Thank all of you dear friends for your kind notes. I have a pile of mail, so if you sent a card or donation it is in a pile at the moment and will take me a few days to go through, as I am still recovering from the hospital trauma. Bills are late, and I have no one to help me, but a good friend will start next week working part time with me to catch up. So if you sent a gift, you will get a thank you. Plus I now need dental work, etc., and my car’s transmission is broken. But I’m not broke.
BTW all Free Minds lost in the recent story was a $700 laptop. No one can access my bank accounts without my knowledge, even my Treasurer, who does not even have anything but viewing access to my bank account. So the financial loss was minimal, because it had been an extra gift by one dear Christian in Australia and 3 pastors. It’s just that the PROJECT was ruined and the budget of $5000 was used up too quickly. No account was ever compromised, nor was any money stolen. It’s just a shame, as we had such a great idea. Sometimes I wonder if it’s ruination was planned from below (Beth-Hell).
Life goes on, and no more AJWRB for me. I gave it back to Marvin Shilmer, God bless him for his good intentions in giving it to me in the first place. I just didn’t know it would almost kill me (and of course, neither did he).
Here is an update on my condition.
I have all my mental faculties back (except short-term memory loss from this last week), and apparently need no further medical treatment except to get back to my regular various meds for my spine, ADHD and high blood pressure. I also take strong probiotics for my colitis/Candida, (all of which the hospital immediately took away from me despite their being legal prescriptions!),
I just need to do get on a program of meditation and exercise, I think.
There appears to be no other mind or body damages except some remaining trauma.
The Danger of “Legal” Drugs
I can only take a very few pharmaceutical drugs because most are quite poisonous to my system. I developed colitis years ago from taking disgustingly large doses of antibiotics for an operation that actually destroyed all the good bacteria in my stomach. The drug the doctors prescribed for the colitis was useless (Asacol) so I spent two years doing double-blind testing on foods. I had to discover this on my own-please don’t send books or medical advice which everyone tries to do and they only make me worse. I know my body, not the doctor, nor do you. No offense.
Probiotics (high grade) are a lifesaver.
I found out I had Colitis AND Candida. I can ingest no wheat products or yeast extract, even wine or beer, without getting sick. Well-filtered and high quality Vodka or Tequila or good white champagne is drinkable (even though I don’t like most of them).
That means I have to prepare all my own foods, and can’t eat restaurant, packaged, or 99% of grocery foods. Take a walk through the aisles of your local grocery store… at soups, all packaged foods, and sauces, and you will find they all use yeast extract, which I discovered on my own (through two years of double-blind testing on all kinds of foods…eating only one type at a time and recording the results) that any yeast derivative was killing me. Actually ANYTHING fermented, even tofu.
Anything fermented beyond something like mild cheese will close up my stomach for 2-3 days. I have to drink goat’s milk. Even things like tofu and aged cheeses wipe me out if I take more than half a serving. If I prepare all my own foods and don’t eat at restaurants (or hospitals), I am asymptomatic.
If I hadn’t done this testing I surely would have ended up having some of my intestines removed, or even end up with a colostomy bag. The medical profession is useless in dealing with Candida and Crohn’s disease.
All doctors and hospitals ever do is give you drugs nowadays.
I was going to vote for Obama’s health care hospital plan, but after what I just went through I’m not voting at all. Certainly not for a wishy-washy cult member either. To me, hospital care will only become even MORE dismal, and they will only hand out drugs, like they do now. I have to pay over $1000 a month for HMO health insurance, plus $200 in prescriptions and doctor’s visits a month! I pay over twice my rent to slowly kill my body. Hey, they can FINE ME. I’m not dying due to legal drug pushers! Nor am I voting for a cult member who has no balls. The system is really screwed up.
I can only tolerate probiotics, a few select drugs, and low-grade medical herbs. I have four doctors, one MD and three specialists, all in one medical plan.
The Main Cause
1. The hospital gave me loads of Ativan via IV. This is a nasty drug. All the hospitals dispense it like candy. I am healthy disease-wise and strong and only sleep 5 hours a night and never get sick, so being confined to a hospital bed that was very uncomfortable for 3+ days was EXTREMELY hard on me. I recoiled at the thought of dying in this hell. I feel really sorry for those stuck in hospitals, mental wards or old folk’s homes… I guess some can take it, but not me. If it’s my time, let’s have an good old fashioned Irish party and a wake IN MY HOME WITH MY FRIENDS AND LAUGH AND MAKE IT AS PLEASANT AS POSSIBLE.
