From the Brink of Death A Chiropractic Patient's Story. By Keith W Jn 1986 lwas on top of the world. I t naa jusr won the All Navy I Weightlifting Championships and had set a national drug free record in the bench press. My full time lob became to lift weights and compete, and I loved it. I attended college at night and did a number of exhibitions and talks in the community. I had minor celebrity status both in the Naval Community and in my city. Life was good. Shortly after returning from a competition tour I began to experience some sinus headaches and my training started to plateau a bit. I kept a training journal since I started liftingin I978 and tracked myprogress very carefully. The headaches were not bad, just annoying. I went to the Navy dispensary and was given some medications. The meds worked like magic, except they gave me nuclear diarrhea. I went back to the doctor and was given drugs to stop that. That went away, but then I experienced seyere dehydration and was admitted to the hospital. After many tests, I wdlked out with three more prescriptions. My health rapidly began to spiral downward and soon I was spending my days at the hospital going from one doctor to the next. Within a month I was taking 18 drugs a day,which amounted to about 80 individual pills. I quickly became homebound and disabled, unable to work, drive a car or really do much of anything. The only food I could keep down was applesauce and sometimes apple cobbler. Most nights, I would ger a blanket and a pillow and just sleep with the pillow on the toilet because the dry heaves would begin around 1 a.m. and last until sun-up. On good nights, the heaves were four minutes apart; on bad nights theywere two minutes apart.l went from a solid 22olbs to around 165.l looked like death warmed over. This went on for oyer a year and most of it is still a blur. I had to have someone drive me anytime I needed to see the doctor. Fortunately I had good friends in this regard. I saw all kinds of doctors and was even seen by one ofPresident Reagan's doctors at Bethesda. No one really had an answer for what was going on, except that my immune system was failing. Diagnoses of Epstein Barr and severe chronic fatigtte syndrome were discussed as possibilities. I had a meeting with the head of the Naval Hospital in Charleston in the summer of 7987.I was brought into his office and he told me that I should get my affairs in order because he felt I only had a few months ro live. The news was actually a relief. I wanted to die and end the misery. I had a friend drive me to a mall later that week to buy gifts for my family for the following Christmas, knowing I was probably not going to be alive. While in a B. Dalton Bookstore, a man asked me if I was ok (I could only walk maybe 15-20 steps before I had to stop and rest). I said I was fine, because I had gotten tired of telling everyone the story. This guy persisted a bit and he told me he was a doctor and that maybe he could help me. I told htm t had seen some of the best doctors in the world and then he told me he was a chiropractor. I think I laughed for the first time in over a year. I told him I had "internal" health problems, not neck and back pain, which was the limit of my views on chiropractic. He persisted that I come to his clinic, and about this time, my friend offered to drive me to the clinic the next day. I agreed with absolutelyno intention of going to this quacks office. On the drive home, my friend said something hke, "Well you should give it a shot. What do you have to lose?" I agreed to go. I went to the office the next day and did the whole new patient process; the doc brought me into the exam room and began his exam. I was about as skeptical as you could be, when all of a sudden, he says, "Hey Keith, did you have a bed-wetting problem as a kid?" Wow... how in the world did he know that? I had a classic bed-wetting case for most of my childhood for four to five nights a week. I never spent the night with a friend and grew our of it by the time I was 15-16 years old. My parents spent all kinds of money on therapies and treatments, but how could this quack have known about that? He told me he could tell from examining my lumbar spine and talked about the bladder and neryes. He now had my attentionl If he pulled that one out of his butt, well it was a good one. He 52 I SpizzMagazine