Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (2 page)

And to my cats, Betty and Gloria, who kept me company all these weeks. They walked on my keyboard, knocked over my water glass, had actual “cat fights” for my entertainment, and purred loudly while they slept in the window. Great little friends.

May you all have great health and love in your lives, and if we all follow the principles in this book, we can still be together for book number 200!

Thank you.

I just turned sixty-five!

I’m excited about it. Never thought I’d feel this upbeat about an age that many keep secret.

Like so many people, a couple of decades ago, before I “saw the light,” I dreaded aging. And why not? I never saw an aging person who was happy about it. My late then-ninety-year-old auntie Helen said it so well: “It sucks to get old, Sue!”

And who could blame her. Once “full of bullets” as they say—energetic, mischievous, outspoken, confident, and funny—my aunt spent her last years in a nursing home, unable to perform the simple tasks of life. “The food sucks in here,” she would say. “I miss being able to cook for myself.” Forgetful, with unsteady feet that couldn’t feel the ground from neuropathy and bones so brittle that the wrong moves could snap them in two, she was right. It sucked.

Back when I was a kid, sixty-five was ancient. Now I see it as young. But I can remember being at family weddings looking at my old aunts (in their sixties), all of whom had their legs wrapped in support hose to hide their varicose veins and swollen ankles, their feet propped high on chairs to take some of the pressure off them. They had swollen bodies and pendulous breasts, and there was a seeming sexlessness to them. Youth was gone, bones were brittle, memories were foggy; they appeared to be living back in the “I remember whens.”

Next, I noticed that the pills started, tackle boxes full—for memory,
for blood pressure, for cholesterol, for bones. Soon they became the ones in the wheelchairs, stooped over, shaking, confused, not quite remembering who they were and, worse, not remembering who they used to be. We patted their heads, kissed them, and told them we loved them. They responded to the affection, but it could have come from anyone, because now in a haze of drugs and loss of self, just being touched and acknowledged, by anyone, felt nice.

When I was a kid and my parents and relatives were still young and full of fun, I remember them partying till all hours of the morning. I was supposed to be in bed, but I would sit with the door cracked open, watching, listening. They had such a good time, laughing nonstop, drinking, and playing cards all night long, then stumbling out of the house hugging and kissing one another good-bye. They were in their forties then; their sixties, seventies, and eighties were coming but none of them gave it a thought. No one back then thought about making a
plan
for aging well.

We plan for nearly everything else in our lives. Think about all the energy you put into planning a vacation, or any major event. But aging is put out of our minds; we don’t want to acknowledge it; we choose not to “see” the end point. Aging is just something that “happens” and is something we want to avoid. And rarely do people think the fate they see all around in others is going to happen to them.

No one sees the nursing home, hospital, or hospice center as his or her end point. Though we know aging is inevitable, we ignore it. Even the healthiest among us choose instead to think of it as something so far off in the distance that today’s choices are not directly relevant.

But we know deep within, that “time” will come and how terrible it will be if we find ourselves trapped and lost in our particular confinements: wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, knees that won’t hold us up, loss of eyesight and hearing, debilitating diseases. Not us! we say. That’s what happened to our parents, but not to us! But, I ask you,

Have you taken diet, lifestyle, exercise, supplementation, hormone replacement, or sleep seriously? Have you managed your stress?
Answer yourself honestly. This book is trying to change the aging paradigm.

You don’t want to hear your doctor say you have things like “autoimmune disease.” Huh? What’s that? Or conditions like lupus, fibromyalgia, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, and swollen, bloated guts. You don’t want to have systems that don’t work properly, or experience macular degeneration, which can cause blindness or near blindness; stiff joints; brittle bones; weak limbs; damaged hearts; heart disease; minds that aren’t firing; and then there’s cancer. That’s the big one these days. Deep down, we almost expect it. Like it’s some ninja warrior out there, sitting, waiting, ready to strike when we least expect it.