Hell, to me, would be DYING confined in a hospital, incapacitated, too drugged to escape, and monitored by Nurse Ratchet! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
My Special Ops Friend from WWII
I made a pact with one of my my best friend’s husband, who is 79 and feels the same way. He is Jewish, though he attends a Christian Church to make his wife happy.
He was a Secret Operative in WWII (a sniper who regularly dropped into Germany by parachute ALONE- and had to carry cyanide pills in case he was caught). We won’t let either of us die in a hospital. Invite a handful of friends over, have a party, and then go out in nature and take a pill or something. Not a pleasant thought, but at least not One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I am an outdoors person… I live on the beach since leaving Bethel in 1980 in the same place with four other guys on three levels in an old house built in 1934 (you can tell by looking on the back of the porcelain toilet lid, if it’s the original toilet). LOL
I react badly to being confined. I cannot sit in one place for very long but have to have exercise. If I ever fly anywhere I have to fly business class if the trip is over 4-5 hours as I get claustrophobia and start panicking. That’s why I rarely fly anymore… it’s way too traumatic for me to be confined, so cramped up next to another person, sitting still like in a flexing flying coffin.
I have to be busy all the time, and have no hobbies or love interests or boyfriends or girlfriends… but LOTS of good local surfer friends. I’m a hippie from the 60s, remember? WE CAN’T TOLERATE THE ESTABLISHMENT. And we’re not into LABELS.
That’s why even though I love Christ I refuse to go to a church anymore. It’s been 14 years after retiring as a pastor for Foursquare. It’s good for others, and I love the worship, but American Evangelicals are almost intolerable to me in a group together. I think I’d rather be Catholic (minus the pope) or Greek Orthodox. (In other parts of the world, especially Germany, churches can be much better and more healing to the soul.)
I do recommend a church for those who need such things. But all most Americans seem to care about are politics and the Last Days, or theology. Even the BIBLE warns against this! Why do they even go to church?? At least it’s good for worship and companionship, both good healers.
Better find the right one! Otherwise it’s a social club.
I was raised a Baptist, and later my mom worked as a secretary for Robert Shuller, who developed the first drive-in church in the world… window speakers, passed collection plates to the cars, picking boogers out of your nose, it was comical. And later it became the ostentatious Crystal Cathedral (which is now broke).
That’s American Christianity. (But there are MANY good churches and pastors out there, you just have to find them.) I know quite a few good pastors all over the world.
Rebellion Against the Establishment
I quit church at 13, because I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I loved Jesus, as all of us Jesus Freaks did in the 60s. But we didn’t carry around Bibles and believe in the Greek hell or the powerful devil nonsense, or even the Garden of Eden. Not even interesting!
Just Jesus.
Besides, I studied paleontology since I was six, and loved the grand story of the world and its changes over millions of years. The greatest thing that happened to me was in 1993 when I stopped trying to piece it all together. Thus ended years of insecurity. Back to Jesus only.
But it wasn’t an intellectual thing. I was baptized at a Billy Graham Crusade when I was 9, on my own, and I have always felt his presence since. Just can’t put in into words, and it took me many years to learn that lesson. It is an experiential thing… but it happened at Pentecost to about 5000, and it happened in the 60s to the Hippies. We just can’t explain it, but we all feel the same power and grace.
Church is Usually a Business
Church is a business… when I left Bethel I spoke in hundreds of them. I was a Foursquare pastor for many years – even had a small church for 3 years here in Manhattan Beach made up mostly of former JWs. Hope Chapel was a seeding church – sending out pastors all the time – it was great. But in many churches most people were only concerned about “The Last Days”, and I had had quite enough of that in the Watchtower. I never believed in 1975 or their concept of the “anointed” or any of that crap… I just kept my mouth shut.
I had left the Christian churches because all people wanted to do was write books about Revelation (a la Hal Lindsey) and the Rapture. NOTHING about true giving and worship. It has gotten a little better since Calvary Chapel and Chuck Smith, Vineyard Fellowship, Harvest, and other denominations. (Thank God).
Back to Nurse Ratchet and my Hospitalization
2. I was treated horribly in the hospital - this was the REALLY BIG problem. I wasn't physically bad off once the poisonous-to-me leg-cramp drug that my doctor prescribed wore off, but by that time I was kept heavily drugged in the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance, Calif. and could not think clear enough to figure out what to do. So I had to suffer their virtual total lack of proper care.
3. Plus, none of my friends or roommates knew exactly what had happened, and although a former roommate took me to the hospital at my request (I was losing consciousness after by riding a bicycle in the afternoon and my leg had suddenly cramped up in an intersection 200 feet from my house in the middle of the street and I fell over, (the third time since starting the drug weeks earlier) and was hit lightly by a car and they sped off. (I can’t remember the drug’s name as I later threw it away lest I accidentally take it again.)
