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35 year old male

Has a benign medical history, eats very healthy, and prior to injury, exercised a lot.  Eventually determined that he had overtrained and over-dieted which led to a low testosterone issue.  Was a field scientist, and went back to school for a health profession.  Most of 2022, was at his apartment for 18 hours studying and sleeping, or going to class.  

Patient initially presented 7/11/23 for telemedicine consultation re: symptoms following acute COVID-19 infection and COVID shots. Referred by his functional medicine mold specialist.

– Health status: stable chronic.  Hx CIRS, hypogonadism, exogenous testosterone S/p  Muscle biopsy and dehiscence semicircular canal

– COVID-19 vaccination status : x2 mRNA Moderna

BATCH     ADRs DEATHS DISABILITIES LIFE THREATENING ILLNESSES

013L20A    3119           62                39                  26

023M20A   1616           23                17                  31

-7/5/23 spike antibody IgG 10,090 U/mL

– Previous COVID-19 infection by testing or presumptive by symptoms, December 25, 2022.

– Onset of symptoms December 2022 and constellation of symptoms including fatigue, brain fog, memory problems, shortness of breath, dizziness when standing, fast or pounding heart rate, loss of taste or smell, anxiety and depression, symptoms worsening after activity. Also reports burning muscle pain, fiberglass skin sensations, stabbing upper and lower back pain, muscle twitches and “blood pumping in legs” sensation

– Clinical trajectory: worsening.

April 2022 was diagnosed with hypogonadism.  Had fatigue, wasn’t gaining muscle while working out, libido was low, was cold all the time.  Total testosterone below 50 ng/dL, and was started on exogenous testosterone therapy with internist.  Had researched therapy, shifted to a hormone specialist with an aromatase inhibitor (AI) and higher dose of testosterone.  June 2022 had a back injury with weightlifting.  Did physcial therapy.  Symptoms started to pile on.  Thought the AI was the issue.  Came off both testosterone and AI after a couple of months. Between insurance and appointment scheduling delays it took months for tx.  Scheduled twice for a muscle biopsy.  Looking at Multiple Sclerosis and autoimmune illness.  Did labs, nerve conduction study, muscle biopsy, brain and then spinal MRIs.  Went to Neurologist, who said this was post-viral illness, and given medication (uncertain what meds).  

Found his way to a functional medicine physician who focuses on CIRS and mold toxicity, first visit January 2023.  Had Genie testing: https://www.survivingmold.com/resources-for-patients/treatment/genie-genomic-expression-inflammation-explained-now-available.  Was living in an apartment which had high levels of mold.  Moved out, started to get better with treatment, and then got much worse.

Activity makes him worse.  He has to be careful about walking more than ten minutes at a time.  He can’t lift anything without it causing a flare of his symptoms.  His muscles burn when he uses them.  He’ll have a “fiberglass” symptoms affecting his skin systemically.  Was wearing shorts, no socks.  Typically feels cold.  He has stabbing back pain all the time.  Has sporadic muscle twitching.  He couldn’t think at all, or remember what he expect to be able to remember.  “My legs are always vascular, especially my left one all the time.”  He feels a “blood pumping sensation”, used to happen all the time, went away, and then came back.

He had drowsiness during Summer 2022, and couldn’t work even part-time.  He would be studying during summer courses, and would get up early in the morning to get a couple of hours of studying in; this lasted a few months, but recently came back some.  He was trying to start some classes in August 2023, and was struggling with self-worth, because he “isn’t doing anything.”

***He has had some anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, which is completely new.  When pain went away, those feelings would go away.  More recently, even without the pain, he would have those feelings and thoughts.  On a good day this typically goes away.  

June 30^th, 2023 he started IVM.  Within days, the anxiety and depression disappeared.

Physical symptoms seemed to be getting better.  Started ATP360 6/23 and hadn’t noticed any difference.  One of the few things which improved was his libido.

IMPRESSION: Constellation of multi-system symptoms NOT temporally associated with vaccination for COVID-19, BUT temporally associated with episode of acute COVID and consistent with vaccine injury.  Patient received two mRNA shots from bad batches.  Symptoms reflect mitochondrial damage, endothelial inflammation, anti antibody response, and micro clotting, with a no signal of mast cell activation (initial impression).  Provocation and exacerbation of injury facilitated by testosterone use (enables spike entry into cells via TMPRSS2 pathway).

Discussion: You are taking Colsevelam/Welchol (as a binder Rx by your mold specialist).  As we discussed, cholesterol is both the constitutional basis of building hormones in your body, and is utilized in your mitochondria to make Progenolone, which is your own endogenous steroid, that helps lower systemic inflammation.  Your last testing of this level is in the 50s ng/dL, which is suboptimal.  My suggestion is to stop this medication and permit at least four days to evaluate for change in your symptom burden.  In the short term your blood lipids will increase.  Within six months, they will be better than previously.  Four days after discontinuation of Colsevalam, I would suggest initiating Nattokinase per my directions, which will modulate your blood lipids, and more importantly, help heal the lining of your blood vessels, while breaking down microclots and neutralizing spike.  Because Nattokinase heals the lining of blood vessels, your blood pressure will improve.   You should check your blood pressure daily, and expect that you will need to stop taking your Losartaan for BP control.  As your systolic BP approaches 120 mm/hg or less, it would be best to cut back or eliminate this medication.  

The Desmopressin which you are taking, for reasons which are unclear to me (mold specialist later explained conern for decreased cardiac preload secondary to disregulation of anti diuretic hormone or ADH), is most likely harming you.  Please see the attached study re: the development of autoantibodies following acute COVID which attack ADAMTS13, the enzyme which manages clotting in our body.  When ADAMST13 is driven down, it drives up vonWillebrand factor levels, and both changes increase your body’s tendency towards clotting.  It is very likely that you already have significant microclotting at baseline due to vaccination and spikopathy.  If you use the free software Epocrates to understand the pharmacology of Desmopressin,  you will learn that the mechanism of action leads to increased plasma Factor VIII and von Willebrand factor levels.  This increases the risk of clotting in the context of vaccine injury and autoimmune dysregulation.

DRAFT SCHEDULE: Spacing changes is important in order to assess for benefit, neutrality and side effects.

Day 0 Pacing is the single most important intervention in surveys of vaccine injured by REACT-19.  See the presentation about this by Dr Joel  Wallskog of REACT-19 from the FLCCC Conference in May 2023.

Day 0 DC Desmopressin

Day 0 Intermittent fasting.  Long-term goal should be at least one 72 hour fast per month.

Day 0 Continue with IVM daily.  Target at dose of 0.4mg/kg, divided into two doses daily with food and fat.  

Day 4 DC Colsevalam

Day 8 Nattokinase 2000fu (100mg) orally on an empty stomach.  Take this daily for two days, and then increase to 4,000fu daily.  As tolerated, advance by adding an additional 2,000fu later in the day at least two hours after a meal and at least thirty minutes before the next meal.  

Day 12 Take NAC Augmentata (NAC-A) 200mg orally once daily for a week to determine your tolerance.  You may feel some minor return of previous spike related symptoms as your body begins to break down the fragments from spike denatured by the NAC-A.  Then take twice daily for up to three months, or until resolution of symptoms, and then daily indefinitely. You can take it with food, but I have found that best effect is to take on an empty stomach, or at least 15 minutes before eating.  Drink plenty of water, i.e. at least 16 ounces with each dose, when taking NAC-A.  

Day 16 LDN 0.5mg/drop, starting with one drop under tongue at night for one week, advancing as tolerated up to 4.5mg. 

Reassess after 2-3 weeks.  

***If iliac venous compression (IVC) continues untreated, it is possible (I have seen this in at least four patients) for neuropsychiatric symptoms to emerge.  Post acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injured patients are often misdiagnosed as having psychiatric issues and treated with a raft of antidepressants, antianxiety and antipsychotic medications which don’t address the underlying and undetected pathophysiology.   My working understanding of the pathophysiology of IVC is as follows: IVC or May Thurner Syndrome (MTS) exists in 30-40% of the population as detected on autopsy, but many people pre-pandemic were asymptomatic during their lifetime.  The origin of this condition is an anatomical vulnerability.  The left kidney sits higher than the right in most people, and as a result, the right iliac artery crosses the left iliac vein in a manner which increases compression.  The spike protein from the COVID shots enters the bloodstream and provokes both direct and indirect injury to the endothelium  (cells lining the blood vessels).  I have seen IVC in an unvaccinated individual, so that I think high spike burdens from shedding can contribute to this condition.  Spike also provokes microclotting and causes injury to the collagen which provides structure to compressible veins.  

The perfect storm which appears to provoke IVC in PASC and vaccine injury patients is a combination of  anatomical vulnerability, vascular injury, widespread coagulopathy, and resulting pelvic hypertension with venous stenosis, reflux and collateral flow that decreases the preload to the right atrium (results in POTS).  The pooling blood in the pelvis provokes ongoing systemic inflammation, irritating and impacting surrounding organs, such that we can see in the labs impaired renal and liver function, and irritation to the bladder causing cystitis, and the gut, causing dysbiosis.  MCAS flares in such patients.

Historically, IVC and MTS was associated with young woman of child-bearing age, and symptoms including left leg pain and swelling, pelvic pain, and lower back pain.  In the more than sixty patients I have worked up for IVC, there have been men and women of all ages, less than half of whom have any left leg symptoms or even pelvic pain.  Most of them have an athletic history.  Many have a history of trauma or surgeries or both affecting the abdomen and pelvis.  Men often have history of left testicular varicocele.  Woman may have had multiple pregnancies.  Development of urinary urgency, frequency and nighttime voiding is common, as well as dysbiosis (constipation, diarrhea, bloating, heartburn, abdominal pain), new hemorrhoids, painful intercourse for women, POTS and MCAS.  A minority of patients have lower extremity edema and new varicosities.  Dyspnea, chest pain and headaches are not uncommon.  Increased anxiety, depression and insomnia or poor sleep patterns are common.  Coagulopathy, with consistently elevated microclotting scores is uniform, and it is not uncommon that elevated D-dimers are found.   Patients often feel worse in the morning and get progressively better during the day.

7/28/23 Recently has experienced an increase in his symptoms. He started NAC-A about four days ago and is correlating the increase in pain for when that started. I explained to him the process of denaturing spike and how we can see patients have an increase of symptoms during the initial start of taking NAC-A. He is only taking 1 cap daily. I suggested that he go down to 1 cap every other day, but he wishes to continue taking it daily knowing his symptoms may improve after a week or so. He clarified that he is off of the Atorvastatin as well as the Colesevelam, but is still taking the Desmopressin to finish off the bottle.

7/30/23 I was able to speak with his mold doctor via phone for an hour.  He utilizes the Shoemaker Protocol in treating CIRS patients.  Notable excerpts from our conversation reflecting his clinical thought process include:

With pulmonary hypertension, patients will have elevated right-sided pressures, and so have less blood return to right side of heart.  Can only increase stroke volume or heart rate.  With POTS, the first thing he does is look at specific gravity and it is typically 1.10, indicating intravascular volume depletion.  With Desmopressin, increase ADH, which improves intravascular volume and eliminates passing out.  Try to reset hypothalamic output of ADH.  Proopiomelanocortin (sic) pathway is disrupted. 

***This is a very important part of the history, as the mold doctor was on the right track with concern for decreased preload, the volume of blood returning to the right side of the heart and this leading to POTS symptoms, but the pathologic cause was actually iliac venous compression and coagulopathy, not changes in ADH.

The physician thinks that the patient got much worse due to exposure to a water-damaged building.  He had gone to visit his mother, and staff had documented issues with her home.  Was wearing long-sleeves and shirt in June 2023, first time able to do this in a while.  Skin culture showed Propionibacterium acnes (gram positive)…. was >200,000, and should less than 10,000.

***Another  important point, because mold practitioners are inclined to blame mold as the primary souce of the patients troubles, when it is more likely that the spikopathy from COVID infection and vaccine injury has destablized mast cells, provoking MCAS and lowering the patient’s tolerance of pre-existing environmental mold.

