pretty sure. What else could it have
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DIAGNOSIS UNKNOWN- The Bite
been?” she wondered out loud, still staring in the mirror. “I want a
doctor to see this.
Linda was convinced she had been bitten by a spider and was
concerned because she had heard on more than one occasion that
spider venom could desiccate the tissue leaving holes in the flesh.
Our friend and former neighbor Steve, a physician, had presumably
been bitten in his sleep by a brown recluse spider and nearly died,
kept alive only by the massive intervention of his colleagues on
the hospital medical staff. He had been shaken by the experience.
We knew spider bites could be serious.
“It’ll go away.” I said again.
You’re not always right!” she told me. And it turned out I wasn’t.
Within a few days the tissue around the dot began to redden and
swell. As her eye began to close up, Linda experienced strange
waves of unwellness. She believed it was spider venom coursing
through her veins. She felt she was being poisoned. I was
concerned about her reactions to this event but was confident the
infection, or whatever it was, would disappear.
We were shocked when the eye continued to swell dramatically.
In the corner of her left eye, close to the nose, a distended bag of
fluid distorted her face. We stared at the eye, studied it with a
magnifying glass, not knowing quite what to do or to say but, as
always, assuming this ailment would run its course. She wanted
to see a doctor immediately. We felt we knew how to enter the
medical system. We had many friends and acquaintances who were
physicians. An eye problem required an eye doctor. Even though
we had recently moved to a new town and knew no doctors personally,
it only took a week to get an appointment with an ophthalmologist—
Dr. Elias. I had to take her. By that time the swelling had impaired her
vision and she didn’t feel safe driving a car.
Dr. Elias, the ophthalmologist, didn’t know what it was.
“It might be a bite,” he told her. Or it could be an allergic reaction
from a dust particle or animal matter of some type. I can’t see any
foreign objects in the eye.”
Dr. Elias prescribed an antihistamine and cortisone cream. We
went home to wait for the medicine to work. A week after this
first visit to the doctor the eye was much worse. It hurt, it ached,
it was scratchy. Each morning, it was filled with sticky stuff. I
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DIAGNOSIS UNKNOWN—The Bite
drove her back to the eye clinic. I sat in the waiting room and
read several magazines.
Dr. Elias was apparently baffled.
What did he say?” I asked as we walked to our car.
“He said he enjoys a good mystery!”
It was inconceivable to me that a highly trained eye specialist
could not diagnose her condition. Why should it be such a
mystery? I wondered what Elias would do with this mystery. How
does a physician go about enjoying a good mystery? Does he sit
in his den at night and quietly savor it?
What he did was the “handoff.” He referred Linda to a local
internist—Dr. Lewis. “An internist is a specialist at diagnosis.”
Dr. Elias told Linda. We knew that, of course. Our friend Steve
was a board certified internist. She saw the second doctor a week
later.
Dr. Lewis thought it was a bite. He told her to return in a week if
it wasn’t better and he would prescribe an antibiotic. Linda was
upset because Dr. Lewis didn’t even take a close look at the eye.
“He just glanced at it,” she said in a confused tone. “He didn’t
even get close to me! Then he asked me if I’d had a pap smear lately.
When I left he hollered at me as I was going down the hall, ‘Have
you signed up for a mammogram?’ I don’t want to go back to him.”
“He’s supposed to be good,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Who says?” she questioned.
We realized that we didn’t know as much as we thought we did
about how to enter the medical system. We had an eye problem
so we picked an eye doctor. The eye doctor thought an internist,
a diagnostic specialist, would have the right answer. That made
good sense to us. But the internist didn’t ask enough questions
to come up with a diagnosis and was busy trying to promote pap
smears and mammograms. Linda didn’t really want any more X-
rays. She wondered about radiation. Our new dentist had taken
several X-rays during the summer. Linda had some concern that
the swelling and redness was the result of X-rays. But finally, we
decided that X-rays would also have to cause damage to the eyeball
itself and Linda could see when she held her eye open.
We were concerned, but not worried. Everyone, even normally
healthy people get sick once in awhile with a cold, flu, or other
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