The Slow Process of Losing It
I had no personal visits from any friends to help me out for two days. It was as if I was in another country 10 miles from home and locked in a room with a tormenting male nurse. My roommates didn’t bother to even visit.
I was offered no help at all by the male nurse to find the phone numbers of my friends that were in my wallet who WOULD help me. The sicko dude would not even answer my requests for help in calling someone I knew by just typing in the phone numbers, but only informed me erroneously HOW to do it myself! In fact, other than that he never even bothered to talk to me or give me any help, let alone even LOOK at me! And although I could easily walk, I was not allowed out of the room for three days. Wasn’t allowed to bathe. Didn’t eat a bite for 3 days, which was good as I would have soiled my jeans and probably forced to wear them! I was in absolute hell. After a day and a half with no answer as to when I would get out, I began to panic big time. By the third day when three of my closest friends found me and came to visit, I was about 2 seconds away from suicide… something I have never contemplated in my life.
I love life… but because I was panicking hard after 2 days of being confined to a very uncomfortable bed, I overheard them talking about putting me in with the bipolars, and I panicked even more. I saw no way out. The entire 3 ½ days I never ate once and no matter how much Ativan they gave me I was up in 2 hours and they bitched at me to go back to bed! If I could even have walked around the outside room (I could walk fine) it would have alleviated a lot of the stress, but I wasn’t allowed out once (had a bathroom in my room) and my blood pressure remained over 200 the entire 3 ½ days. I’m amazed I didn’t die from a blood aneurism in my head or something. Even more drugs didn’t bring it down. I was coming apart inside. I wasn’t even praying… I felt God had no use for me any more.
I just wanted OUT. I had images of dying in this place.
My vision was so blurry even with my glasses due to the Ativan that I couldn’t read any of the emergency and friend’s phone numbers that were in my wallet. I cannot afford a cell phone that gets reception (I live in a bad signal spot just over a hill on the beach and only Verizon cell phones will work there, which are too expensive for me. (I only have a land line and a cheap emergency cell phone from Virgin mobile ($30 for 3 months) which will only work a half mile away from my house, so I had none that I could just dial out on and call my friends for help. At home I can only use a land line.
I was also way too drugged on Ativan to remember all the important friend’s phone numbers. And here the male nurse refused to even dial the numbers written in my wallet for me. In fact although he was required to stay next to me in the room at all times, he never responded to any appeals and refused to read and dial out to the blurry-to-me phone numbers in my wallet! He probably also stole my prescription drugs. I was alone, in a panic after a day, and although not causing them a single problem incident or anger towards them (bad idea anyway), I wasn’t allowed to leave my room, was tethered the entire time to an IV plus a whole bunch of tubes that were continually coming undone and setting off alarms all day and night… just if I rolled over in my bed.
I couldn't focus well enough even with my glasses to read my closest friends' phone numbers so as to call them and ask to please come down and visit me so I could get the right help, and the nurse, a total As%^&*, mostly wouldn't even respond to my questions on how to dial outside the hospital to the numbers I knew, and I couldn't get the attention of the other workers at Little Company of Mary in Torrance so as to how to get an outside line. This first orderly, who had to stay in my room 24/7, not only would not respond to any requests for help with the phone or several other matters, but generally would never once even LOOK at me.
It was like being in hell.
Within 24 hours of this I was becoming a mental basket case and started agonizing and went into severe mental trauma. I had no one to help me or appeal to for 2 days, and by that time I was beginning to lose it. Yet I never raised my voice or caused trouble. I was never strapped down... but ended up getting wrapped up in the IV and detector tubing (like 8 tubes) just by turning over in the bed, and the nurses who responded to all this modern equipment They gave me all the wrong drugs, kept me wrapped up in tubes, I could not leave the room except to use the bathroom, and the bed was horrible. They couldn’t even figure out the modern equipment they had! So the 20 different alarms went off all night long. My friend brought over the meds I normally take for my various ailments and they took them away and gave me other drugs that are practically poisonous to me.
I have almost completely purged them from my system and cleansed my body now. I have candida with colitis so I could not eat any of their food for 3 days and they kept me so drugged up I couldn't think clear enough to tell them I cannot tolerate ativan or wheat/yeast products. I had not been drinking either. My main physician
I am doing much better after the horrible hospital incident. THEY almost killed me. I only ended up with a bruise and $2500 worth of tooth repair now facing me.
Think TWICE before you go into a hospital in Los Angeles/Compton/Inglewood area.
Randy