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Failure of surgery and pills drives healing quest
On the edge of medicine and miracles, one man turns to a Brazilian shaman
Somewhere out there, a Capital Blue Cross agent is losing sleep over me. In the past 13 years, I have accrued $1 million in medical bills. My insurance profile (which, when cued up for review, no doubt sets off an alarm in some office in central Oklahoma) breaks down like this:
120 trips to 12 different doctors: $30,000
16-plus pills a day: $16,200
Four hospitalizations: $170,000
Two major surgical procedures, each requiring a week of recovery time in the hospital and megadoses of morphine: $500,000
An IV infusion of high-intensity anti-inflammatories every 8 weeks for the past 4 1/2 years: $275,000
I began running this tab in October 1994, at the age of 14, when doctors noticed, under the nuclear glow of a barium x-ray, that the walls of my small intestine were shrinking. They diagnosed me with Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder of the digestive tract. My small intestine swells and scars, shrinking my internal piping from a silver-dollar diameter to that of a number-two pencil, creating obstacles for everything I ingest. Two types of pain come from this: a dull ache that can last for days, or a knife jab that stabs spasmodically. When the disease is at its worst, I feel both, with my abdomen as the epicenter. Even morphine isn't strong enough to soothe that agony.
After that initial intervention, the doctors sent me home with a cache of drugs, including a prescription for an elephantine dose of prednisone, a potent steroid with a list of side effects long enough to make a pharmaceutical rep blush.
The severe reality of chronic illness soon became apparent in the wild distortions of my teenage frame: The meds inflated my face like a beach ball, while a vanishing appetite left my waist and limbs emaciated. Like most Crohn's carriers, I felt my energy plummet. To start each school year, my mom would sit down with my teachers and tell them that when I fell asleep in class, it wasn't from a lack of interest. When my buddies were dipping their tater tots, I sipped my soup, popped my pills, and held my gut against the next wrenching spasm.
I'm not the only one with gut problems in my family. We catch Crohn's the way most people catch colds: My dad, two of my brothers, and an uncle and cousin on my mom's side also have constricted guts. My dad was the charter member of the Goulding Family Crohn's Club, and his story couldn't be more different from mine.
Embracing alternative therapies
During my childhood in California, he worked 60-hour weeks as a commission-based life-insurance salesman, coached every sport we ever played, and volunteered whatever time was left to anybody who needed it. That all changed in 1994 when, at age 44, he was diagnosed with Crohn's. He decided that major life changes were in order, so after 30 years in California, he transplanted my family to the relative calm of North Carolina.
He completely transformed his life, going from a man so high-strung he was once tossed out of a Little League game for f-bombing the ump, to a guy who now spends each dawn folded up on a yoga mat, surrounded by burning incense and candles.
"My health problem was so much more than just physical, and I was willing to try anything to fix it," he says.
He did: Four years after he was diagnosed, my dad lulled his Crohn's disease into remission.
My father, the yoga-stretching, meditating man, is part of a groundswell of Americans who are breaking out of their doctors' offices in search of better health. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have tried some form of alternative medicine, from acupuncture to Asian herbal diets. Acknowledging this trend, the National Institutes of Health established the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which has invested nearly a billion dollars since 1999 to separate the bunk from the brilliant.
"The idea of healing is no longer just about what a traditional doctor can do for you but also what you can do to help heal yourself," says Larry Dossey, M.D., the author of "The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things" and a onetime chief of staff at the Medical City Dallas Hospital.
My dad improved his condition by embracing nontraditional therapies, while I've made myself sicker by avoiding them. I work too much, sleep too little, eat and drink with religious intensity. When the swelling and pain in my intestine escalate, I up my dosages or talk to my surgeon. But with every slice of the scalpel, the outlook grows grimmer. "You need the small intestine to absorb calories and fluids," says Kim Isaacs, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the gastroenterologist for me, my dad, and my brother Rex. "Cut too much and you'll need to be hooked up to an IV constantly, and life becomes pretty difficult."
Last summer, I added a new malady. A detached retina — unrelated to my gut, as far as I know — led to a permanent and nearly full loss of vision in my left eye.
The Crohn's kicked in soon after, and I was half blind and bedridden. I'd had enough. I took medical leave from work and retreated to North Carolina. That's when my dad told me about a man in Brazil who might have a solution to our problems.
Placing faith elsewhere
I don't believe in miracles. I never have. Even as a devout young Catholic, I questioned the loaves-and-fishes story. My brain wasn't willing to go there.
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Someone like João Teixeira de Faria, known to his followers as João de Deus (John of God). Believers claim he has cured hundreds of thousands of people over the past 35 years, giving sight to the blind, movement to the paralyzed, and new life to the cancer- and HIV-stricken. But he's no doctor. With a second-grade education and zero medical background, he has no business diagnosing people, let alone cutting them open. Yet every year, tens of thousands of people converge on his clinic — Casa de Dom Inácio, located in a tiny hillside village in central Brazil — to seek his help.
John of God grew up as the son of a poor tailor. At 16 he began treating people in spectacular fits of healing that he wouldn't remember immediately after. As John and his followers tell it, he is a medium through whom dozens of history's most prolific healers — King Solomon and Saint Ignatius of Loyola among them — do their work.
Those who make the trek from the far-flung corners of the planet continue to find some mysterious forces at work in Brazil. "There are things going on down there that medical science simply cannot explain," says Mehmet Oz, M.D., a professor and surgeon at Columbia University. Dr. Oz incorporates techniques similar to those used by John of God — therapeutic touch and hypnosis, for example — into his own surgeries.
My dad first heard about John of God through John Orr, who is on the faculty at Duke University and has been his spiritual therapist for 8 years. Orr, who once suffered from ulcerative colitis, a disease closely linked to Crohn's, did a long stint in Abadiânia, where John of God does his work. After his time at the Casa, his symptoms retreated.
He suggested that we consider the trip.
"I went because I wanted other options," Orr told me. "You might, too."
I needed other options, but was this one really for me? Shouldn't you have faith before you seek help from a faith healer?
I had invested my hope in the powers of Western medicine. And yet after spending a million dollars, losing a dozen years, and sacrificing 42 inches of my small intestine, I was still sick, and getting sicker. Maybe it was time to place my faith elsewhere.
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