// This story will not make sense unless you read part 1 first. Check it out here.
One month has passed since my world was turned upside down. Every week, a nurse comes to the house to help me with my drug injection. It's a stark reminder of the fact that something is seriously wrong with me. The realization that anything could happen at anytime is a tough one to carry around. To make things worse, my douchebag boss just fired me. For 'economic' reasons. Yeah, right!
It was a dark time for me, and I filled the gaping sadness and anguish in my life with playing World of Warcraft, drinking wine, and smoking weed. But it didn't cure this gnawing ache that was slowly killing me from the inside. This feeling of dread and despair that I was wasting away the good years that I had left. You never know when a flare-up might strike. My body felt like a ticking time bomb. Ready to explode at any time.
Something had to change. I was leeching off the government feeling sorry for myself. But I didn't want to go back cleaning porn-spyware-infested family computers, looking at husbands squirm when I explained the root cause of their ongoing PC issues. No, I needed a high-paying job that could fast-track my life. The logical thing to do was to specialize in a branch of IT. A CCNA (network engineer) course was just about to start, and since I was unemployed I could take it for free! After 4 months in the course, I landed my first networking job. I couldn't believe it. I practically doubled my income, and they gave me a car, laptop, and mobile phone. The future was finally looking a bit brighter!
I joined the network and security team of a major multinational corporation. The employee I was replacing was bound to a wheelchair. You've guessed it, he was also an MS patient, but his was a more aggressive form than mine. He worked with the company for twenty years. His colleagues witnessed his progression from an athletic young man to a weak and helpless pile of human misery. Two years after his departure from the company, he died by taking a bad fall. Another gloom reminder of how this disease affects your body.
But for me, life flashed a brief smile in my general direction. A glitter of hope took hold in my very essence. Maybe life can still be good. I had a decent job and was able to save some money. This was also the time I aggressively started following all the news about MS and the search for a cure. I signed up to newsletters, set up Google Alerts, and watched countless of documentaries. I knew about every drug that was out there. Even the experimental ones. I wasn't going to end up like my colleague, I was determined to find a way to stop the disease from progressing.
Two years passed. I had a few isolated flare-ups, but nothing major happened to me. I was getting increasingly tired, though. Could this be the dreaded MS-fatigue I read about? One of the most common symptoms of MS, and affects about 80% of all patients. Through all the research I did on the disease, I knew the right nutrition and living a healthy lifestyle could have an enormous impact on my energy levels. At the same time, my wife was going to classes for a degree in nutrition. My diet at the time is what you could call 'the standard Belgian diet'. Bread for breakfast, bread for lunch, and meat and potatoes for dinner, with a few vegetables thrown in here and there.
We decided to take it one step at a time and start by changing our breakfast. For the last 5 years, we launch the day by having a glass of lemon water. Followed by at least half a liter of green smoothie in the morning. This had a low-entry barrier for me, as I was used to not having breakfast at all. Coffee was all I needed. But the smoothies were remarkably tasty, even though they were all green and healthy. Who would expect that having a cup of raw spinach for breakfast could be made delicious in any way? After doing this for a couple of months, I switched out my lunch sandwiches for salads. This took some adjusting as you don't have the same 'full' feeling from a salad compared to bread. On the other hand, I loved that I didn't fall asleep anymore after lunch. The salad was easy on my digestive system, and I found that my energy didn't drop like it did when I had a heavy meal.
I was feeling better and better and, sick and tired of the side effects of my medication, I started doing the injections only once every two weeks. I went for a yearly checkup at the hospital, and every time I asked my specialist, Professor D. about other treatments options. I explained to him that I switched my diet and that I felt much better. He agreed that there are a few studies out there that suggest this theory, but there is no definite proof. A couple of weeks before my appointment with him, I came across a Ted talk from Terry Wahls. Dr. Terry Wahls is a clinical professor of medicine at the University of Iowa and also an ms patient. By the end of 2007, she needed a wheelchair to get around. By the end of 2008, she biked 18 miles a day. This remarkable, if not completely unbelievable, recovery left me stunned. And it was achieved almost solely through nutrition! I showed it to Professor D., and although he was skeptical, he maintained an open mind and admitted that it might be possible. There is very little known about MS and other neurological diseases. Most of them are still a mystery to us. Changing my diet totally changed my life. After four years we had completely renovated a house and a nice bit of savings. We sold the house and moved to Cambodia. By that time I had almost entirely stopped taking my medication. I'm now two years without medication, and I still feel great.
For now, I feel like I have stopped the disease in its tracks. But who knows when it will rear its ugly head again. And my faith in traditional medicine is still there. I believe in technology, and the first successful results of clinical trials with stem cells reinforce that idea. I'm sure that at one point we'll be able to program nanobots and repair damaged brain and nerve tissue. There's already a radical new treatment in China that destroys the immune system completely, and then rebuilds it from the ground up. The destroying part is done by a near lethal dose of chemotherapy. Thanks, but I don't think I'll be signing up for that one!
There is not much research being done on the role that nutrition can play in the treatment of MS. Or any other disease for that matter. This is a flaw that's inherent in medical research funding. A lot of independent research is done by universities and non-profit organizations, but they lack the funds to do large-scale clinical trials. A report from 2010 estimates the cost of a human clinical trial at around $27 million per year. Even small scale tests quickly cost between $500,000 and $1 million. This gives a skewed image when you look at research papers being released.
If you know that the cost of bringing a new drug to market can vary between $150 million and $2 billion, then it makes sense that pharmaceutical companies need a way to recoup that money. As a result, most new drugs that hit the market are just variations of existing drugs. With the intention of being only fractionally more efficient or safe than the other ones. Research into radically new ways to approach medicine is not in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.
Please do remark that I have refrained from using the word 'natural' this whole time. My belief is that although proof in the form of clinical trials is lacking, changing my diet has helped me tremendously in dealing with my disease. For now, I am my own living proof. This might change in ten years, it might even change tomorrow. And who knows, perhaps one day enough research will be done that can back up these claims of recovery. I feel good, and my future is looking even better. I don’t think about my disease. I banned it from my mind for now. We'll see how it all ends. I'm silently hoping to upload my consciousness to a computer anyway, physical bodies are so 2015!
Thanks for reading, I hope I didn't depress you too much!
Steem ON!
Sources:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160628/ncomms12015/full/ncomms12015.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24476345
https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/examination-clinical-trial-costs-and-barriers-drug-development
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24476345