Why I Lived
In March 2018 I started having stomach pain nearly all the time. I was losing weight and very tired. I was so tired I had to quit my job as an Uber driver.
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I went to my primary care doctor. His nurse practitioner examined me and diagnosed me with gastritis, an inflammation of the lining of the stomach. She recommended I use what she used and surprised me when she opened her purse and pulled out a bottle of antacid.
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She also wanted me to have an endoscopy. That is where they put a camera down your throat to look in your stomach. To get an endoscopy you have to first have a stress test. They put you on a treadmill and make you run until you almost collapse. I did not want to do that. I had one before and I thought my heart was going to explode. That being said I was not going that route. Coincidentally, at the same time they wanted me to get a stress test, my good friend and neighbor was told he needed one. He decided to do it and wound up having a severe heart attack while on the treadmill. It was bad enough he had to have open-heart surgery.
The pain got worse and I could not keep food down—I would just vomit it back up. If you can’t keep food down you will eventually starve to death. So I went to see a digestive specialist, a seven-syllable gastroenterologist. He gave me medications. Because I would not get the stress test to qualify for the endoscopy, I ended up getting an upper bariatric test instead. That is where they make you swallow this very thick liquid that shows up well on scans and a doctor watches what happens as it goes through you. The tests came out inconclusive.
The pain kept getting worse. Only a week or so after I had the bariatric test my wife had to take me this time to the hospital emergency room. Because I was in excruciating pain, they immediately admitted me into the hospital and got me a room. Next, they did a CAT scan. A doctor interpreted that scan and said, “I am 90% sure you have stomach cancer. You need to have an endoscopy to be certain.”
The thought of doing a stress test still petrified me. I explained this to a nurse, and she told me I could get a chemical stress test that would not put me in risk of a heart attack. Why nobody ever told me before about that test I don't know. So I did the chemical stress test and it went fine. I never felt any stress at all throughout the whole procedure, and I qualified for an endoscopy.
They did the endoscopy to complete a biopsy. This finally confirmed that I had stomach cancer. It was called squamous cell stomach cancer, a rare kind of cancer, that kills almost everyone who is a victim of it.
I did not want to have chemotherapy and radiation to cure the cancer. I wanted to do an alternative treatment called the Gerson therapy. It is mostly drinking fresh fruit and vegetable juices, taking supplements and getting coffee enemas. I talked to the director of the Gerson clinic in Mexico. He said that the therapy does not work well with stomach cancer because you have to be able to keep the juice down not vomit it up for the therapy to work, and I was still vomiting up nearly everything I was swallowing. So he rejected me as a patient. I was able to do coffee enemas, which I did throughout the whole cancer process.
I also went to the Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis. I talked to the head of the digestive cancer unit there. He looked at my records and said I was a mess in there (in my stomach). He wanted to cut me open and “look under the hood.” He asked a bunch of questions about my life and said “You lived a hard life. You had a good life.” In other words, your life is about to be over, you should let me cut you open and see what I can see. I told him, “No, thanks.”
I called my chiropractor, whom I trusted. He said to go to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, near Atlanta. Members of his family had gone there and gotten good results. So I called them and applied. I was accepted, and my wife and I flew down for a visit in November 2018. My insurance and the Cancer Treatment Centers of America paid for everything, including the travel and hotels.
Three weeks later toward the end of December my wife and I went back there and I started treatment. I had seven rounds of chemotherapy and twenty-eight rounds of radiation. It took about eight weeks. I lost over 100 pounds.
I was in extreme pain from the treatments so they put me on several different highly addictive opioid pain killers all at once: hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, and others. They could not stop the pain so they gave me a spinal block, similar to the epidural they give mothers who are giving birth, but that was unsuccessful too. It did not stop the pain at all. I was on so many pain killers that I was hallucinating. I saw roaches, mice, and other bugs all over our hotel room. At one point I saw what seemed like over hundred birds in the room and tried to chase them out through the window.
On one radiation treatment, I was so doped up with various pain medications that in the middle of the treatment I decided it was time to get off the machine. I had been raised pretty high up off the floor--about 6 to 7 feet. The administrators freaked and hit the panic button to stop the machine. A whole bunch people ran into the room when the alarms went off. After that incident they always made sure I was strapped down for treatments.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Why I Lived - Part 2
After the treatment I was just over hundred twenty pounds and too weak for any kind of surgery. I looked so bad most people thought I was going to die. One doctor told my wife, “Only his will is keeping him alive.” We went back to Saint Louis. I was massively hooked on opioids, was in excruciating pain, and spent most of my time on the floor, vomiting or dry heaving. I lived on cottage cheese, yogurt, apple sauce, and frozen custard from Ted Drewe's, but it was hard to keep down.