Cancer will soon be the biggest killer in the world, yet we live our lives, despite our inherent fears, as though it doesn’t happen and it certainly won’t happen to us. Cancer isn’t inevitable. You don’t have to get cancer just because you are alive in this millennium. But if you keep eating all those processed, refined, and chemically sprayed foods, you can pretty much be assured you will get cancer. (Don’t skip
chapter 15
and the interview with Dr. Burzynski, where he explains the genetic switches that protect us and how you can keep these switches turned on. This is lifesaving, life-affirming information.)

You don’t have to go the way of all those people like my auntie Helen. You can choose a different course. I have. I’m having such a different experience. If this quality of life and health continues, then bring on ninety, or one hundred, or more. I believe it’s all possible. Long life with quality—and I mean
long
life. This book is the ticket to a vibrant, healthy life. At sixty-five, I feel great. I’m happy, healthy, I have energy, and my bones are so strong I can do a handstand in yoga. I have perfect memory, and best of all, I have a sex drive!

Who knew this would be my sexiest age?

Things have really changed.

No, I changed.

I believe in the judo effect: using forward energy to win—in other words, turning lemons into lemonade. Like everyone, I’ve had a lot of things thrown at me in my life: a violent alcoholic father, an abusive childhood spent in fear. I hid in a closet at night trying to survive in an unsafe environment and experienced a teenage pregnancy and a marriage not of my choosing. I divorced at nineteen when divorce was not acceptable, resulting in immense feelings of shame and the
surety that I deserved to be ostracized by family and friends. Life-threatening low self-esteem resulted and an overwhelming feeling that I was not worthy of taking up space on the planet. But I was determined to carry on, to make things better for my beautiful child. I brought him into this world and he deserved a good shot in life, and at the very least he was going to know that he was loved deeply and that he was safe.

I fell in love with a married man, which added to my personal anguish, then my darling five-year-old son was run over by a car, which almost took his life. This led to therapy for both of us with an angel who healed my son’s fears and stopped his nightmares, and in addition taught
me
to see myself in a different light: that I was worthy, that what had happened in my childhood was not my fault, and that I deserved to be happy and have an incredible life.

I began to
visualize
it. I saw me: happily married, successful, respected. I kept looking at that vision like it was a “picture in the sky.” I eventually married him and life took an incredible turn. He was—is—the one … my dream husband, and now we’ve had forty-four years of being in love, madly and passionately. During those years, along came unexpected incredible success on television, reaching the height of fame. But when I was at the top of my game, I was fired for asking to be paid what men were being paid. I was portrayed as greedy and lost the affection of the public.

What had happened? How could I be brought down at what I thought was the height of my life? What happened to that photo I had up in the sky?

I now realize I hadn’t gone far enough in my visualization. I had more to go through to learn that the goal has to be complete. I had seen blissful marriage and professional success. That’s what I got. But I didn’t go far enough. I didn’t work my plan all the way through. I hadn’t seen how far I wanted my success to go or for how long. I hadn’t seen my
end point
!

My house burned down, and then on top of that I got cancer, breast cancer. Now I was blind and couldn’t see any picture in the sky whatsoever. One day, lying in my bed looking at the ocean, sicker than sick from radiation treatments that had burned the inside of my esophagus, something caught my eye outside my bedroom window. A huge whale,
huge
, leaped out of the ocean very close to shore. I called my husband to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. He saw it, too, and then I saw this whale leap out of the ocean, three times, until he disappeared.

Surely this was a message if I chose to see it as one: leaping, springing forward, joyous, life going on, energy soaring. I took the actions of the whale for the message that they were. The whale was there to show me that life goes on for a purpose, and that I had purpose. I put another picture in the sky; I saw health, great health forever. I saw joy, I saw happiness, I saw us going forward. And I saw love that was endless between my husband and me, and we were old, very old, but we weren’t “old.” We had youthful vitality and health, and I wanted that. So I chose it. That became my new focus. How could I use breast cancer and losing all my possessions as a new and exciting starting point?

This was the pivotal moment in my life where I chose true health and wellness as a lifestyle, as my ticket to my end point. I realized I couldn’t achieve my big picture unless I started the steps to great aging immediately. I realized, too, that I could change the paradigm of aging.