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In hindsight, my first symptom started in 1956. I started having periodic blinding headaches. The headache manifested itself as a tremendous pressure, usually behind my left eye. (Like a little man with both thumbs gouging into the back of my eyeball) The U.S. Air Force physicians diagnosed it as cephalgia-migraine headaches, not MS. Over the next eleven years those headaches became increasingly worse and occurred more often, but the diagnosis was never questioned.

Back in 1952, during the Korean War, my right ankle and left wrist were injured and the right ankle finally had to be operated on in 1959 and again in 1960 and finally a third time to fuse the joint in 1963. I was also having some balance problems and developed a drop-foot that required a leg brace during this period of time.

Without an explanation of why, the Air Force doctors brought in a Neurologist and preformed three spinal taps on me over my six-month surgery recovery period. Then they told me they were going to medically retire me because of the fusion they had done on my right ankle. Still no one even mentioned the possibility of MS. (I found out later that the only test available for MS in 1964 was the spinal tap.)

After retirement in September of 1964 I went to work as a radio/TV announcer and engineer for a commercial radio/TV station in Reno, Nevada. In 1965 I woke up one morning totally numb on my left side. I went to the Air Force doctor at Stead Air Force base and he thought I had suffered a stroke at age 31. Once again, there was no mention of the possibility of MS even though all the "stroke" symptoms disappeared in a week.

Later in 1965 I began to slur my speech. I was fired after screwing up two or three live newscasts. I still didn’t know why, but I suddenly had what we in broadcasting used to call, "The tongue from Hell". It went away in a few weeks and I moved on to a "Big Bang’er" (50KW) AM radio station outside of Portland, Oregon. Everything went great for about five months until the "The tongue from Hell" struck again. This time both the Air Force doctors and the Veterans Administration doctors had a shot at finding out what was wrong, but still none of them even mentioned the possibility of MS.

After being fired again I decided I had better forget trying to be an on the air personality and fall back to my skill as an electronic engineer. I went to work for a TV station, doing engineering only, no on camera or voice responsibilities. My boss soon learned that even if I sometimes sounded drunk, I really wasn’t. I just had some kind of weird speech impediment that came and went from month to month.

In November 1967 while driving to work at 70 miles an hour on Interstate 5, I suddenly went functionally blind. (Trying to get your car stopped and out of everybody’s way in the morning rush hour traffic when your blind is a scary thing let me tell you!) That day I ended up at the University of Oregon Medical School and was examined by the Chairman of the Neurology Department and an MS expert, Dr. Roy L. Swank, MD, PhD. For the first time I heard the words, "You have Multiple Sclerosis."

Dr. Swank had a theory that diet could control MS. He and his assistant, Barbara Dugan outlined this crazy diet of no meat, cheese, or man made fats like Crisco. "Hey folks, if you think I’m going to eat like that you’re crazy! I’m a meat, potatoes, gravy and ice cream kind of guy. I don’t eat rabbit food or baked fish. I’m going to the VA where they have real doctors who will give me a magic shot in the behind and take care of this. DIET INDEED!"

Boy was I disappointed. The VA doctors didn’t hesitate this time, "Yep, you have MS. To bad too because there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do to help you. There is no treatment except steroids and as long as you can walk we won’t give you those. But, within three years you will be in a wheelchair and we’ll see about steroids then."

Talk about being knocked for a loop! "Well, maybe the National Multiple Sclerosis Society knows what to do." I went to the next chapter meeting. Boy, that was a bummer. I found a bunch of people in wheelchairs complaining and crying about everything under the sun and stuffing themselves with free pizza followed by gooey donuts. And, I guess what offended me the most was the guy from NMSS who was perfectly fit himself (if you don’t count being 50 pounds overweight and lighting one cigarette off the butt of the one before) and was begging these poor cripples for donations. It took me over ten years to ever go back to anything that had any connection what-so-ever with NMSS.

A strange thing. There was a rival MS society in Portland. People who were disciples of Dr. Swank and his Lo-fat diet ran it." What the heck, maybe I’d better take another look." This meeting was full of laughter, hope and good feelings. Instead of sitting around griping about what they couldn’t do any more, these people were telling each other what they could do this week that they couldn’t do at the last meeting. And they were swapping recipes, not just for rabbit food and baked fish, but all kinds of Lo-fat herbal sauces and what sounded like real tasty foods. I was impressed. Just from their attitude and zest for life these "Swank people" were the ones I wanted to be like.

There were two things that they made sure to impress me with right away. 1- Always communicate with everyone close to you and don’t be ashamed or afraid of having MS. It’s a disease anyone can get that is no fault of the victim. 2- never allow yourself to remain in a stressful situation or relationship. You can’t avoid some stress, but if you find yourself in an ongoing stressful situation get out of it. If necessary, simply walk away from it.

Well, I went back to Dr. Swank with my tail between my legs and started the diet. I went to see Barbara once every two weeks with a log of everything I ate or drank and she would go over it with me. "That’s OK, that’s good, a little shaky there, don’t eat that more than 2 times a year and that one is a total No-No, never eat that again." Hey, it was a yearlong learning process. My vision came back to normal except for a couple blind spots that I still have over 30 years later. My speech was not so bad so often, but even after denying myself all the good stuff I still got some new symptoms! I started having bladder control problems and I kept dropping things with my left hand.

My friends at the Swank MS society said, "Your job in TV is too stressful, it’s time to get out." After a little finagling around, in 1969 I bought a retail health food store from an uncle of mine in Florida, left Portland and never looked back. Without the TV stress everything turned around quickly. Within another year I was basically symptom free. Oh, I still dropped things and stumbled and scraped my knees when I tried to play tennis twice a week, but when it came right down to the nitty-gritty I was pretty darn healthy and able to do anything I felt like trying. My MS was under firm control!

