Beating Brain Injuries, Blindness, & Environmental Illnesses is POSSIBLE!

When I was a younger woman, I was a dancer, an artist, a musician and singer who grew up in one of the biggest cities in the world, near beautiful beaches and in the country in some of the most beautiful mountains around. I always loved being in nature. I became an environmentalist before I even knew that word. My parents weren’t the perfect parents. But one of the things I’m most grateful to them for: they educated me. They were crazy into education. And they taught me how to educate myself. So I, too, though an artist, became kind of crazy about learning stuff. As much as I could about all the topics I was interested in. Which was a lot.

THAT saved my life. Sometimes we just have to save our own lives.

I’ve been up and I’ve been down. To my father’s dismay, I chose to be an artist and an activist. Sometimes my art made me great money and sometimes, times were hungry. We all have our ups and downs. But I guess there are some who choose to Iive a ‘safer’ life. When you live life large, the hits can be pretty large too. I’ve beat disasters in my life many times— that insatiable curiosity which led to an unusual education and my persistence saved me.

And my flexibility. After dancing on pointe for years, double knee reconstruction made it impossible for me to dance professionally for some years. And never ballet again.
I turned to my painting, sculpting, and writing. I became a dance, music, and theater critic for a New York City trade weekly. Then my curiosity and desire to know and learn how things worked got me kicked up to the position of assistant managing editor. I learned more.

Once upon a time in Los Angeles, your typical LA driver took me down when I was on my Yamaha 650 motorcycle. While recovering, I got fired from my job, and then my COBRA insurance ran out. How many people in the USA know THAT story?

I’d always preferred holistic health care but a serious health challenge found me a welfare patient at Los Angeles County Hospital during the years that a nurse friend once called ‘the terrible years.’ I hear they’re a little better now, but I wonder.
Once I got through it, I was like Scarlett O’Hara with that little chunk of soil in her hand, saying “As God is my witness…” except I said “I’ll NEVER have to deal with this kind of medicine or treatment again!”

I’d never cared much about money before, but I decided to use the skills I’d learned volunteering and fund-raising for causes I believed in via a number of non-profit organizations to start a business where I could do the things I loved AND make money.

Just as I was launching it, disaster hit: a neighboring industrial installation gave me a diagnosis of Acute Toxic Chemical Exposure and a slew of environmental illnesses that most MDs knew little about. Sadly, many still know little. It took me years and a lawsuit people said I’d ‘never win”— but I beat the Acute Toxic Chemical Exposure that left me blind, connected to an oxygen tank and sick as heck with environmental illnesses for years. ALL the MD’s said I’d be brain-damaged, blind, and terribly disabled for the rest of my life. They wanted me to give up, stay blind, and go live in a board and care. I came out on top, a millionaire. I was able to afford holistic and cutting-edge treatments. It took more than 5 years before I got my sight back. I got my brain back. I got WELL.

I guess I could have taken it easy and travelled the world. But my Mama was on her last years of life and needed me. And so many people were writing me to learn HOW I beat all that, I began writing a book and publishing an e-zine on Alternative Health and Wellness.

The 2008 crash took me out. I was seriously broke. I lost a high-end loft in Los Angeles that had been my dream-home AND my ranch north of the city that had been the home my Mama had always dreamed of. Like so many other US American homeowners, I learned about the corruption of the banking system. I moved into a rental apartment I did not know was rife with black mold and that nearly killed me. It put me back in the Disability system—but this time—I could SEE what was going on. That’s a whole series of stories in itself… and yes, I’ll be sharing those too.

I’m still bouncing back. I have neurological issues that are a challenge, but not the biggest I’ve faced. I don’t have many of the multiple diagnoses I was told were ‘incurable.’ But I still battle the residual myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as ME/CFS, and Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) a syndrome that almost always comes along with ME/CFS.

 ME/CFS affects so many millions of people around the world, there’s actually a DAY for it: Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Day of Understanding and Remembrance. In Spanish it’s called Encefalomielitis Miálgica. Yet, sadly, so many doctors are still woefully ignorant about it, misdiagnose it for years before people can get real help.

It stinks. Sometimes people I want to spend time with, people I love and who love me, don’t see me for weeks — because it’s all I can do to go get groceries, make my own food, research, and write. One of my online friends says: ‘‘Sometimes it involves pain. At other times, there is little pain but a prostrating exhaustion. Really— getting out of bed and walking 5 steps can take an hour or more.”

