Scraping Away the Sludge and Hospital Emergencies

Today my mood is a bit more upbeat than yesterday. With my back keeping me up until 4:00 AM the previous evening, I was in a bit of a funk yesterday. There were moments when I was ready to throw in the towel and call it quits. Let me start refeeding and get out of here. The classic pattern for fasting has these ups and downs. So I can expect some more days in the dumps.

One thing that offers a sense of encouragement is when I brush my teeth (no toothpaste) and scrape my tongue each morning. The toothbrush is acquiring a putrid yellow color from the slug that's brushed off the teeth. The first thing I'll do when I get out of here is get a new brush. Each tongue scrape clears a gob of goo. That's when I remind myself visually how much good I'm doing myself. The tongue is one of the primary eliminative organs for the toxins coming out of my body. I'm literally scraping years of garbage into the sink!

The masseuse was in this afternoon with her magic fingers. Between the fast clearing the toxins stored in the cells of the muscles and ligaments and her deep tissue work, we're making progress on my chronic body tension patterns in my feet, left shoulder, the left side of my face and the tendons in my neck on the left side. She is focusing her attention on my problem areas rather than doing or overall massage. For the last session I have, she'll do a standard all over Swedish massage as a going away treat.

One of our fasters has gone to the hospital. At 81 he came to his first fast in March with a diagnosis of angina and ulcerative colitis. Several days into that fast the doctor ran some tests and found that he had intestinal parasites and not colitis. Then the fast was stopped, he was given medication and sent home to clear up the parasite. This shows why I think it's essential to fast under the supervision of an MD.

On the second go round, he's still having problems with the fast. The doctor found the parasite has not cleared up. Further research has shown that giving the medication intravenously is more effective. His son came to take him to Manhattan where he will get this treatment at a hospital. Fuhrman will work in consultation with the city doctor. In the meantime his angina has cleared up from the first fast. He is a "cool" 81 who "surfs the net" in his spare time.