It's Good to get a check-up

When something doesn't seem quite right in your body it is sometimes good to get a check-up at the doctors.

My father was very into preventative medicine so he was very healthy. His diet was perfect, his exercise was perfect, he advised others how to get healthy, how to throw away their glasses and how to exercise and how to eat to be really healthy.

However, he didn't like Medical doctors because like his father before him he believed people should only go to doctors and hospitals to die or for a broken bone to set it in a cast or something like that. To understand this better probably 70% to 80% of what doctors know now they didn't know when my father was young as he was born in 1916 and his father was born in the 1880s. So, this kind of thinking was also prevalent in people even during the 1950s, and to some degree they were right in thinking this way. So, if you were healthy, the attitude was in the U.S. often, "If it ain't broke don't fix it". And so people often saw themselves sort of like the animals in the forest. "If they were strong they survived and if they didn't it was natural selection."

All this changed for me when my father around 1980 started urinating pink urine (blood in the urine) which though I didn't know it then was one of the signs for prostate problems or prostate cancer. But, also it could come from a blow to your kidneys or other organs as well.

We got my father to go to the doctor but my father didn't follow up on it right even though we encouraged him to until it was too late to really save him. Then he had to have his prostate, his bladder, and one of his kidneys removed because the cancer had spread from his prostate to other organs. He lived one more year after that and then died of bone cancer because the cancer had spread to his bones and at that time there wasn't much they could to. So, he passed on in 1985.

This was quite a shock for my mother and I because Dad had always been sort of a larger than life John Wayne kind of healthy and spiritual and always exercising character that had always been about 75% healthier than anyone we knew. So, Dad dying wasn't really possible was it?

So, this was a very bitter pill to swallow and caused my mother and I a whole lot of psychological problems. This also caused eventually (9 years later) the end of my 2nd marriage I realize now looking back on it. I wasn't really ready to save my marriage at 37 without my father being around to help reinforce me doing the right things in my life. (I had expected my Dad to be alive to 100 and not to die at 69 like he did). Though my mother after that lived until she was 90 in 2008 she spent from 2001 to 2008 in a Senile Dementia and Alzheimers facility. And that was tougher to deal with by about 10 times or more than watching my father die. But, at least when she finally went we were very grateful that she passed away both for her sake and for our sakes as well. Once she almost burned down her home we had no choice but to institutionalize her because she spent 12 hours praying for the fire in her kitchen to stop with no one there. So when my son arrived there was melted plastic still burning on the kitchen floor from the tupperware large bowl she had put on the electric burner. We had no choice because of liability at that point but to institutionalize her. It was probably the low point of my life and I had to let my wife and son do most of the work because this was impossible for me to deal with because I had promised my father never to let my mother go to an old folks home. But, for a variety of reasons I had no other practical choice. I suppose if I had been single and it had only been my mother and I, I probably would have taken my mother out of the country to a 3rd world country and ended both our lives out in the country somewhere beautiful in order to honor my father. But, with a family to think of that would be dishonorable to do. So, in the end, "Life is for the Living!"

If you have older parents remember always, "Life is for the Living." Which basically means "Take care of your spouse and your children and let your parents go. Because otherwise, you really are an idiot and not really an adult yet if ever you will be one.

So, this was extremely hard for me to put my mother in an Alzheimer's and Senile Dementia home and probably I will never forgive myself for this. But also, it was the only reasonable thing to do and because of it both my family and I are still alive and doing okay because of this decision.

And until you go through something like this  personally you have no idea just how bad it is to go through!

So, this last month after I got back from Hawaii with 3 members of my family and one of my daughter's friends I realized it was time to go to the doctors because I had had a pain in my throat for about 6 months now that wasn't going away. It sort of felt like a slight sore throat but kept just getting worse and then getting better but never entirely going away. My son who is a nurse thought it might be an ulceration in my esophagus on the right side. So, finally I realized I had put this off as long as I could. Also, I just had not been feeling right since coming back from Hawaii.

So, my doctor sent me for a sonagram of both sides of my throat and of my heart.

So, yesterday we got a call from my doctor that I needed to come in and discuss what the sonograms revealed. So, I felt sort of uneasy about this especially because he said nothing about my throat but he was concerned about my heart sonograms instead.

Like I said, often if you go into treat one thing they can find out other things by accident through the process of elimination and through tests.

He said that the heart sonogram had revealed that my hearts blood exiting the heart was at about 40 percent and that this was bad because in the 30s one needs to think about a heart transplant. So, he needed to give me medication to rebuild my heart back up to 50 to 55 percent because that is where I need it to be at to be healthy.

At the time I felt sort of like when someone diagnoses your car so you finally know what has been wrong with it. So, I was relieved to know why I hadn't been feeling right since I got back from Hawaii.

So, the next few weeks he has to see me at least once a week until this problem is corrected hopefully through medications. It's pretty amazing that they can do stuff like this (both the accurate sonograms of throat and heart) to be able to recognize better what is actually going on. So, they took videos through the sonogram of my heart through a computer so I could hear as the technician did this my heart pumping through the speakers and watch my heart beat along with multiple technical computer readouts of various different parameters.

The only problem is that I got sort of an allergic reaction to the goop they put on your chest and throat which is a little like poison oak but not as bad. It is very itchy and so my doctor gave me a prescription for a topical steroid to get rid of that. But still, it is amazing what doctors can now do with an advanced sonogram processed through a computer.

I had had in  September 1998 until May 1999 (when I was forced to retire to stay alive) a heart virus. At the time most people I knew of died of it from panic when they passed out from it. One of the reasons that I lived is that I had been taught a disconnection meditation by Tibetan Lamas in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, California and in India and Nepal. Since I could then do this at will I did not have to go into panic but instead went into an alternate state of consciousness which turned out to be very important to my physical survival in 1998 and 1999.

The reason it is easy to die from a heart virus is (at least then) it could only be defined by the process of elimination and because of this people would psychologically panic because they weren't sure what was happening to them.

However, I also as an intuitive had another advantage because when this illness started and I was waiting for my son to come get me and take me to the hospital one morning angels came to me and surrounded me so I expected to die then. However, they all said in unison, "You are not going to die your life will get better now!" They kept saying this over and over loudly to me until it had seeped deep into my cells and subconscious. So, even though I still sort of thought I might die they had changed the awareness of my physical body on an extremely deep level. So, when my son came and took me to the hospital I was light headed and kept talking to the doctors and nurses about all the angels coming to me. They said this was very common among people in the emergency room who thought they might die to have experiences with angels. I somehow found this very comforting then in fall 1998.

So, somehow when I couldn't oxygenate my blood and had to pass out often in the next few months I could just sit down or lay down on the floor and pass out. Then I would wake up 1/2 hour or an hour later and I would be okay. Often I would be alone at home when this happened because my wife was usually at work during this time. Though it wasn't easy to endure I survived it because I also then had a 2 year old daughter and I was determined not to leave her fatherless. So, I succeeded in my determination with the help of God and Angels and doctors and nurses and my wife and children.