Obesity, Cirrhosis, Hepatitis C, Diabetes and Liver Transplant

Thank goodness the doctors in the emergency room possessed great resilience because they spent eighteen hours working on me. Passing through my veins were seventy-eight units of blood that virtually kept me alive during this extraordinary surgery. While they were operating, they discovered that my liver was in an advanced state of cirrhosis.

Finally the sky opened and I came out of my deep sleep. I found myself hooked up to a breathing device. I became anxious, but slowly and surely they nursed me back to some semblance of health. I left the hospital exactly twenty-one days after the accident.

On the way out the door the doctors gave me some more discouraging news…they told me that they found hepatitis C in my liver. With that discouraging news I asked if anything could be worse, and they said, “Yes, as a matter of fact it could. You also have adult-onset type 2 diabetes.” It was certainly a depressing time in my life, and I began contemplating what to do next. I had a cousin in South Carolina and I decided to move down to the warmer climate to be with them.

Shortly after I arrived I spent the evening with some friends in a bar, and when I got home I felt quite nauseous, and I proceeded to up-chuck. What surprised me was that it did not look like anything I had eaten recently; in fact it was red, like blood. Thank goodness my cousin and his wife arrived home earlier than expected and they rushed me to the closest first aid station thirty minutes away. From there I was transferred to a hospital in Charleston, South Carolina, with an IV in my arm. There they pumped my stomach to find the cause of the bleeding, and discovered I had literally torn the lining of my stomach, and that I had the beginning of a bleeding ulcer.

At home after being discharged from the hospital, I continued to feel quite nauseous, along with an overall sense of lethargy. I drove myself down to Florida, and once again I was admitted into the hospital. This time the doctors told me that I had contracted pneumonia, obviously from my weakened immune system, and they said I never should have been released from the last hospital. They also discovered that I had ruptured my esophagus, and they performed surgery to sew it back together. My liver, they told me, was beyond help, and the doctors put me on the waiting list for a liver transplant. So I waited for a new liver.

By this time I felt completely hopeless and I yearned to be in familiar surroundings so I went back to the area where I grew up. I still had relatives and close friends from the past, so it was nice to spend time with them. I actually saw them in a different light because now, for the first time in my life, I lived in fear of potential death.

One day while playing with my little three-year-old niece, she looked up at me and said, “Uncle Jack, I don’t want you to die.”

I was stunned. Little did I know that she even understood how ill I was. This touched me deeply, and restored my will to live.

In spite of all that was going on, I continued in my old ways. I always enjoyed socializing, and one day, at a party, I met Sandra O’Neill. She looked directly at me and said, “You know, you don’t have to die. You don’t have to be sick. All you have to do is to change.”

Somehow I trusted her. She told me that she and her family had been eating healthily for over thirty-five years, and that not one of them had been sick during that entire time.

I started becoming aware of raw foods, and when I added them to my diet I started to see a difference, and I felt renewed. I asked Sandy to tell me more, and she told me about such things as wheatgrass shots and green drinks. She also recommended that I go to the Hippocrates Wellness.

I called the Institute, and the first person I spoke to was Michael Bergonzi, who is a master genius of wheatgrass growing. I told him that I had been taking wheatgrass juice, and that sometimes it was frozen. He explained that the frozen juice had little or no value compared to the fresh juice. It was amazing that Michael took forty-five valuable minutes out of his very busy schedule to help me. This left a lasting impression on me.

Michael told me that there was an upcoming course that he and Ken Blue, Executive Chef at Hippocrates, were putting on, where I could learn more. I could not wait. I drove down to West Palm Beach, and took the class. I felt like a whole new world opened up for me.

Back at home I began juicing, and drinking the fresh nectar and I started feeling better.

On July 14, 2005, I suffered a healing crisis. I believe it was a way for my subconscious to insist that my consciousness begin to grow. Although I had read a lot about such things, I was not prepared when it happened to me. My electrolytes had become depleted, and my friends thought that I had become schizophrenic. During one of these episodes my family took me to the hospital where they did a barrage of tests, along with a complete psychiatric examination. At this point I was not happy to be in the hospital because I knew from experience they could not help me in any significant way.

The next natural step in my healing was to attend Hippocrates Wellness, which I did one month after being released from the hospital. I was shocked at how much information I was gaining about nutrition and my body. I began to detoxify from a life filled with pharmaceutical and recreational drugs, and eating non-nutritious food.

When I arrived at Hippocrates I weighed 346 pounds. I now weigh 150 pounds, and I feel great. I cannot speak strongly enough about the Hippocrates program, and how important it is to take total responsibility for your life. To anyone reading this article, I would say stop the intake of animal proteins, and don’t eat anything that isn’t healthy. Try the living food diet, and the Life Change program at Hippocrates. It works. People feel a great difference and are happier once they eliminate their addictions to non-nutritious foods and chemicals.

Thank you all for reading this story. I know it is long. Thank you to Sandy O’Neill for being the first light at the end of the tunnel. And thanks to everyone on the staff and all the guests who shared my time at Hippocrates Wellness, where I learned how, with your help, to heal myself.

I am living proof that this design for human survival is the way we were intended to flourish. I will close now with a gentle smile and lots of love. Peace be with you my brothers and sisters in health.

Vol 27 Issue 1 page 26