Historically there is a relation between CIRS and increased vonWillebrand, and thus increased clotting.  He hasn’t noted previous microclotitng with CIRS, but hasn’t had a manner of testing it.

Discussion of and agreement re: use of micro current therapy going forward.

08/15/2023 Telemedicine visit

Not very much is going well.

Just finished abx, going to Peridontist, who will be removing an implanted left upper tooth.

His pain wants him to say that everything is worse.  He’s trying to be realistic about what is worse.  He struggles to go to the mailbox.  Got up yesterday to make breakfast for his girlfriend.  Getting up and walking to the kitchen feels like a big workout.  Back in January 2023 he could still move himself into his kitchen.

Wakes up with burning and stabbing pain, hyperalgesia.  Clothes hurt.  Has lost half of his hair, starting about a year ago.  He can feel every hair which falls off his head, and it is worse.

He is experiencing a lot of stress, and it has gotten into his head.  Got rid of his bed and couch, and had his apartment cleaned professionally.  Got his workout bench out of storage, and is looking at it, wondering if it has mold.

“I’m tired of fighting, and don’t want to be here.  I’m telling everybody so that doesn’t happen.  My life is trying to be a good boyfriend, because I found the woman of my dreams.  I’m doing one college class, and it’s hard.  In the past, I could do that in my sleep, but now I’m tired, in pain, and struggling.”  Would prefer to physiologically feel better before reaching out for psychological therapy and cost is a concern.

Cold all the time, but burning and stinging is mostly in legs, and going everywhere, including now in his face.  His skin is very wrinkly, which started a while back.  Unless the mold and bacteria are the issue.  He overthinks eating, his relationship, his finances.

His girlfriend ran a race this last weekend.  “Everyone’s life is going elsewhere.”

Mold doctor indicated to him that we were on the same page, but wanted him to keep taking the Cholseval and VIP (vasoactive intestinal peptide, nasally administered).   The VIP is used in CIRS  “to attack several biomarkers.”  It’s the only thing which feels like it has for sure helped him.

He ventured a theory: references Dr Jordan Vaughn’s statement that he has a large segment of patients who can identify the day that they were injured.  The only thing which changed before injury was starting to take testosterone.  Then, he was deadlifting and had a lower back injury while deadlifting.  The day his skin sensation/pain started, was the week he had a muscle biopsy, cold-turkey quit nicotine, which he understands to open the floodgates to spike in the brain.  He can wake up and his left leg is “super vascular.”  He would look at it every day, and it would upset him.

***Another key point in his history, as many IVC patients can pinpoint the day and time when their life dramatically changed for the worse.

7/11/23 Telemedicine visit

“My legs are always vascular, especially my left one all the time.”  He feels a blood pumping sensation, used to happen all the time, went away, and then came back.

No Hx of left testicluar concerns.  Has Hx of hydrocele on his right.  Mornings used to be manageable, and things would go downhill over the day.  For fourteen months, he has always slept very hard.  The last several weeks have been the hardest of his life.  He wakes up with hope and fight, pushes through his day, and by the end of the day, he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.  Mornings now suck, because he started in pain.  Hasn’t noticed any edema in his legs.

He is on day three of the Arc device.  He can perceive the micro currents.

IMPRESSION: Severe post-exertional malaise secondary to mitochondrial dysregulation and hypoxia from extensive microclotting. Left iliac venous compression: specific time of onset, following possible pelvic injury, severe lower back pain, left LE vascular prominence.   

PLAN:

-Please complete the vascular study ordered to initiate workup for left iliac venous compression.  This is the first step towards completing an MR venogram which would provide the definitive diagnosis and is needed by a vascular surgeon.

***I ordered vascular studies on the first tweny or so patients until I realized how useless they were in diagnosis.

-Please complete blue top testing with Dr Vaughn to evaluate/stage microclotting.

-Please consider completing the labs which were ordered during our first visit.  

Day 0 Initiate Plavix 75mg orally daily.

Day 4 Initiate Aspirin 325mg orally twice daily with food.

Day 8 Initiate Eliquis 5mg orally twice daily

8/23/23

Day 8 of the anticoagulationt reatment plan.  

Some increased numbness in right arm.  “My muscle burning (predominantly legs), back pain, and energy have without a doubt noticeably improved.  My fiberglass skin pain has improved maybe slightly. “

9/6/23

A couple of bruises here and there but no negative side effects of anticoagulation other than the numbing in right arm.   Can walk more and exert himself a little more with less pain and less repercussions.  His three main symptoms are stabbing back pain, burning muscle pain, and hyperalgesia that he refers to as fiberglass pain where it hurts just to wear clothes. All are exacerbated by activity (walking, lifting, exercising).  Two of the three were improving last week, back pain was not getting better.

9/18/23 

Microclot results are back: stage/grade 4 of 4 amyloid fibrin microclot formation, significant and widespread.

09/28/2023

Having some improvement.  Waking up each day with a better attitude, because he has some answers re: what is causing his symptoms, i.e. microclotting.

Week two of triple therapy he was able to walk across campus.  He overdid it during that second week; went on a long walk with his girlfriend, walked across campus twice, and helped new neighbors move into their home.  His brother’s truck needed a new battery.  It is elevated, and for 1 1/2 hours he was picking up the battery and moving it around.  His upper back was excruciating for the following two weeks.  He also had an acute episode of presumed viral illness.

He also had his dental implant removed, and started feeling better last week.

The fiberglass sensation affecting his skin is up and down.  If he does too much, everything will get worse.

Before MRI of his spine in 12/22, he could feel the blood pumping through his legs and the twitching. Discussion of whether or not to repeat MRI, or wait until his previous MRI has a second read by Interventional Radiology specialist Dr Brooke Spencer in Denver, CO.

Discussion of Aspirin 81mg daily vs 325mg twice daily.  Mold doctor has concerns re: large doses harming him. 

***Worth noting that higher doses of Aspirin could have helped mitigate his MCAS symptoms, but may have led to earlier incident of rectal bleeding, which occurred three months later when the patient increased Aspirin dosing to 81mg BID and was straining to have bowel movements.  Ongoing use of the Arc Microtech has minimized concerns re: bleeding and bruising in our patients on anticoagulation therapy.

IMPRESSION: Stage/grade 4 of 4 fibrin amyloid microclotting, experiencing clinical benefit with triple anticoagulation therapy.  Suffering increased symptom burden following overexertion, recent acute viral illness, dental surgery, and ongoing shedding exposure from increased social contacts with school and medical/dental office visits.  Concern for iliac venous compression (IVC).  We identified a previous non-contrast MRI thoracic/lumbar spine, and with some small chance it could provide clinically useful information.  If not, we can order an MR Venogram.

PLAN:

-Send CD of MRI Lumbar and Thoracic spine from 12/22 to Dr Spencer’s office Colorado for an overread (medical term for second opinion radiology review)

-Rotate sites with Arc device.  Order more self-adhesive pads from the UK.

-Order for Nattokinase from Allergy Research Group sent to FullScript.  This formulation may have a special advantage for you, because it has low or no histamine and may be less provocative to your system with mast cell instability, and histamine release from breakdown of platelets.

-Feel free to take (mold doctor’s) direction to use only Aspirin 81mg daily instead of Aspirin 325mg twice daily, if upon reflection of our discussion you have lingering concerns.

-Sip Baobab 1 Tbsp in 16oz water over at least eight hours daily.

10/12/2023 RN followup call:

He is doing okay, having some days of feeling good mentally and physically. Not having the fiberglass pain when putting on clothes and being able to move around more. He will then have days that follow that he doesn’t feel well, low energy, clothes cause pain and can’t tolerate moving around much.  He continues on the anticoagulant therapy and is tolerating it well, without concerns of bruising and bleeding. He is scheduled to have telemedicine consult with Dr. Spencer’s office on 11/1/23. They are talking about doing the MR Venogram and he is wanting to get that completed. It sounds like they will order it for him to complete locally. 

10/27/2023 RN followup call:

He will have days that are considered good days. His clothes will feel okay and not cause pain, he is able to walk longer distance and mentally has more energy and clarity. Other days that are not so good, he is in a lot of pain and exhausted. During these days he feels mentally down and questions wanting to live. This was more frequent in the past. He states he is very vocal about this to his family and does not have a plan. 

11/17/2023 Telemedicine visit

Repeat MR Venogram didn’t occur.  The night before the study was supposed to happened the imaging center called and said that they don’t do MR Venograms.  Now he is communicating with staff at Dr Spencer’s office, and they advocating for him.  They have patients on the East Coast who they have sent to a local academic medical center which is about an hour away from him.

***Arranging for local MR Venogram is an uphill and time-consuming battle for our staff and the patient, and we have had to start charging for the hours spent on it.  Insurance doesn’t want to pay for it.  At least a 3T magnet MRI is needed.  Technicians, schedulers, radiology nurses and physicians are often unhelpful and do not distinguish between the venous study we want and the study they perform.  Local radiologists almost uniformly do not correctly read the MR Venogram and do not identify venous compression, but it can be identified by Dr Spencer and her expert Interventional Radiology (IR) team.  We have to arrange for a CD copy of the study to be sent to Colorado for a second opinion.  Vascular studies including locally performed ultrasounds are almost completely useless in identifying IVC.  I have spoken with more than twenty (!) vascular surgeons and IR physicians across the United States, and only three have been capable of having a reasonable conversation.  The rest have been condescending in their “expert” lectures to me about May Thurner Syndrome (MTS) or IVC, and how a patient who doesn’t fit into the box they are familiar with, could not possibly have the condition, let alone could it be caused by spike protein, let alone have it lead to neuropsychiatric symptoms.

“I want it to be something, but I’m not doing any better.”  The short walk to class is now fine with the triple anticoagulation.  Walking more than that brings negative repercussions.  He has been hopeful between now and then.  If he overexerts a little bit, the next week he has a lot of pain. 

He ran into something a few weeks back and had bruising.  The initial numbness in his arm and increased bruising with initiation of anticoagulation has resolved.  

Discussion of Flavay and Sulodexide, and potential benefit for collagen repair.  A few months into his health issues is when his skin started looking old and then exfoliating.  He is also losing muscle mass.  Recently, inside his right ear, the skin is exfoliating.  Anytime he overdoes it, his hair will start to be less soft and fall out faster.

Two weeks ago he had a very bad week.  He thinks it’s because he overexerted the week before, and then started struggling with dark thoughts, and his hair started falling out more.

He is cold on a regular basis, despite wearing extra clothes.  Compression underwear with polyester and cotton helps the pain from wearing clothes.  If he walks too much, the fiberglass pain returns.  It’s 73F in his apartment, and he has a heater on, with compression underwear.

He stopped the Arc, because it was leaving marks on his arm.  Discussion of how to rotate sites, avoid constriction, and use it on his ankle with medical tape.

If the MR Venogram comes back clear and it isn’t that, then what will we do next?  

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) drops, Sulodexide, Flavay.

IMPRESSION: Plateau in clinical progress.  Ongoing exposure to shedding from class attendance.  Delicate balance with post exertional malaise, extreme temperature dysregulation, hypersensitivity of skin, hair loss, decreased skin turgor, muscle atrophy.  Baseline elevated spike ab dilution and stage/grade 4 of 4 amyloid fibrin microclotting.  Concern for iliac venous compression.

*** Improvement in clinical symptom burden with initiation of anticoagulation, followed by plateau and/or regression is a common feature for patients with IVC.

PLAN:

-Use a styptic pencil from a local drug store to stop facial bleeding when you cut yourself.

-TCM eye drops and nasal spray to protect against spike shedding.

-Over-the-counter therapy to inhibit platelet adhesion to blood vessel walls, which is an over-the-counter equivalent of Plavix: Flavay 100mg (1 cap) twice daily. Advance to 200mg (2 caps) twice daily as tolerated.  Flavay is available online at: https://www.healthysource.com/flavay.html

-Pentoxifylline (PTX ER), 400mg three times daily. It is third-line therapy in patients with severe microcirculatory disturbances. PTX is a non-selective phosphodiesterase drug that has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. It improves RBC deformability and reduces blood viscosity, so can mitigate the hyper-viscosity and RBC hyper aggregation, which is linked with the development of coagulopathy in the vaccine injured. It is also an PAI-1 inhibitor, which enables the body to break down the microclots more easily.  Cost isn’t prohibitive, $15 for 60 tabs with Good Rx coupon.