In the health food business I learned about vitamins, minerals and special food supplements. I had the opportunity to learn from people like Dr. Carlton Fredricks, Adelle Davis, Linus Pauling, Roger Williams and Hans Nieper. Following their advice on supplements within another year I didn’t even have the typical MS tiredness or exhaustion. Heck, I wasn’t even bothered by Florida’s heat and humidity.

The key to living with MS for me was the Lo-fat diet, food supplements, regular exercise and stress control. Things went along great except that my family was the only one that I ever heard of that went through a dozen water glasses every year because the darn things kept falling out of my hands. I visited the VA once every six weeks because of my history of MS and because they needed to keep an amazed eye on me. (Nobody with MS could do what I did and stay as healthy as I was! It just wasn’t possible. Every time a new Neurologist came on the scene he had to re-diagnose me again!)

Then in 1977 I suddenly developed "quick onset hypertension." An old doctor, ready to retire looked me over and said, "OH, oh. This looks like high blood pressure secondary to MS. Very rare and a very long hard problem to treat. I’m turning you over to another doctor because I won’t have enough time to work with you on this, this is my last week here." A young Neurologist and a young GP looked me over and said, "No way this could be MS. I never heard of an MS patient with high blood pressure. Low blood pressure is reported once in a while, but not high BP. We’ll just give you a diuretic and you’ll be OK."

"But doctors, if it is not MS caused like the other doctor said, then just what caused me to go from 120/80 to 200+/115 in one month?"

"We’ll call it Essential, Quick onset Hypertension." I guess that means that for some reason (Which the doctor doesn’t know) it is suddenly essential for my body to function with blood pressure bordering on causing a stroke! I was on a low fat diet and had no bad habits that would cause high blood pressure, but I just suddenly had it for no apparent reason.

I guess I just don’t understand medicine, but that doesn’t make any sense to me. If something is wrong, first you find out why and then fix it. You don’t just throw something at a patient with an unusual disease and an unusual set of symptoms simply because you've seen that's what other doctors usually do. But, 23 years later my records still call it Quick Onset Essential Hypertension. Unknown cause.

No doctor spent any time trying to find out WHY even after standard diuretic treatment landed me in the VA hospital twice and it took a cardiologist a full six months to figure out a regime of 4 different medications 4 times a day (16 pills every day!) before my blood pressure was controlled without me losing all my Potassium and landing back in the hospital.

But, in 1990 all those years of strong hypertension medication finally took their toll and I suffered an Abdominal, Aortic, Aneurysm. I went to the VA hospital as an emergency because the aneurysm started leaking. I’m told that the fact I even survived emergency AAA surgery is almost a miracle in itself. I was still in SICU in a coma several weeks later when suddenly my kidney shut down. (I only have one functioning kidney) Right away kidney dialysis was started and once again I dodged a bullet and survived. I came out of the coma, but because of the reduced kidney function gangrene developed in my left leg and it had to be amputated.

Dr. Swank who had continued to be my long distance MS advisor all those years wrote a letter to the VA and stated that in his expert opinion both the AAA and the amputation were caused secondary to my long standing Multiple Sclerosis. The VA had a physician just out of medical school who said, "No, it could not have anything to do with MS." So the VA refuses recognize it as service connected. That makes a big difference as to what benefits I’m entitled to.

Bureaucracy: Don’t you just love it? Here is Dr. Swank, who carries both an MD and a PhD, who was the Chairman of the Department of Neurology of a major University Medical School, who has dedicated himself to the study of MS since 1948 and who holds about a dozen world wide medical patents stemming from his forty years of MS research, and his expert opinion is overruled by a kid fresh out of med school and that is accepted by the US Government. (By the way at age 94 Dr. Swank retired from his MS clinic in Portland year before last.)

There are a few other things the VA refuses to recognize about this. The VA did some research a number of years ago on MS patients who were also veterans and were cared for in the VA hospital system. The VA statistics show that of those MS patients who died in the VA system care over a five-year period, the cause of death on their death certificate was kidney failure in almost 25% of the cases. I know of no other small group of people in which an average of 25% of their number dies of kidney failure. I discussed this phenomenon with Dr. Hans Nieper, MD, PhD, who was also a world-renowned MS expert from Hanover, Germany. He said we’re lucky in the VA because in Europe they expect closer to 30% of their MS patients to die of kidney failure.

Yet the Veterans Administration doesn’t recognize the implications of their own research. When my kidney failed I was already in SICU hooked up to every conceivable kind of monitor. The moment my kidney shut down they knew it and were able to almost immediately start the kidney dialysis that saved my life! Other VA MS patients didn’t have that much luck. Their kidneys failed and they simply died. They had no time to develop gangrene in a leg and have it amputated.

One other interesting little thing: Suddenly, again for no known reason my kidney started functioning normally again several days before my leg was amputated. Of course the gangrene was already established and one functioning kidney couldn’t detoxify it without help, so Chop; off went the leg. I keep asking the VA what the definition of an R/R MS exacerbation is and they tell me that it is when some body function stops working for a period of time and then starts working normally again for no known reason. Son of a gun! Doesn’t that sound just like what my kidney did?

Being in a coma for several weeks and having one hoof lopped off is pretty darn stressful, and we know that stress is a major problem for MS patients. After I recovered and got out of the VA hospital in 1991 I found that I had some old symptoms back again, but they were more acute than ever before. My balance is so bad that I have not walked without crutches except for a few feet on occasion since 1990. I have had bladder control and bowel control problems since 1990 that have slowly gotten worse. I also developed spastic dysphasia where I choke and gag every time I try to lay down flat. I developed night sweats and now suffer from MS caused Erectile Dysfunction.