When we were in Atlanta they put us in a hotel just for cancer patients being treated at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. People were taking marijuana to help handle the pain of the chemotherapy and radiation. You could smell the marijuana throughout the hotel. So when we got back to Saint Louis, in February of 2019, I wanted to get some.
Coincidentally, I went to see a doctor who was both a chiropractor and top-level Asian medical doctor. There were other people in the room with us and he leaned and whispered in my ear, “You need THC.” THC is one of the active substances in marijuana. It wasn’t legal yet, but I knew I going to get some.
He then recommended I do see this other doctor, a naturopath, who examined me. He felt I had a whole lake of tumors in my stomach. He put me on high-dose intravenous vitamin C.
He also prescribed mistletoe shots as he believed mistletoe was an excellent treatment to cure cancer. My wife helped me take shots in my stomach for four months until I eventually started on the RSO.
I did continue to do the coffee enemas as I know they help me to get rid of the toxins that are in my body.
Like I said everyone knew how this was going to end, so I was in hospice at this point. I had two hospice nurses. They didn’t like me because I insisted I was not going to die. The nurses said I scared them, so they finally kicked me out of hospice.
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Around July of 2019, a year and a half into this adventure, my wife remembered seeing a documentary that she had watched over 20 years ago. It was called “Run from the Cure” (not "Run for the Cure"). It was about a guy named Rick Simpson and the highly concentrated marijuana oil he made known as Rick Simpson Oil or RSO.
Rick had a work injury and he wanted to get a prescription for a marijuana compound. He could not get it as marijauna was illegal in Canada at the time. Since he was a chemist, his doctor encouraged him to make it himself.
Rick used it to cure himself. He helped so many other people in his community with serious health issues including chronic pain and cancer that the word spread rapidly.
RSO is very high in THC, the chemical that attacks cancer and kills it. At this point RSO is in use all over the world. It is one of the reasons that medical marijuana laws are being passed, because it has gotten so many people well from supposedly incurable illnesses, and thousands of activists are passionate about it. So my wife remembers this documentary just as medical marijuana is legalized in Missouri. It was so recent that dispensaries were not even set up yet.
We went across the river into Illinois, and visited a couple of dispensaries to try to find RSO. They had it, but because we were not residents of Illinois, they would not sell us any. When we were in one of the dispensaries, a guy asked me if I was on hospice, because I looked three-quarters dead. He gave me the name of someone who might be able to get me some RSO. Just a name, no phone number, email address, or other contact information.
We went back to Illinois the following week desperately looking for him. We ended up in the town we thought he lived in, but we could not find him. A few weeks later, my wife took me to see a physician, to try to deal with my pain. The doctor mentioned someone who might be able to get me some RSO. It was the same person that the man at the Illinois dispensary told us about.
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It was the same name I got at the dispensary in Illinois, and this doctor had a phone number for him. We found the guy and met with him. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer several years before but was still alive, cancer free, and doing great. He, like Rick Simpson, made RSO oil and gave it away to people who needed it. He gave it to us, and told us how to use it. In August, 2019, I started taking RSO oil. After building up to it, I took a gram a day for sixty days. I just put the oil in a few gel capsules and swallowed them. It was making my digestion better and that was what I cared about. But I was still in pain.
In October, 2019, I was out of my mind in pain, even though I was taking the RSO. I went back to the local emergency room to be looked at. They gave me another CAT scan to see where the pain was coming from. As we were sitting down with the ER doctor, discussing the scan, my wife asked him, “What about the tumors in his stomach?” The doctor looked at her with a perplexed expression. He looked at the scan again very carefully, then shrugged his shoulders. “There are no tumors in his stomach.”
After discussing it with him we reached the conclusion that my pain was from the opioids I was addicted to, not from anything wrong with my stomach. We went back to my original doctors and had a PET scan, endoscopy, biopsies, and more blood work done: They found no cancer. I got off the opioids. As I did, my pain and mental anguish became less. I started to get better. I had scans and blood work every six months for three years, and there was no sign of cancer. There is no sign of cancer to this day.
I am now out of pain and am up to a healthy one hundred ninety-four pounds. I want to thank God for helping my wife and I get through this and to share the good news about RSO with those who need it.