-Restart the Arc in two weeks on program 3, then a week on program 4, then rotate a week each on program 1, 2, 3 and 4.

-See attached reports re: Sulodexide https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36769668/ and  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35647070/.

12/4 Telemedicine visit

Patient reports 12/1/23  appt with NP in Dr Spencer’s practice, and review of lumbar spine MRI from 2022.  Overread revealed severe left iliac vein compression. His dad is flying him to CO and has appt 12/11/23 for MR Venogram. Dr Spencer’s office is going to update this week but trying to arrange for stent placement while he is out there. 

Patient reports NOT feeling any better at all. Admits now that he has had blood in stool on/off since starting blood thinners but didn’t think much concern of this and therefore did not relay this information until now. Reports since changing to Flavay he has now had significant amount of bright red blood daily in stool, splatter in toilet and when wiping. Denies SOB, dizziness, lightheadedness, nausea or vomiting.  Is currently on 81mg Aspirin, Flavay 2 capsules BID, Pentoxifylline TID but has discontinued Plavix when he started Flavay. Using ARC on program 4. Has not required styptic pen as trying to shave more frequently and thus noticed less issues with knicks/bleeding. 

Advised we will follow closely regarding the concern of bleeding above and the importance of informing us of this type of issue. Verbalizes understanding.   Later acknowedged to nursing that he had bumped up Aspirin to 81mg twice daily.

Plan to get a CBC, CMP and guaiac of stool to assess for blood loss. Back off Aspirin to twice weekly.  Rotate Arc each week through programs 1, 2, 3, 4.  Ship TCM eye wash and nasal spray to him before his flight, as the shedding in the airport and on the plan could be very harmful for him.  He can/should also order Enovid nasal spray from Israel.

-Utilize ENOVID Sanotize nasal spray from Israel up to six squirts total daily during your travels.  You can use this spray before departing for the airport.  This can be ordered online at this address: https://buyenov.com

12/4/23 Telemedicine consult read of 12/14/22: MRI Lumbar performed at OPI. 

There is severe left MIV compression with a moderate length stenosis. The internal iliac on the left is dilated suspicious for presacral plexus collaterals. There is no signfiacnt disc disease. Venography and intravacular US with left renal venogram can be considered with possible iliac vein stenting.

12/5/23 RN follow up call

No further rectal bleeding since drop of Aspirin to 81mg twice weekly.  CBC, CMP normal.  Stool test negative for blood.  Likely blood was from a hemorrhoid secondary to IVC and straining to have BM with constipation.

12/7/23 Labs, note from provider

Thanks for getting these labs done. Overall, I find good trends in these values. I don’t think the low WBC or RDW is clinically significant. Decrease in MCHS tells me that you’re freeing up movement in your capillaries for the RBCs to deliver O2 and remove C02, so that your body isn’t loading as much hemoglobin on the RBCs. BUN and BUN/Creatinine ratio improved a notch, while Creatinine increased slightly, a good sign for renal function. Platelets improved, meaning less are getting chewed up in microclots, and your bone marrow is functioning well. Albumin (protein in blood) has normalized. Liver enzymes have improved, and your stool was negative for blood. 

WBC 2.9, RDW 11.3, MCHC from 34.3 to 33.5, Plts from 240 to 255, Albumin normalized, BUN 22 to 22 mg/dL, AST 32 to 19, ALT 43 to 17.  

12/19/23 Procedure note

The Inferior Vena Cava measures 431.8 mm square in cross- sectional area. The left Common Iliac Vein measures 284. 9 mm square in cross-sectional area where normal with a 56.% stenosis in the tightest area. The left External Iliac Vein measures 165.9 mm square in cross-sectional area. Additional measurements were performed including diameter of the narrowest portion of the common iliac vein which was 4-5 mm compared with approximately 18 mm diameter of the normal common iliac vein which would represent a 73% stenosis in diameter. Although his degree of compression was somewhat equivocal, his venogram does demonstrate severe reflux, therefore the decision was made to proceed with stenting.

12/22/23 No further rectal bleeding and in response to report of constipation s/p stent placement, OxyPowder ozonated Mg recommended to help with BM regulation.

01/08/2024 After completed the stent placement, reports no real significant changes in symptoms. Fiberglass sensation is still present, maybe slightly improved. Energy is still low. 

01/19/2024 Telemedicine visit

“I’ve had huge improvement.”  He was sick, tired and the three weeks after surgery were not fun.  He noticed after surgery that he had a huge release in the fiberglass pain which lasted for a while, but all the other pain was terrible.  It was hard for that to be appreciated amidst the other discomfort.  He was however wearing more clothes.  Three weeks post-surgery his post-op back pain was terrible.  In the last two weeks he feels like he has improved every day.  His fiberglass pain is better, holding steady.  He is wearing more clothes, touching more things.  Post-op and chronic back pain form the last 1 1/2 years is better.  Burning muscle pain is better.  Activity level has doubled, but mental capacity feels like it has gone through the roof.  “Right now I’m handling all kinds of stuff.  I got a part-time job teaching at the university, and am taking two instead of one class.  My truck needs repair, but I’m looking into fixing that myself, and I’m taking on more things.”  He caught himself going on walks just to go on walks, after being terrified of walking across campus.  Now with two classes, that means walking to two different locations.

Previously it would take him a week of doing nothing to recover if he walked to two different locations.  Now he is walking more, intentionally, with a big backpack with a lot of weight.  The only people who knew before yesterday how well he was doing were his mom, girlfriend and a close friend.  “I feel scared to say it, but starting yesterday, I’m just going to say that I’m doing great and keep moving in that direction.”  There have been a lot of family and friends praying for him.  

No symptom has completely resolved.  He is not yet at his normal mental capacity, to take on a part-time job and full course load.  He still has some back pain and fiberglass pain. 

He went on a fifty minute walk before our meeting and feels fine.  He can still feel increased blood pumping in his legs, which has been present from the very beginning.  “Something is going on there.”

Money has become a big issue.  He wants to discuss how to trim medicines from the list.   

He came off LDN for surgery, and hasn’t restarted it.  He has a good supply of NAC-A, Nattokinase, Eliquis.  He had a big reserve of IVM from India, but is about to run out in two weeks.  He needs Flavay, about to run out.  He did the Arc and Baobab consistently, but the Arc is a hassle.  He did the Arc for two weeks after surgery.  The Arc hurts him during a three hour cycle.  He only ever used the thick carbon pads, because it only came with two of the self-adhesive pads.   Using TCM one drop of eye drop in each eye, and one spray in each nose.  The eye drops stained his contacts.  He hasn’t noticed any negative effect, but stopped putting them in when he wears his contacts.

IMPRESSION: Significant clinical improvement following iliac venous stent placement with increased cognitive function, exercise capacity, decreased fiberglass pain.  Decreased chronic back pain.  Intense concern re: financial constraints and need to trim therapeutics in order to maintain benefit, but stay within budget.

PLAN:

-Invite to support group Thursday 8-10pm.

-Shift to normal Nattokinase from NK-SD for cost concerns.

-DC Pentoxifylline, due to lack of demonstrable benefit.

-DC fish oil for cost.

-Pause Flavay for cost.

-Change Aspirin to 81mg daily

-Continue IVM 12mg daily (reduced dose for cost)

-Restart LDN to stabilize mast cells, tighten cellular junctions of gut for leaky gut

-Use Arc for three hours a day rotate each week through program 1, 2 and 3.  You can use saliva instead of gel to make contact with the carbon pads.  

02/06/2024 RN followup call

The Monday after our last visit, he experienced a return in all of his symptoms.  The day of his visit he had made the adjustments of stopping some meds and supplements and decreasing others. He was wondering if he can go down to 1 cap daily of NAC-A augmentata instead of 2 BID to save on cost. He has been taking 1 cap daily recently and hasn’t noticed a difference in symptoms. ***He made all of these adjustments right before he experienced the crash***, but it has been 2 weeks now and he is starting to feel better. He believes he overdid it with how much he has pushed himself the weeks prior. He is not back to feeling as good as he did before, but it is improving. He is tolerating walking to campus and his pain is decreasing. We discussed nutrition habits and he feels fasting puts a stress on his body. I encouraged him to just focus on waiting to eat 1-2 hours after waking up and avoid eating at least 3 hours before going to bed, but then during the day eat low-inflammatory foods. He discussed having the habit of eating right before falling asleep after a long day of working and studying. I encouraged him to schedule breaks throughout the day from studying and dedicate an hour for dinner to enjoy a sit down meal with his girlfriend. This will help him metabolize his food before sleeping, but also manage his stress during the day. He agreed and plans on implementing this. He has decreased the amount of physical activity he is doing to not over do it and is tolerating it well.

02/16/2024 Telemedicine visit

Two weeks of severe downturn with physical and mental pain after two weeks of tremendous physical relief at third week s/p stent placement.  His mindset changed completely from being rock bottom to thinking about marriage, graduate school in a health profession, and moving forward in the near future.  

He had a busy week with exams and work.  School and work keep him busy 24/7.  He and his girlfriend decided to pick up a babysitting job for four days in the middle of his exams.  During that time he started to feel better, after going into that feeling pretty crumby.  He got very little sleep, then got sick Thursday a week ago.  He couldn’t sleep and was getting behind on school and work.  ***In the middle of being sick, despite not sleeping, he didn’t decompensate.***  Normally he needs at least nine hours of sleep.

“I want to get better, heal, and go back to my normal life.”

A thought a few days ago was that he felt better the next day after starting anticoagulation medication.  With Aspirin, he went from not wanting to move to being happy to go down the steps.  This raised questions in his mind about dependence upon medications.  “I want to feel better because I’m truly healing, not because of some pill.”

All of his pain is decreased.  Last night slept eight hours.  This week he walked around campus with his backpack for the purpose of walking.  He added in the extra paces because he was feeling good.  Going non-stop from 6:30am to 10:30pm.  Back pain made it hard to drive to school, but he can now drive with less pain.  

He reflects that it’s easier for him to make decisions which are on behalf of others than himself.  In the shape he is in right now, he can’t be a father or go to school, and if someone tells him that he can’t do those things, it is hurtful.  His teaching commitment ends beginning of May, and he has been asked to teach another class from August to the end of November 2024.  

He has certain clothes which he has set aside, because it isn’t tolerable to wear them due to the fiberglass pain.  Sometimes he will try them on to test them.  Cotton has been his favorite fabric, and today for instance he is able to wear a cotton sweatshirt, which doesn’t feel great, but can bear wearing.

IMPRESSION:  ~ Two months s/p stent placement for iliac venous compression.  Global improvement in the last two weeks with decreased lower back pain, improved cognitive function and stamina.  Fiberglass sensations/pain remain at a decreased level, which may yield to treatments focused on neurological improvement.

PLAN:

-Live02

-Titrate Aspirin for benefit, e.g. up to 81mg twice daily with Arc to limit bruising and bleeding.

LITHIUM MICRO-DOSING 

-Lithium is a trace mineral which may help prevent and treat neurological conditions secondary to spikopathy.  Dosing is ~130mg orally daily.  That dosing is many times below any level of potential toxicity.  It can be purchased online for about $15 for six months worth from this source.  

 https://horbaach.com/products/lithium-orotate-130mg-180-capsules

Below is a link to the Substack by Dr Michale Nehls on the topic of Lithium.

 L-ARGININE 

-Trial L-Arginine 1500mg together with Vitamin C 500mg orally twice daily for four weeks to support energy and endothelial function.  See this study:  “https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36501014/”.

03/04/2024 RN followup call

He was justting getting over his recent acute infection and has now come down with another acute infection. He had never started the NTZ and HCQ due to receiving meds after inection was resolving. He had ordered them anyway to have on hand. Last week he would feel fine during the week, but then at night would cough and didn’t sleep much. Saturday he felt tired, but thought it was from overdoing. Sunday he woke up with body aches, fever of 99F, sinus congestion and continues to cough. He started NTZ and HCQ right away. He is also going to pick up the Azelastine spray for nasal congestion. He states his cough is productive and coughing up green sputum. Last week, despite being sleep deprived he was able to function better than he normally would.  Post exertion malaise has improved and fiberglass pain has slightly improved. 