I still read international medical journals and articles with excellent REAL information and articles by respected SCIENTISTS. Many MD’s are now questioning 20th century medicine. I read an article where one MD put it well: “It is important to move past the fear of information and really look at what has happened with the modern day medical industry & the pharmaceutical stranglehold that plagues it today… It’s time to re-think current medical research and look at the bigger picture.”

So while I love the arts and culture and am passionate about the environment, I also continue to write about medicine, conventional and alternative. Because so many people still write me telling me their stories and asking me for information. A Facebook friend named Kelly wrote me to say ‘thank you so much for the encouragement and for your own path to recovery. it’s such a huge piece of information to put it all together, I always tend to internalize and blame myself when I feel terrible but my house that’s so bad that I actually ended up on disability after being a very vibrant and successful person and I thought it was just living in this town which in a way it is, the belly of the Beast. Mold is an entity.’

It IS possible to beat many things that conventional medicine calls ‘incurable.’ I’m living proof. And I am far from the only one. Neuroscientists once believed that “brain injury caused permanent deficits: once lost, a faculty never returned. More and more, though, they recognize that the adult brain can relearn lost skills. This ability to change, called brain plasticity, remains somewhat mysterious, and it happens achingly slowly. But the bottom line is that the brain can recover lost functions in certain circumstances.”

You see—while ALL conventional medicine once believed that the brain was the only organ in the body where the cells do not regenerate, today we know about the amazing neuroplasticity of the brain. And while many people suffer brain injuries, some chemically caused, some by ‘innocent’ blows, some a hazard of profession (like the pro football players who now suffer from CTE, a degenerative brain disease) we are learning more and more about the human body’s incredible abilities to HEAL.

My own toxic exposure was called “acute” in medical terms. That’s what hit a lot of people in the US Gulf 8 years ago and the many other environmental disasters that abound. But so many people around the world today suffer from what is medically termed as “low-level toxic exposure.” And go through years of misdiagnoses before finding effective help.

In future blogs, I’ll share with you a story about a little boy who was lucky. He had a famous MD in the family who did not take the advice of the first 40 or 50 MD’s consulted. He kept calling and insisting until another famous MD took the case and saved the child. And said if the issue had not been dealt with immediately, the child would have surely died. Famous MD shared: “999 Dr’s out of 1000 would have taken one or both of two routes to ‘treat’ him… and following that advice would surely have killed him.”

I’ll tell you about a fellow who was once told by his Dr that he could sharpen pencils for a living. Today, he’s a Dr himself—and his patients call him a treasure!

I can’t write about everything in medicine today, so I write about what I know best: coming back from environmental illnesses, healing brain injuries and advances in neuroscience. What it’s like living with invisible disabilities and natural non-invasive medicine.
And what gives me joy: the arts, culture, and the environment.

Once upon a time, I was a jazz singer. I got my undergraduate degree studying music, theater, and creative therapies. I was fortunate to get my degree from one of the most respected alternative education institutions of our time, where I studied with some real greats in my fields.
My mentor, friend and advisor, Ray Copeland inspired and uplifted me. He once told me the great Charlie Parker said: ‘If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.’

Well, I’ve lived it. I’m still living it. So thanks for being, thanks for being here.

My mission is to entertain, help educate, inspire, & inform you, choose any one of those, or choose all, and if I can inspire and inform you enough, perhaps you’ll choose to create miracles in your own life, and maybe in the lives of others, too. I DO mean it when I call this site interactive. From your comments and questions I will know what YOU most want to hear about. So subscribe. Comment. Ask questions. And won’t you share my blog with your friends and tell them to comment and question and share? This is a new website & blog so I appreciate you helping me getting it out there.

Now… ‘Will you come see me… Tuesdays and Saturdays? What have you got to lose? Will I tell it like it is?’
You bet! And let’s have some FUN.

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If you haven’t heard of Playing for Change, they’re one of my favorite music projects: an amazing collection of international musicians, and children playing your favorite songs, all around the world! You can find their channel on YouTube Playing for Change and hear their albums and purchase their music! In the years since they began, they have created amazing educational programs in music for children around the world!