03/11/2024 Telemedicine visit 

“I’m doing great.”  “It’s been a rough month, but I’ve been very happy.”  

Five weeks of getting sick three times was challenging.  The problems he was being treated for were getting better during that time.  He went through a month of not sleeping well due to stress, illness, life reasons.  “I could barely function off nine hours of sleep for two years, and during the last five weeks’ time I was functioning on far less sleep!”  Right now he feels so good, and is so happy, that he is scared to say it.

Adding more with zero repercussions, feeling better.  He is inching his way back to the last good day in January 2024, when he went on two 45 min walks and ran for 60 seconds with his girlfriend. Yesterday went on two 45 min walks.  Saturday night he went out to eat and was chasing his nephew around, which he did several times, picking him up, and not having negative repercussions.

The fiberglass pain is getting better.  When that goes away he feels like a normal person.  

“Finally all of the stuff I’ve been taking has been able to help in a way that I can feel.”

He is having future thoughts again of working out, and envisioning more work and more school.  If his health is better, he will propose to his girlfriend.  

He DC’d LDN because of the surgery, and didn’t go back on it because of money, but since we last talked he started it again.  

Fiberglass pain is resolving.  

“I’m type A, very disciplined.”  He still eats whole food and veggies, avoids alcohol, and when he is healthy, once a month would like to have a drink of alcohol.  He had two drinks in the last few weeks, including on his girlfriend’s birthday two weekends ago and enjoyed it.  He realized in the beginning that alcohol made him feel better from a medicinal point of view, and so stayed away from it.  He was in a social setting with friends and family and enjoying every minute of it.  Once he feels the alcohol, he sets it down.

Next week is his Spring Break.  He scheduled an ultrasound, and an eye appointment.  He feels like he could run right now and handle it.  

Discussion of Rapamycin for more rapid decrease of microclotting by promoting increased autophagy.

IMPRESSION: Recovered from most recent acute illness, with three in the last month.  Functioning well despite decreased sleep.  Credits the stent placement with the increased energy and the Lithium Orotate for increased resolution of the fiberglass pain.  

PLAN: For paid subcribers only, sent via separate email.

DISTANT PAST

Once upon a time there were classes in art, music and gym from Kindergarten through senior year in high school.  Budget cuts, oversized classes and teaching to standardized test scores rather than comprehension and life skills have all taken an axe to these lifelines.  

Mr Greaney was my gym teacher for those seven  years of elementary school.  He was a tall man with a deep voice and most of the year he wore a navy blue warmup suit, with white racing stripes.  No matter your age or size, birthdays meant that you ended up over his knee with the class counting out loud as he gave you a gentle number of swats on your bottom equivalent to your age— and one for good measure!  Jesus, Joseph and Mary, it’s like I’m telling a science fiction story for the resemblance between those moments and the politically correct, touch-phobic, probiety of the present.  

Nobody messed with Mr Greaney.  I don’t care if you thought you were a tough guy from the slums of Hartford, you were no match for him, and you knew it.  Period.

Junior high school was a different scene, but our teacher was another physically fit and generally cool cat name Mr Steiner.  He had black wavy hair and a mustache.  He was perpetually relaxed, and had really good attention, meaning that when he was talking to you, you had him.

How many of us were vulnerable to the attention of adults when we were kids?  I had been missing my dad since my parents divorced.  My stepfather and I were locked in a battle of wills, and I ached for a father figure in my life who could help me find my way and love me with all of my faults.  This is rich territory for pedophiles, and they were there in the shadows for sure.  A narrow escape from one such predator is a topic for another day.  It was both my good fortune, and painful dilemna, that Mr Steiner was a kind man who cared about his students in general, and me in particular.

Coach called the boys Chief, or Rocky, or some other name which he probably called hundreds, if not thousands, of other boys during his career.  He called me, and only me, Moose.  I chose to hear his designation as a sign of his respect and affection for me.

My best friend in junior high and freshman year of high school was Bill.  He was a good student:  big, strong, and willful.  We both lived in households where alcohol influenced our family dynamics; still overflowing in mine, chicken scratching to maintain sobriety in his.  In our circle of friends were other boys like Bob and Kevin who were physically strong and intellectually gifted.  When Billy decided to join Bob and Kevin, on the freshman wrestling team, he persuaded me to sign up too.  Mr Steiner just happened to be the high school wrestling coach.

The first weeks of wrestling practice are still pretty clear in my mind.  The sheer physicality of it, the burning lungs, weary muscles, omipresent smell of adolescent sweat, and getting pounded on the mat time after time after time.  As I’ve written before, I have plenty of experience with losing, but this took it to another level.  After each practic, I remember the dim light of the locker room and the smell of Mennen SpeedStick. I would catch the late bus with just a few others, headed home in the dark, with a quarter mile walk home at the end of the bus ride. Once home I would scarf down dinner and then hit the books, every single weeknight.  

About three or four weeks in, I decided I’d had enough.  I was old enough to know what hard was, and this was beyond hard.  It was like when you’re a little kid learning to walk and you faceplant on the sidewalk, except it keeps happening over and over.  Sitting in Mr Steiner’s office and telling him that I was quitting was painful.  I yearned for his approval.  He wasn’t unkind, but in a way that made it harder.  He said “Moose, I think you were doing well, that you could be good, if you stuck with it.  I’m disappointed, and just afraid that quitting the team will become a pattern in your life.  We learn persistence early.”  Oooof!

Right in the solar plexus.

A few months later I was moving in with my adoptive paternal grandparents.  I began to have chest pain and shortness of breath.  It felt like I had an elephant sitting on my chest.  Years later, my dad confided to me that my Pop pop had called him wondering if I was reacting to the stress of the recent upheaval in my life, and perhaps I was a bit of a hypochondriac.  We went to my new pediatrician, he referred me to a sharp pediatric cardiologist, who quickly diagnosed me with idiopathic subaortic stenosis, which later became known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy or HCM.  He quickly arranged for an evaluation at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, the closest research center with significant experience in surgical intervention for HCM.   This became the first of many trips Pop pop and I made together from our village of Parkerford, PA to the vast campus of the NIH.  After a cardiac catheterization, surgery was recommended, and a week later I was on the operating table.

HCM is the number one cause of sudden cardiac death in young athletes, or at least before the pandemic it was.  Over the years I can count three families connected to mine who have lost a son or daughter to undiagnosed HCM, all in their early 20s.  Even in my teens, I quickly connected the dots, and understood that if I hadn’t gone against my aching need for the approval of Mr Steiner, I probably would have died on the wrestling mat.  It really was too hard, and somehow I knew it.

RECENT PAST

Because I wasn’t able to participate in organized sports, or even regular gym class after my surgery, I was assigned to the Breakfast Club version of gym in high school with Mr Ronald Pearson, also known as Mr P.  He was the Athletic Trainer for all of the sports teams, and had a group of students who volunteered as assistants.  After a stint as a statistician for our champion football team, I became an assistant athletic trainer, and enjoyed traveling not only with the football team, but also boy’s basketball and the girl’s lacrosse team.

When I trundled off to Susquehanna University to study business economics, I had a work-study job as an athletic trainer before classes had even started.  It was skilled and satisfying work with all the athletes, traveling with the football, men’s basketball, and women’s field hockey teams.  Oddly, it had nothing to do with my chosen field of study, and everything to do with what would become my calling a decade later.

Connie Delbaugh was the golden haired beauty who coached field hockey, and was romantically involved with Don Harnum, the handsome Director of Athletics and men’s basketball coach.  I loved working with the field hockey team, and would hang with them after practice and games.  They were some seriously tough and sexy women, a few of them heavy drinkers who could get pretty rough. Nancy, #27 in the photo, was the recipient of my daily treatment for shin splints in the training room. We became close friends, and after a while longer, romantically involved.  

Coach Delbaugh was very kind to me and made me feel welcome and appreciated for my efforts.  This is a small but poignant example. Once we arrived early for an away game and the gate was locked, with nobody around.  I volunteered to climb over the fence and unlock it from inside, managing to tear my pants in the process.  She took them home and repaired them by hand. Good golly.

PRESENT

In the first and second case studies I have presented at the last two FLCCC Alliance conferences, and the case study in my substack last week, pacing has been the Achilles heel of each patient. It isn’t for nothing that Dr Walskog of REACT-19 presents the number one consensus recommendation of vaccine-injured as pacing. Not only is that true, but also that Physical Therapy is more likely to hurt patients with post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury than to help them.

It has been with trepidation that I have enouraged some of my patients to explore Live02 as a tool to heal their enodthelium, decrease the pathological basis of their microclotting, and get back to a higher level of physical activity. The pre-pandemic use of Live02 incorporated extended periods of hypoxia (low oxygen) to cause vasodilation before then flooding the person with 100% oxygen while engaging in aerobic activity.

Our first patient to try this went to a studio in Baltimore, MD, felt great while doing Live02 with periods of hypoxia and increased resistance, for twenty minutes right out of the gate. Then he was down mentally, emotionally and physically for at least a week. The therapy harmed him.

Trying to learn from this initial experience, I counseled patients to avoid the hypoxic setting. A second patient went to a Live02 trainer, was run through a training session with periods of increased resistance and no hypoxia, felt okay during the session, and then experienced a dramatic decline in his status within tweny four hours. He developed dyspnea, chest pain, near syncope, and severe POTS symptoms, with a sharp escalation in his tinnitus. The effect was to set him back months in his clinical progress.

Still gathering information and trying to avoid any harm to other patients, I wrote out a short, very simple and firmly worded plan of care for patients who wished to try Live02. No hypoxia for at least two weeks, AND no increase in resistance. 100% 02. Slowly increase the time period of Live02 from three minutes (yes, only three minutes) the first session, to five the second, seven the third, nine the fourth, etc. Two patients improvised and incorporated near infrared sauna (NIR) for about forty five minutes prior to their Live02 sessions, took things slowly, avoided hypoxia and resistance, and have done very, very well.

The successes and lessons learned were communicated to other patients. Then last week I had a report from a patient who went to two sessions. Despite my instructions, the patient was assured by the trainer that he had helped many people with PASC and vaccine injury “go from bedbound to running marathons.” He put my patient on a treadmill with resistance, and ran him for 1.5 miles or > 20 minutes on the first day. The patient felt good during the sessions, but experienced an increase in his internal vibrations, dyspnea, and fatigue over the two days following each episode, coming back up to baseline.

I wasn’t very happy. I think that what is more dangerous than a trainer or practitioner who doesn’t know what he/she is doing, is one who is confident that he/she knows what he/she is doing, but is actively harming patients. The simplest way I can explain this is that pre-pandemic expertise expired around November 2019, and our bodies behave differently now, posing many challenges and mysteries to the individuals and practitioners trying to help them recover. We have a study in which muscle biopsies of both control and PASC patients pre- and post-exertion showed actual muscle necrosis and amyloid protein deposits in the tissue of the PASC patients. Going too far, too fast, is going to harm people.

My plan is to write a letter to the folks who manufacture and sell the Live02 setups, but they don’t supervise or control the people who purchase their equipment. I’m going to share this letter with my patients, and ask them to present it to the trainer they encounter when they book a Live02 session. I have low expectations that the trainers will pay it any heed. In the meantime, please beware of the Live02 trainers who claim to be helping hundreds of patients return to their marathon running capacties. That isn’t what I’ve seen in practice, and I think we need to make adaptations for the bodies we live in today.

P.S. Before I graduated from Susquehanna University, one of my closest friends presented me with a mix tape titled “Favorite songs for the men in my life.” It included Ode to a Gym Teacher by Meg Christian.

PAST

I’ve always been small. If you believe that adversity builds character, then I’m a capital C Character, as I’ve encountered my share of bullies. But sometimes they bit off more than they could chew.

This story can be told today because we have exceeded the statute of limitations, and ultimately nobody was hurt. If it happened today, I probably would have gone straight to the juvenile detention center and never made it to college. Or the bully’s parents would have sued mine and I’d have been expelled from school. It was one of those forks in the road of life and a choice had to be made.

I think his name was Brandon. He was dumber than a box of rocks, and got it into his mind that he was going to make me his punching bag. Each day after school he would be on my tail as soon as the final bell rang. In those days we could walk or bike to school. Uphill, through freezing sleet, in subzero Connecticut temperatures. There were no buses for us local kids. The buses were for the kids being trucked in from Hartford as part of court-ordered racial desegregation.

Just like in a bad movie (think Bad Santa) there would be a flock of boys behind Brandon as he towered over me; belittling me, shoving me, which usually ended up with me landing hard on the sidewalk. I didn’t think to ask for help. Both of my parents worked, and I didn’t see trustworthy allies among the teachers or school staff who only wished I took more Ritalin.

But I had an idea and a plan! In the junk drawer at home there was this knife. It wasn’t a switchblade exactly, but the knife retracted, a cheap plastic and metal freebee from some hardware store. The plan was to skip the sidewalk and instead ride my bike to school, and when the bell let out, fly out of there as fast as I could pedal. This part worked. But instead of going home though, I biked to Brandon’s house, tossed my bike in some bushes, and crouched under the branches of an evergreen tree. A little while later, Brandon showed up—alone. Just as he passed by I leapt out and jumped him. It may have all been very comical to an outsider, but it was serious as death to me.

We fell over together, and rolled around for a bit. Mind you, I was half his size, but I had the element of surprise in my favor. While we were still on the ground, I pulled out my knife, and slid the blade out for dramatic effect. I held it under his chin and basically said, “If you every mess with me again, I’m going to cut off your family jewels and jam them down your throat. Understand?” His eyes and very subtle nod indicated that yes, indeed, he understood.

End of story. Brandon never bothered me again. I never pulled a knife on anyone again. In fact, none of those boys ever seriously bothered me for the remainder of elementary school.

RECENT PAST

When I first started working at SUNY Upstate in the Emergency Department, I laid low and said nothing about my recent unionizing efforts at my previous place of employment. At Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, NY, I was one of two nurses who lead a failed attempt to unionize, and was one of the first to go. Somehow the schedule no longer had room on it for me. SUNY is unionized from top to bottom. The managers and professors are affiliated with UUP, nurses with the Public Employees Federation (PEF), and everyone is with CSEA.

It was three years into my time at SUNY Upstate that I was pulled into the fray by Llamara Padro Milano. I’m a sucker for a courageous woman struggling against the odds. She was the besieged Council President for more than 2,000 Registered Nurses represented by PEF at SUNY Upstate. The Regional Representative had talked me up and persuaded me to go to the annual PEF convention, where I was introduced to Llamara.

Llamara is smart, courageous, hard-working and integrity-filled. It’s no wonder that she ran afoul of both the management at SUNY Upstate and the leadership of PEF. As Kermit the frog sings, “It ain’t easy being green.” Let’s distinguish between business unions and rank-and-file unions: business unions are mostly what we have in the US. You pay your dues and you get services from professional staff. They have paid organizers, and their idea of organizing is to get out the vote in elections for public office, or to coordinate a letter writing campaign. Generally speaking, the ideas and actions are top-down and these unions pose little threat to the seats of power. A rank-and-file union, which is what Llamara and I wanted to cultivate, will have workers who communicate with each other about the day-to-day conditions of their workplace and steps they can take to make it better. This typically involves overcoming their fear of being targeted and agreement to take action together. Historically, it is rank-and-file unions which have changed the course of history, when workers exercise their power, and management can sense that they are indeed outnumbered.

I would rather have a business union than no union, but if you are in a business union and you want to move it towards a rank-and-file union, you will get a quick and dirty lesson in who has power and what they will do protect it. I’m not even saying that the leadership of PEF was dishonest or power-hungry, although there were some stinkers embedded in the structure. It’s just a very different take on how things should go, and they don’t want meddlesome upstarts making their life complicated.

In February of 2019, I traveled to Sweden and Norway on a two week trip with my (rank-and-file) union mentor Ellen David Friedman. Ellen worked as a labor organizer in American education for forty years, and is an international leader for Labor Notes. She had been invited to present and conference with a wide range of unionists in both countries. We started our trip in Malmo, Sweden at a joint labor film festival and conference of SAC Syndikalisterna. Unlike other Swedish unions, SAC organizes people from all occupations and industries in one single federation, including the unemployed, students, and the retired.

Just so you appreciate what a bunch of badasses the SAC are, during WWII it was the SAC that was publishing a newspaper openly criticizing the Nazis. Theoretically Sweden was neutral during the war, but Sweden traded considerable goods with Germany, particularly iron, iron products, ball bearings, and trucks. Lumber from Swedish forests was used to build barracks in the concentration camps. It was compliacted. Depending on whose narrative you read, many Swedes wanted SAC to shut its collective trap rather than provoke the Nazi bear.

I learned a lot on that trip. My illusions about the Swedish social experiment fell into disrepair as I learned that the Neoconservatives had persistently, successfully, undermined the social supports and collective bargaining agreements for which Sweden had become famous decades earlier. No stones were left unturned, in education, in healthcare, and in industry.

There was another group of badasses who we met during our trip. It was the proud women and men of the Swedish Dockworkers Union (SDU). When we conferenced, Ellen shared the powerful narrative of the American teachers who organized in West Virginia, Arizona and Oklahoma, as captured in Eric Blanc’s book Red State Revolt. Then the SDU leaders told us about shutting down the ports across Sweden and bringing industry to its knees in their 2016-2017.

I’ll tell you that reading the United Nations Resilient Maritime Logistics report on that strike makes me nauseous, but their visual tells the story. The globalist perspective of the UN leads to subversion of any and all efforts by people to excercise their collective power and engage in self-determination. The report encapsulates how global government (controlled by corporations) should decentralize transportation hubs and utilize a diverse and adjustable range of methods to transport goods. They make recommendations about how to go around these pesky workers fighting for their jobs, wages and safe working conditions. Legal protections and the right to strike which took more than a hundred years to establish, are subverted within a matter of years. And so the fight continues.

The 2016-2017 SDU strike had deep implications. As reported in Jacobin, 2.27.2019, nearly three years later, “The union is currently engaged in an existential struggle with employers from the entire sector. What began as an industrial dispute with APM Terminals at the Port of Gothenburg has become a national dispute that has included significant changes to the right to strike along the way, backed by the Social Democratic Party. In response to employer lockouts, the SDU has announced plans for indefinite strike action. The future of independent, left-wing, rank-and-file trade unionism in Sweden hangs in the balance.”

PRESENT

From “Honest Fight” by Charley Crocket

I know folks got their ways of doing things
Live where the low fruit hangs
That’s how it is
I can still see my mother’s hard-earned tears
Across the years in my mind

What have I done?
‘Cept stand up for myself
When I didn’t have anybody else
What have I seen?
Of an honest fight
I’m just doing what I think is right

In our PASC and vaccine injury support group last night, I asked everyone to spend some time working on our relationship to fighting. Our families of origin profoundly shape how we fight, or don’t. How did this play out with our parents and siblings? Did we fight with words? Did we fight dirty? What was our experience in school, with friends, and with strangers?

The collective responses were very rich. It may have been one of the most meaningful meetings so far, in part because we have all come a long way in showing ourselves to each other. What was very clear is that almost every person in that group is a fighter. There are variations, which include fighting through resistance, silent (listening and observing) and deadly, guerilla, take-no-prisoners, the spitfire, and team fighter. We also agreed that we are all tired, and can notice that we don’t feel the level of fight in ourselves that we have embodied prior to being injured by the spike protein.

Regular readers may be scratching their heads and wondering how it is that I identify as a Quaker, yet am writing about fighting. This reminds me of one of my favorite Pop pop stories. We lived about an hour away from Lancaster, PA, Amish (and all-you-can-eat buffet) capital of the US as far as I’m concerned. So, an English (what the Amish call us non-Amish) tourist walked up to an Amishman who was purposefully avoiding eye contact and going about his business in town. Blocking the Amishman’s path, the aggressive and macho Englishman asks him, “Say old man, I heard that you Amish don’t fight. What kind of man are you?” The Amishman looks the Englishman up and down, weighs his response, and then says, “Brother, I may not hit thee, but I may hold thee most uncomforably.”

None of us in the support group consider ourselves fighters of aggression. Our collective life experience has been that someone, or some thing, brought the fight to us, not the other way around. Then we had a choice. In most cases we instinctively knew that to give in to a bully or injustice would invite more of the same, and so we stood our ground. We took our share of hits, and were ready to face the consequences of defending ourselves, because we have an internal moral compass which guides us regarding right and wrong, and the difference between the two.

A newer participant in our group made the profound observation that our burden is made heavier, because in effect we have a political malady. This reminds me of the politicization of AIDS in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. If you tell somebody that you have asthma for example, they would have a good idea what you meant, and that is was a real medical condition. Manifestation of injury following the COVID shots is extremely inconvenient to the safe and effective narrative which almost universally endorsed by our healthcare system, and the powerful economic interests it serves. The McSick system is weighted towards marginalizing us with diagnoses of functional neurological or generalized anxiety disorder, because the rubric of its diagnosis codes and tests can’t identiify or explain the pathology we are carrying.

One among us is a veteran of multiple combat tours in the military. You haven’t seen nuthin’ till you witness a plucky twenty-something country girl from Montana giving what-for and a motivational pep talk to someone who used to command 800 men. It brings tears to my eyes. She was fighting for him, when he wasn’t clear about how to fight for himself, feeling indecisive, when he has always been a person of strategic decisions of tremdous consequence.

Which raises the questions…who or what are we fighting against? What are we fighting for? Who are we fighting alongside? And how are we to fight?

As individuals harmed by the virus and the shots, trying to heal, we have been forced to look squarely at the evil before us. Only in this way have we been able to survive this long, against the odds. We are clear that none of this was an accident. This pandemic was planned for years; see the details of Event 201 hosted by Johns Hopkins University, and you will see the script for the last four years. Event 201 was a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York, NY. The bioweapons were waiting to be launched. The media response was and is coordinated. The evil geniuses are coming for us and our families. They won’t stop until they get what they want, a dramatically reduced global population. It’s unbelievable, yet true. This is not a drill. This is not 1944. This is 2024, and there is a global genocide in progress.

They aren’t hiding their agenda. It’s out in the open if a person is willing and able to see and listen. Although, it is stunning how many URLs for the World Economic Forum result in a message telling me that I can’t access that information with my server. Queue to minute sixteen of this interview with Yuval Noah Harari, one of the top advisors of the World Economic Forum, who asserts that we are moving towards a world where we will not need most of the people who are currently alive. I put the whole link here so that you know I’m not cherry-picking from the dystopian future he portends, in which AI reigns supreme, and humans are an afterthought.

As people with PASC and COVID vaccine injury, we carry these truths with us every day, in the face of the denial and disbelief of most people around us. This, despite the mounting numbers of injuries and deaths, the ever outwards expanding circle of turbo cancers which spring up suddenly and silence victims in mere weeks and months. We still have our autobiographical memory, curiosity, critical thinking and capacity to fight, even as the hippocampi of millions is rendered feeble and obedient by the lab-made spike protein.

The fight has been brought to us. It is on our doorsteps, in our homes, in our bedrooms. We are fighting for our health, our humaness, and for all of humanity. We are the bedraggled, overwhelmed and disabled, fighting side-by-side, back-to-back. We are slowly healing, sharing our stories, and gathering ourselves up. The forces of evil, in the characteristic hubris of the worst of archetypal villains, has woefully underestimated the persistence and badassedness of humankind.

PAST

My dad was a sales representative for a series of companies which make walk-in freezers. His customers were restaurants and fast food chains. He worked for Bastian Blessing, Vollrath, Frigidaire and Masterbilt. After my mom and dad divorced when I was ten years old, summertime visits with him usually included several days on the road as he made sales calls in the Northeastern United States. At the end of those days we would go out for dinner, check out a local attraction, and sometimes stay in a motel overnight if we had traveled as far north as Maine.

Driving was second nature for him, and he was attentive. This made him a good driving instructor for me. The summer before I turned seventeen (my Pop pop wouldn’t let me get my license when I was sixteen), it was my dad who taught me to drive on one of those summer sales trips. One close call occurred when I tried to get on a highway via the exit ramp. Dad got pretty excited, but not angry, and I never did that again.

Because he grew up around a service station—which my Pop pop owned and ran— my dad knew cars pretty well. He could readily distiguish a 1967 Chevy from a 1968, and certainly one make from another. There were always antique car catalogues around when I was a kid, and as an adult who has been reading Consumer Reports auto issue for thirty years, I can identify a lot cars myself.

My Pop pop wanted me to focus on my school work, and not get into the vicious cycle of working a job to pay for a car, and then repairs, since I would only be able to afford a junker. And he certainly didn’t want me driving one of those “Japanese roller skates.” So he kindly let me use one of his cars, and I paid the insurance. It was a metallic blue 1976 Chevy Caprice Classic. It drove like a ship floating on clouds. It was so solid that once, when I backed up at a friend’s house on a moonless night and hit his stone wall, the wall fell over and there was not a scratch on the bumper.

Back to my dad. Conversations with dad had a limited menu. He was an introvert who had pushed himself to be more comfortable in social interactions, which was ironic when you consider his line of work. We would talk about cars, sing along to music on the radio (he had a good voice and a hilarious falsetto that would show up with certain Beach Boys songs), share commentary about the attractive women we saw, and not a lot else. This reparte about women was an oddly uncomortable ritual we shared. I wasn’t really into sports; if I was, we probably could have engaged in this pseudo-language that so many men use as a proxy for meaningful conversation. I’m sorry, but it’s always seemed like a farce to me. Rather than talk about what is really going on in their lives, some guys can just spend hours talking about teams, players and plays.

It was instructive for me to see and know what it was that my dad did for work. I admired him for it, even if I didn’t aspire to it myself. I could tell that he was good at it, and that his customers liked and respected him.

The physical memories I have of being in the company of my dad are of being small, and feeling myself a boy, even when I had grown into adulthood. He was a solid six feet tall, held himself with good posture (some would say a military bearing), and always took care to stay fit with tennis, volleyball, and weightlifting. Near the end of his life, when he had been ill and lost a lot of weight, I saw more of myself in his thinner physique. When there were opportunities to help care for him, I was able to take them because of the friendship and support of my wife. These were poignant moments which matured my sense of self. This twilight time let us both see each other with clarity, an openness that came with approaching death, and speak words of acknowledgement about each other’s goodness, and the good women we had each married.

RECENT PAST

Before my father died, my wife and I had been considering moving out ofPhiladelphia, our home of the time. Violent crime had touched our lives multiple times, which was its own travail, but there were petty crimes that wore us down too. We’d had a beautiful Ficus plant in the courtyard we shared with five other neighbors, and when workman were doing repairs on one of the houses, it disappeared. Or early one summer morning I heard sounds below our bedroom window which were unexpected; the garbage truck had been by around 4am, and this sounded like more garbage can rustling. I got out of bed in time to see our sole garbage can, which had our house and street number spray painted on it mind you, being loaded into someone’s trunk before he took off.

Dad left us some life insurance money, and we decided to make a break for it. While we kept working, we began diligently researching new places to live. We lived in what Philadelphians call a Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Ghost) which is essentially a tiny house with three floors—or rooms— stacked on top of each other, and a narrow winding staircase. They were popular with ship’s captains and their families in the 1800s. The walls of our first floor were covered with newsprint lists of what we were looking for in a new home. Then the day came that we quit our jobs, hired a teenage neighbor to watch the cats, and hit the road. We covered a lot of territory in the next month, on both coasts of the US and plenty of places in between. Ithaca, NY was one of our first stops on the list, and ended up being the last as well.

Thinking about our travels and the many stories I could tell, I landed on one which relates to our visit to Boise, ID, and a spectacular dessert. If you’ve never been to Idaho, I highly recommend it. Some of the most beautiful vistas in the entire United States are in Idaho. My only words of caution are that if you have a car festooned with progressive liberal bumper stickers, you might not want to be driving through the Snake River Valley after dark. The gun racks in the cabs of those pick up trucks have real guns in them, and the drivers may not be fans of Brandon—or Prius owners.

You don’t have to be from Philadelphia to know what a Tastykake is, but for many a Philadelphian, it has been considered haute cuisine for more than a hundred years. I certainly enjoyed a butterscotch Krimpet in my day, but my wry reflection is that any product which substitutes a K when common English would call for a C is…suspect.

So, we were exploring Boise’s potential for our future, and on our first night in town we went to a nice restaurant. It had high ceilings and timberframe interior, with the trophy heads of many big animals on the walls. After an exceptional meal, we ordered the dessert special. When it arrived, I paused in reverence. There was a handmade ginger cookie of sorts, like an upside down hand with delicate fingers spread open, holding a scoop of vanilla ice cream with a dark chocolate drizzle, probably a few strawberry slices and a leaf or two of mint. It tasted even better that it looked. When I came up for air and wiped my lips with my napkin, I met my wife’s eyes, and she uttered words that shall live in infamy. “You know, that was beautiful, and tasted amazing, but sometimes…you just want a Tastykake.”

PRESENT

Tomorrow I’m going on a road trip to Selden, NY, after a ferry ride across Long Island Sound, where I’ll meet a fellow named Zee, and try to take an old Volvo C30 off his hands. If there are any C30 enthusiasts out there, please give us a little shout. The C30 was made from 2006-2013, in two generations. Volvo made about 220,000 of them, and it was meant to be an appetizer to Volvo ownership, leading buyers up the food chain after they got the little coupe experience out of their system. That worked in a sense, because 3 out of 4 people who bought the C30 were first time Volvo buyers. It’s not as sporty as your little Mazda Miata, but it’s classy—and cute. Five cylinders of tranversely installed inline horsepower makes it go vroom! No, I’m not having a midlife crisis. Yes, I’m channeling my Pop pop and dad…it’s my inner Marsland motorhead coming through.

While I’m on a road trip, I hope that you’ll be digesting three clinical updates. The first is courtesy of a patient who wrote a very detailed summary of her response to the clinical interventions we have tried to date. In particular, she credited Baobab with a wide range of improvements including decreased joint pain in previously injured areas, and return of hair growth and luster. When she attempted to reach the 1 Tbsp dose in 16oz of water, sipped over at least eight hours which I had suggested, all mayhem ensued. This could be interpreted as provocation of her MCAS, in particular provoking her paresthesias. Fortunately, she didn’t give up on Baobab, and with some trial and error, discovered that by dosing as little as 1/8 tsp, and no more than a flat 1/4 tsp daily, she could get marvelous benefit without any adverse effects.

The second update to share is the name of a product for heartburn which has been very helpful to patients trying to wean off of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). Reflux Gourmet is a clean product made with sodium alginate from brown seaweed or kelp. It has two flavors: Chocolate Mint and Vanilla Caramel. I like them both, but particularly enjoy the Vanilla Caramel, as it reminds me of the Werther’s caramel chews of my boyhood. Once taken, the alginate forms a protective coating in your throat, esophagus, and stomach that can help relieve or even prevent manifestations of reflux. When the alginate reaches your stomach, it forms a protective gel “raft” that floats on the top of your stomach contents. This raft effectively blocks off (or “corks”) the esophagus, physically blocking the reflux of your stomach contents into your esophagus.

Reflux Gourmet was recommended to me by our dear colleagues at Vitahealth Apothecary in NY, NY. It is widely available, and the cost is about $25-37 online. Each tube contains forty seven doses, and it can be used up to four times a day, after meals and at bedtime.

The last update is about a type of medical device on the market which delivers microimpacts. I spent a mind-blowing two hours in conversation with Peter Simonson, President of Juvent, a company which makes a very high quality and safe form of microimpact device. Our visit was revelatory, because of what I learned about bone as an endocrine and metabolic organ. Bones are so much more than the structure on which we hang our meat suit.

Pierre and I both have one of these devices and use them personally. FDA approved use of the Juvent is to reverse osteopenia and osteoporosis, but the clinical applications are much broader. This device has been on the FLCCC Alliance protocol as third line therapy called low magnitude mechanical stimulation. Page thirty two of the I-RECOVER protocol reports:

Low Magnitude Mechanical Stimulation (LMMS or Whole-Body Vibration). Low magnitude (0.3-0.4G), high-frequency (32-40 Hz) mechanical stimulation has been demonstrated to increase bone density as well as indices of general well-being in patients with a variety of medical disorders. It is postulated that this intervention recruits bone marrow stem cells in addition to having metabolic and immunologic effects. In humans, low-magnitude acceleration is applied through the feet by standing on a platform oscillating at relatively high resonant frequency. These parameters are very safe, painless, and easy to administer. This therapy is offered by Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Centers, or a device may be purchased for home use https://www.juvent.com/health/) similarly with noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS).

A study referenced by the protocol is:

Mogil RJ, Kaste SC, Ferry RJ, Hudson MM, Howell CR. Effect of low-magnitude, high-frequency mechanical stimulation on BMD among young childhood cancer survivors. A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Oncol. 2016;2:908-15.

What I want to say about this therapy is that there are many knock-offs on the market, and most of them are likely to harm you. They are the equivalent of standing on one of the machines in Lowes or Home Depot which is used to shake up paint. While our bones are designed to handle mechanical vibration at this level, the rest of our organs, including our brain, are not. Juvent operates at very safe 0.3 – 0.4 g’s of energy between 32Hz-37Hz, and detects the user’s resonant energy to use this energy effectively. Since I have delved into the science behind this product, two of my patients bought knock-offs, one at the recommendation of her Physical Therapist, and I had the bad luck of having to tell her she wasted her money for something that would probably hurt her.

The Juvent is an expensive piece of equipment, costing $6,000. It is also made in Tennessee by well-compensated American workers, using aerospace grade aluminum, gold-plated microprocessors, and strongly patented technology which cannot be easily imitated. It is my hope that with future case studies exploring some of its potential uses for patients with post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC), vaccine injury, and cancer, that we will find ways to increase access through shared facilities.

P.S. I do not have a financial interest in Baobab farms, Reflux Gourmet, or Juvent—just an intellectual one!

PAST

When I was a very little boy, we lived in Horsham, Pennsylvania near an Air National Guard base. The drone of the large planes flying overhead was part of the soundtrack of my childhood. I assume that at least some of those planes were C-5 Super Galaxy transports. Monsters with two enormous engines on either side, they could carry heavy equipment and have brought the caskets of dead soldiers home to Dover, Delaware from many conflicts during and since the Vietnam War. In an odd twist of fate, it would turn out that my future father-in-law worked as a Flight Simulator Technician on C-5 flight trainers during his career in the Air Force and later as a civilian. The planes’ vibrations were so penetrating that there were resulting cracks in some of the storm windows on our porch.

It was around that time that my family went to an air show of the Blue Angels. This is a squadron of elite pilots who are ambassadors for the U.S. Navy and perform aeronautical maneuvers to impress the crowd. When I was barely four years old, they were still flying the F-4 Phantom. The show captivated my imagination, and I remember that a few years later I was building the model plane versions of the Blue Angels’ F-4 Phantom. (Between the model glue and the paints that I used, my little brain got a fair amount exposure to VOCs those days!) With my paper route money, I was a regular at the model store downtown.

As a teenager I was drawn into the plot line of movies such as “The Great Santini”with Robert Duvall. By that time I was well aware of the rivalry between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marines, and living under the authoritarian thumb of a U.S. Navy Captain, my stepfather Em. His last reserve station was South Weymouth Naval Air Base in Massachusetts. Of course, I wanted to be a Marine. Most of the Santini storyline felt familiar and deeply personal, but especially the raw emotions of Lt. Col. Wilbur “Bull” Meechum’s son Ben as he sought to preserve his sense of self under the obliterating rules of his father. The plane which Duvall’s character flew was an F-4 Phantom. When you watch the aerial scenes, you’ll see plenty of black smoke, but only the occasional white vapor trail from the the jet engines.

When I later watched Duvall in Apocalypse now, I was enthralled. I swear it was an F-4 Phantom which delivered one of the napalm strikes, not an F-5 Freedom Fighter, but what does a kid know? Before the sounds of the fighter jet arrive, you could hear the radio call of a soldier on the ground: “I have a target for your fast-movers…Burn’em for me will ‘ya?” Later you see Duvall’s character, a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer, bare-chested in his Union Cavalry hat proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” It was F-5s that delivered the napalm that time, so that his guy could surf without pesky mortar fire. When we visited Myrtle Beach, SC for a family reunion in 1979, I found myself one of those cavalry hats, and would pretend to be Duvall’s character, “It smells like…victory.”

I aspired to become a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, and my grades were certainly good enough. An indication of my serious intentions was joining the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets in the Fall of 1983. If I were to pick a year where my sensibilities regarding war and a military career began to change, I would say it was 1984.

Three of the five major father figures in my life converged at that time. I went to live with my Nana and Pop pop, and Pop pop had been a Marine who fought in Okinawa during World War II. More than once, in frustration with my irascibility, he would say, “I wish we could get you to Camp Lejeune and the Marine boot camp would straighten you out.” I had wanted to be a Marine, but that didn’t sound so good. He was reflecting back to me a sense that I was too wily for military life. My freshman social studies teacher, Mr Roger Breidinger or Mr B, opened my eyes to the pretexts upon which every war is started, from the sinking of the USS Maine before the American invasion of Cuba, to the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam. I learned about the Kent State shootings where the Ohio National Guard killed four and wounded nine unarmed college students on the Kent State University campus as they peacefully protested the war in Vietnam. I came home with questions about who the good guys really were, and that would get my Pop pop upset.

Larry MacKenzie, father of my friend Larami, introduced me to Quakerism. Incredibly thoughtful, a soft-spoken professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, Larry would gladly drive out of his way to pick me up and bring me to Quaker meeting on Sundays. He and his wife, Bonnie were the first adults I ever met who insisted that I called them by their first name, an early sign that their respect for my integrity and mind as a teenager was a notch above what I had experienced previously from any other adult.

Diagnosis with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and open heart surgery at the NIH in March of 1985 put the official kabash on my military aspirations. But there was still a lot to sort out in my mind, between my fascinations, my dreams, what was true, what was right, and what I was going to do about it.

RECENT PAST

In 2007 my friend Melanie recruited me to come work in the Emergency Department (ED). She had transferred there a year before from the medical surgical floor that we both worked on at a small community hospital here in Ithaca. Shari McDonald, the ED Nursing Director at the time, had a more evolved perspective on nurses and our role in delivering care. She saw a spark in me, which prompted her to invite me to travel with her and another nurse to a Studer (now Huron) conference in Pensacola, Florida. I learned some important things about helping patients to move through the ED more efficiently, and setting up a program for follow up phone calls, which caught clinical deterioration early. Although I didn’t catch sight of them while I was there, I was aware that Pensacola, Florida is the home base for the Blue Angels.

Because my wife and I had a no-car household for a decade and then a one-car household for an even longer period, I would use a combination of carpooling to work with my friend and fellow nurse, David, biking, or riding the bus. At the time there was a bus driver named Ray who I became pretty friendly with. Ray is a mountain of a man who runs a private hunting lodge and game farm, is a part-time lumberjack, bus driver, and former U.S. Navy Phantom F4 pilot. You can easily imagine that despite my Quakerly inclinations, I was fascinated to hear about his experiences as a pilot during Vietnam.

Ray is a tough guy. Having worked in the emergency setting for sixteen years, I think I have some solid ground up upon which to describe my observations of how different people handle pain. The first thing I’ll say is that women have the upper hand, without a doubt. Childbirth is the benchmark, but I think you can peg kidney stones above that. With men, it’s a crapshoot. But Ray was in a category by himself. He told me a story of lacerating the palm of his hand during a log splitting mishap. He went to the ED and when the suturing physician said he was going to use lidocaine to numb up the site, Ray told him that he didn’t need it. After some back-and-forth, the physician told Ray that if he truly didn’t need lidocaine during the entire process, he wouldn’t charge him. Ray’s hand was sutured and he was discharged home without a bill.

Most of the time we conversed at the front of the bus, I listened to Ray, because his daughter had developed MRSA and had a series of escalating healthcare events which ultimately led to her death. I have had plenty of encounters with MRSA, but this was the first time in my career that I had seen such a young person die as a result of complications from it. She was a single mother, and the daughter she left behind was four years old. Prior to that, I’m sure that Ray was looking forward to retiring from his job as a bus driver. Now he and his wife had a young granddaughter to raise and insurance to provide.

David and I worked together for seven years before I moved to the ED. There was a brief U.S. Navy connection for him. I’m vague on the details of how and why he left military service prematurely, but it makes perfect sense to me that such a brainiac would have been tracked to work in naval intelligence. It also makes perfect sense to me that he didn’t stay with the military, because he is one of the most peaceful-minded and out-of -the-box thinkers that I have known.

During our joint tenure at Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca (CMC), the center hired a motivational speaker who was a former Air Force fighter pilot. Images of the planes and references to his glory days were part of his schtick. Exiting one of these presentations together, I witnessed a rare demonstration of anger from David, as he succinctly, said,”I don’t think that a former highly trained murderer is in the best position to motivate the masses.” In that moment, I realized he had clarity, whereas I had wrestled with uncertainty during years of fascination with military fighter planes, and the people who pilot them. My inner voice told me that there is something debased about mass killing from a distance. It started with modern warfare and has only accelerated in scale since.

PRESENT

If you haven’t seen The Matrix film series by now, you should. The basic plot is this: The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world designed to keep humans under control. Humans are kept sedated, effectively living a virtual life, and their life force fuels The Matrix. If you haven’t see The Matrix, what follows may not make as much sense to you. Simply put, I think of The Matrix regularly, as we are living in such a dystopian world where black is white and upside down is right side up.

Did you (who have seen The Matrix) ever wonder what happened on earth which led to the scenario of The Matrix? I did, and so did many others. The Animatrix is a 2003 American-Japanese adult animated science-fiction anthology film produced by the Lana and Lily Wachowski. The anime compiles nine animated short films, detailing the backstory of The Matrix , in addition to providing side stories that expand the universe and tie into the film series.

From The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance II –

The humans scorched the sky DURING the war.

Operation Dark Storm was done to cut off the machines’ primary energy source (solar power) using high-altitude bombers WHILE humans simultaneously launched attacks against them. The plan was to give humans the upper hand for a short period of time, while the machines didn’t have an alternate energy source yet.

This advantage didn’t last long since most of the humans’ weapons also depended on the sun, and their fragile bodies were no match for the machines’ resilient shells.

I’ve been an enthusiastic reader of science fiction for many years. In part, it is because science fiction writers have foreshadowed events occurring decades later. Yet these days, it seems that the time and distance between science fiction and current reality is rapidly shrinking.

I’ll tell you that four years into this pandemic, which many think is over, it’s a slog climbing up the hill to my office and settling into a day filled with patients still struggling with post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury. What makes it possible to carry on, aside from the fact that I’m a persistent son-of-a-gun, is the fact that sooner or later, more or less, our patients are getting better. There is indeed an upward trend.

What consistently takes the wind out of my sails and challenges my spirits, is a glance to the sky as I leave our home each morning. What starts off as a clear blue sky, takes a sinister turn as the jets appear and begin laying down their vapor trails. It has happened so many days now, that the pattern is predicable as, well, the weather, and I’m astounded that I don’t hear more people talking about it. I’m adept at pattern recognition; it is an important quality which makes me an effective clinician.

I see patterns to the vapor trails. I have paid attention to military planes my whole life. These jets are not commercial airliners taking off from the Tompkins County Airport. These are military planes, or drones; there are often four, or five, and they systematically criss-cross the sky, laying down their trails. They don’t take off for holidays or weekends. They fly at all times of the day and night. What then happens is the sky becomes covered with a haze, the sun and the blue blocked out. What often happens in the day or days to follow, is that it gets colder, and we have rain and wind.

Before I went on my recent road trip, I only knew what I have been seeing in Ithaca for at least the last year. As I headed to Long Island, dipping south near Pennsylvania, crossing through Connecticut, to Long Island and back to Ithaca, I saw vapor trails everywhere along the way. The scale of these operations boggles my mind. The money, the human resources, the fuel expended, and sheer number of jets in the sky, everywhere…is deeply disturbing. This is new, it is not normal, and it is not good.

The ongoing daily theft of the common good, blue skies and sunshine is by itself a crime against humanity. As a reader of prescient science fiction, knowing that there are arrogant humans who think that they can outmaneuver nature and manipulate the seasons and weather in order to counter perceived global climate changes, well, the vapor trails are ominous. As a healer, attempting to treat thousands of people who have been and continue to be poisoned in an ongoing campaign of collusion between Big Pharma and captured governments, I’m suspicious of what these vapor trails really signify. I know that we have already been betrayed, but would the evildoers be so bold as to carry out further poisoning by light of day, in the very skies above our heads? Why not?

I wonder if these jets have humans in them, or if they are drones piloted from central locations such as Hancock Air Force Base in Syracuse, NY. I wonder if these jets are in the skies all over the world; a colleague in the UK has sent me pictures of the same images in skies above her home. I wonder if the men and women who pilot these jets know what the true mission is, or are being told lies. I wonder if they are courageous enough to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and protect fellow citizens from all enemies foreign and domestic. I wonder…if they are people just like my friend Ray, who was once young and enthusiastic, very technically skilled at carrying out orders which meant death for those on the ground.

I don’t know what these vapor trails contain, but my own eyes and mind have observed that they obscure the sun, steal the blue skies, and bring cold and rainy days. I have a patient who draws a clear temporal association between the day a sky was filled with vapor trails, and the demarcation of her chronic chronic illness. I know that this is not what has been, and it feels very, very wrong. I’m curious who else has noticed, what is known, and what might be done.

PAST

Before hyperactive was a diagnosis truly in vogue, it was applied to me, and I was medicated with Ritalin. The doctor who prescribed it was a kind looking man with a deep, resonant voice name Dr Robert Allyn Kramer. He was a mensch; a kind and gentle man with impeccable credentials who died too young. Yale graduate, leader, educator and author in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry, president of his synagogue, he was even president of a non-profit arts organization. Who would have thought that a dear and trustworthy person could prescribe a drug that would addle my brain for decades? Certainly not me.

Dr Kramer was always seated behind his enormous desk, looking across the organized surface of it at little me in an oversized chair. He wore these half-lens reading glasses which made him look like the scholar he was. He was dressed in a suit, with pressed oxford and tie, and I remember he had a faint scent of something which smelled both manly and clean.

Getting down on the floor and playing with blocks wasn’t Dr Kramer’s style. It seems so odd to me now, that this imperious behind-the-desk approach was considered effective. It certainly reinforced the aura that he was the authority, and in control of the situation.

When I reached my teen years and was introduced to Re-Evaluation Counseling or RC, I began decades of work to try and recover my brain from the wreckage of my youth, while still emerging from it. Not until I was eighteen years old and joined a men’s support group one summer in Philadelphia, did I began to suspect that the Ritalin had a legacy for my mind. To put it in a sentence: as smart as I am, I still have to work pretty hard at learning and comprehending, and I think this is because of the years I was on that drug. Anyone who has spent much time around me, my wife especially, may have experienced the frustration of getting a quick and brief answer to a question. Sometimes what they get is silence, and aren’t sure if I heard them. This is more understandable in recent years as the COVID shots rendered me a candidate for hearing aids with persistent tinnitus, so I don’t always hear the question. But what it happening in my head, is that the wheels are turning, and I’m thinking. It’s kind of like trying to get up to 60mph in second gear, which by the way is kind of fun in the weathered Volvo C30 I just acquired, but not as much fun for the person listening and waiting for a reply.

MORE RECENT HISTORY

After college I volunteered with the Church of the Brethren or BVS. The Church of the Brethren (COB), Mennonites, and Quakers are three Protestant denominations with a history of pacifism. The Quakers have the American Friends Service Committee, which doesn’t have as many volunteer opportunities for entry level positions as the Brethren Volunteer Service (BVS), and the Mennonites mostly have Mennonite volunteers. We had our orientation in San Francisco, and for three weeks, the men and women in my group slept on the floor in a COB church basement, and shared meals which we cooked in the church kitchen. During the week we would each spend time visiting a room which had dossiers on the different potential volunteer assignments and engaging in discernment about what our first, second and third choices would be.

As you can see from the group photo, we were a young group, and the three weeks we spent together was an intense period of spiritual and personal exploration. It’s easy to be attracted to people when they show their inner selves with honesty and vulnerability. This was a particularly dynamic and vivacious cohort. During the next two years, I fell in love with multiple people, and have had plenty of time to reflect upon what drew me to each of them. Above is Laura, with whom I had a fleeting romance during orientation. She was a foot shorter than me, but strong enough to lift me up like a feather. Her heart was pure and true. If I had my head screwed on straight, I would have figured out how to keep that connection for a lifetime.

In reviewing our potential assignments, I was really drawn to one related to sustainable agriculture, but the opportunities were slim. There was a farm in Ireland, and one in New Mexico, but either the slots weren’t open (Ireland), or they didn’t think I was the right person (New Mexico). I don’t clearly remember how I ended up at a homeless shelter for families in San Antonio, TX, but I did. It was a Catholic Worker House on the East Side, a primarily African American neighborhood, which was sketchy at a time when crack was big and gangs were picking up speed. I sported a ponytail down to my butt and being a skinny white guy with John Lennon gold-rimmed glasses, stood out like an Ostrich on a chicken farm.

The Catholic Worker movement was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin during the Depression in the 1930s. Dorothy Day’s life and legacy is a radical movement, faithful to the Gospel and the church, immersed in the social issues of the day. In 1933, they began publishing a paper called The Catholic Worker, through which they encouraged people to live out the ideals they wrote about, founding “houses of hospitality” for the poor and “farming communes” for the unemployed. The simplest way I can describe their ethos was to enact the Sermon on the Mount, which is a collection of sayings spoken by Jesus of Nazareth found in the Gospel of Matthew that emphasizes his moral teachings.

When I first arrived at the San Antonio Catholic Worker, there was an eclectic assortment of volunteers. Homer and Rosetta were a retired couple from Indiana. He had worked for Indiana Bell as a lineman, and she had been a foreperson at a Singer Sewing Machine factory. Homer was super chill, and Rosetta was pretty high strung. She had developed a habit from years of supervising people to repeat everything she said twice. “Scott, you need to go collect the donated produce before breakfast. Scott, you need to take the truck and collect the donated produce before breakfast.”

Matt was a Minnesotan frat boy who had done something vaguely illegal and was doing community service. Joel was another BVS volunteer, who had been in my orientation group, and came from an established COB family which had a organic farm in Ohio and was famous in their own circles. (For reasons I never understood, he saw me as a competitor, and later on, he would ally himself against me with Phyllis). There was a young hetero couple who came from I-don’t-remember-where. I just remember that they had each other and a working car, and were planning to have lots of kids. There was Heila, a red-headed German in her fifties who owned an art gallery back in Germany, and was taking a few months to work on her English and explore the underbelly of America. Ulla was another German volunteer who had a primary education and language therapy background. Then there was Phyllis. She was a BVS volunteer who had been at the Catholic Worker for nearly a year, and had worked at the BVS headquarters in Elgin, IL.

We all attended, well, except for Matt, a community Mennonite church. There was a contingent of Mennonite volunteers, kind of like us BVS volunteers, except that they had their own house, with an older couple who were the house parents and kept watch over the youngsters. In retrospect, I can see how very wise this arrangement was, because soon after Homer and Rosetta completed their volunteer assignment and departed, the organic stability which resulted from their elder’s wisdom began to dissolve. Then Heila left, then Ulla left. The remaining twenty-somethings energy became a bit contentious and our relationships suffered.

Given the passionate ideology and religious fervor which we all shared, it isn’t actually surprising that our community became fractious. Unfortunately, I became the lightning rod for this bad mojo. My sense of where things went south for me personally relates to Phyllis. I can’t say this without sounding like a shallow cad, but Phyllis was one of the ugliest humans I have ever met. It wasn’t just an external ugliness, although her disproportional lumpiness, bad hair and unique facial features were challenging to behold. But she was the living antithesis of Christian acceptance, and was strident in her wokeness, decades before woke was part of the lexicon. Matt drove her crazy, because he was a beer-drinking, baseball-watching frat boy, registered Republican, and when they worked the soup kitchen together, he would listen to Rush Limbaugh. Her daily rants about Matt were tiresome.

That shouldn’t have been my problem, but Phyllis fell in love with me. It was obvious. Have you ever had someone else’s dog with a hard-on try to hump your leg? It’s never comfortable, but it really doesn’t help when the owner stands there as if nothing is happening. So, Phyllis fell in love with me. To say that I wasn’t interested is an understatement. But to make matters worse, I was falling head over heels in love with one of the Mennonite volunteers from our church, Theresa. Ooooff! A curly haired beauty with a kind spirit who ended up becoming a minister’s wife.

Phyllis may have been delusional, but she had eyes, and she saw where mine were looking, so of course she befriended Theresa, then proceeded to push the issue with me. Have you ever seen the connived workings of Livia in I Claudius? In our community meetings, Phyllis asserted that I was not acting as a friend to her, and well, because we were living in a Christian community, I needed to be her friend. I didn’t see it quite the same way. To me, we needed to be respectful and cooperative in our endeavors, but friendship was a matter of free will and proclivity. It got worse, as Phyllis continued to push her demands for closeness upon me, and the harder she pushed, the more vocal I became. After living in Philly for a decade, I would say that I got Philly on her. Back the f___ up before I tune you up. That was a mistake.

There isn’t a clause in some Catholic Worker handbook somewhere about excommunicating unruly members, in part because historically, Catholic Workers have attracted civilly disobedient roustabouts who are inherently unruly, right down to their haircuts or lack thereof. But excommunication is a fair word for what happened with me. In the end, I was voted off the island, so I lost the girl (Theresa agreed to a last dinner out before I left San Antonio), the current assignment, and even my next assignment (I had been accepted after all to volunteer at the farm in New Mexico). It was quite dramatic and traumatic. I got sick as a dog and was in bed for a week, laid up in the home of an older lesbian couple I had befriended through Dignity, a GLB Catholic organization with which I had attended services while in San Antonio. A decade later, there was a reunion of volunteers at the CWH in San Antonio. They actually invited me, and I almost went, then I thought the better of it and stayed put in Philadelphia. Some battlegrounds aren’t worth revisiting.

PRESENT

Before I begin this last section, I want to remind each of you, dear readers, that this is not meant to be individual health advice. Individual questions pertaining to your unique history and questions are not within the scope of my responses when writing this Substack. Please consider becoming a patient by going to our website. If you are an existing patient, please address this in the context of a visit, your overall clinical condition, and response to current therapies in your plan of care.

In the last two months I have made a lot of work for myself by ordering ZRT urine neurotransmitter testing on nearly eighty patients. I spend up to an hour reviewing the results for each patient, considering their clinical course and individual plan of care. I work feverishly to get caught up, then six more results come back and I’m in the hole again. My colleague in The Leading Edge Clinic, India Scott, FNP-C, has been doing neurotransmitter testing like this for more than a decade. I’d finally had enough (and maybe she did too!) of asking her to translate the results for me, and dedicated myself to the task.

You might wonder why your neurologist, psychiatrist or PCP doesn’t use this testing. Easy. Insurance doesn’t cover it, and the captured medical journals haven’t published articles about them, validating their use in formulating effective treatment plans. That doesn’t mean we can’t use accessible tools like this to help our patients heal.

What I have found during my lab reviews is a jaw-dropping, global disregulation of neurotransmitters in patients across the spectrum of pathologies and symptoms. The spike protein has disregulated all of us, and there are things which we can do about it. It helps to have a little peak under the hood in order to guide interventions.

One noteworthy point is the difference between people who had pre-Omicron COVID, and pan- or post-Omicron COVID. As I presented in October of 2023 at the second FLCCC conference in Fort Worth, TX, we had great results using Memantine in patients with cognitive and emotional disregulation. We understood that glutamate levels in the brain were elevated as a result of the spike protein, that high glutamate levels are neurotoxic, and that Memantine is a glutamate antagonist which gently lowers glutamate levels. But at a certain point, Memantine stopped working as well for as many people. Reviewing neurotransmitter results, I can now see that some people have low normal or low glutamate levels, and using Memantine would make matters worse. Only a couple of patients have had elevated glutamate levels on the ZRT testing which I’m using.

Another noteworthy point is that many patients have low tryptophan and low serotonin. This is precisely what the UPenn researchers pointed to in their study of post acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) patients in their clinic: spike inhibits tryptophan production in the GI tract. Tryptophan is a raw material for T-cells (think reactivated viruses), melatonin, nicotinamide and serotonin. The tryptophan highway is blocked by a jack-knifed eighteen wheeler, so we can’t merely eat a lot more turkey. What can we do? UPenn researchers identified this also, recommending the use of 5-HTP, which produces tryptophan via a different pathway. In patients who I started on 5-HTP prior to the ZRT testing, we could see tryptophan normalizing, and serotonin levels in normal or high normal range with concurrent improvements in mood and cognition.

What about Lithium Orotate? Dr Michael Nehls, the neuroscientist from Germany, has been talking a blue streak about Vitamin D and Lithium Orotate to protect our brains from the onslaught of spike. Pierre and I had the pleasure of a private meeting with Dr Nehls nearly two months ago, and he helped us understand that Lithium Orotate was a key tool in the fight to reclaim our brains in general, and hippocampi in particular. If therapeutics such as Vitamin B6 (as P5P 50), or 5-MTHF, or L-Theanine are useful to rebalance specific neurotransmitters, then Lithium Orotate is a general tonic which helps rebalance all neurotransmitters, because it reestablishes neuronal connections, decreases neuro inflammation, and enables the brain to start making new neurons. The particulars for inidividual patients have proven to be nuanced. I generally start with 130mg, but India prefers to start with 20mg of Lithium Orotate and work up to 130mg, stopping if clinical benefit is achieved earlier. Dr Nehls strongly recommended 130mg for symptomatic patients, dropping back to 20-30mg for maintenance when stability has been achieived. It’s important to note that 20-30mg of Lithium Orotate equals 1mg of active Lithium and 130mg of Lithium Orotate equals 5mg of active Lithium.

Because most health professionals, and many laypeople have preconceptions about Lithium as solely the province of psychiatry and bipolar schizophrenia, it’s important to note that we are talking about Lithium as a trace mineral. Would you be concerned about toxicity from a pinch of Celtic sea salt in your water, or 25mg of Vitamin C? No. Neither should you be concerned about trace amounts of Lithium which are many times less than the doses used in psychiatry. You can get 1mg of active Lithium by drinking a pricey bottle of San Pelligrino mineral water, or eating a lot of seafood, but you’ll also quickly empty your wallet, and in the case of seafood, there are so many toxins in the ocean that you’ll poison yourself with mercury before you reach therapeutic levels of lithium. And it’s cheap, cheap, cheap. Horbaach makes a 130mg capsule of Lithium Orotate which costs $15, including shipping, and provides six months woth of the supplement.

My parting thought is regarding MRIs of the brain with a NeuroQuant study. Our beloved colleague Dr Suzanne Gazda has been recommending this test for more than a year now. I don’t think it is financially viable or practically necessary for every patient we see, but the results of the handful I have reviewed are stunning. Patients’ neurological status may have subjectively improved, and they feel themselves returning to their baseline level of cognitive function. Then they get a NeuroQuant and find that their hippocampus is shrinking, and registers in the 2nd, or 12th, or 22nd percentile. Dr Nehls is right. The spike is targeting our brains in general, but our hippocampi in particular, and we need to fight back.