For Those Who May Be Interested: My Health Journey to Date
As you will see in this report, your kind and generous donations have done much to put me on a healing path.
A Letter from Bill Stranger
If I had awakened one morning two years ago to find myself in the condition I am in now, I would have thought myself hugely cursed. But looking at the progress I’ve made since last July, I can only be grateful for how much I have improved. It hasn’t been an easy path from there to here. After having my legs more or less cut out from under me, I spent the next seven months trying to get my health maintenance organization (HMO) to understand that their firm diagnosis—namely, that mine was a simple case of persistent anemia caused by an inadequate amount of dietary protein—could not possibly explain my ever worsening symptoms.
Even though my family and friends could clearly see my steady decline with their own eyes, my assigned nurse practitioner (qualified M.D.’s are in short supply in Lake County) discounted my reports of increasing disability and resisted my requests for a referral to competent doctors at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.
It seemed to me my ever increasing dysfunction and pain was fast bidding to become terminal. Kouraleen had to massage my arms and legs just go get me out of bed in the morning, then help pull me to a stand on wobbly knees full of pain. My shoulders and arms had lost nearly all their strength and ached much of the time. My hands were so swollen I could barely hold a fork. I could no longer sleep under blankets because they were too heavy to move. By the end of the year I could no longer take a bath—one of my few avenues of relief—because even together Kouraleen and I did not have the strength to pull me out of the bathtub. She had to wash me in the shower, dress me, make all my meals, serve me on a tray, clear and wash the dishes, and then go to work a few days a week. It was now high winter and I spent my days in a chair piled high with cushions to provide me just enough elevation to rise to stand on my own to go to the bathroom when she wasn’t around. Knowing that if I fell down I would not be able to get up again on my own, I used a rubber tipped walking stick to move around the house. I had terrible, unbroken insomnia that prevented me from getting any of the desperately needed cellular repair that sleep provides.
Finally persuaded to address my insomnia, in late January my HMO sent me to an M.D. in Ukiah to be instructed in proper sleep hygiene. Fortunately, that doctor had previously spent a couple of decades working in intensive care. After his pro forma talk was finished we had a serious conversation about my symptoms altogether. He was surprised to learn that my primary care health practitioner had not quickly read them as likely signs of an autoimmune disorder. So, although it was outside of his remit with the HMO, this M.D. took it upon himself to order a number of additional tests, including one for “antinuclear antibodies”. Antinuclear antibodies are produced when the body begins to attack the nucleus of its own cells. The ANA test came back positive. Further tests showed I have an extremely high level of antinuclear antibodies, accompanied by a massive increase of inflammation throughout my body. Even then, however, my HMO could offer nothing more than a consultation with a tele-health rheumatologist.
Hearing this, my longtime friend Scott Anderson, a retired M.D. now living in nearby Santa Rosa, interceded. He found a first rate team of rheumatologists in another HMO, likewise in Santa Rosa, that was willing to take my Medicare insurance. My visit to Todd Hofeling in mid-February quickly revealed what I had been missing over the previous seven months. Enormously knowledgeable and empathetic, Dr. Hofeling spent a full hour taking my case, listening to Kouraleen’s observations, and—wonder of wonders—actually conducting a full, hands on physical examination! After intensive further testing, the rheumatologist concluded that I have an autoimmune disorder called Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease (UCTD). UCTD usually happens to women in their late twenties and early thirties. Its rapid onset so late in my life (probably through exposure to some kind of toxic invasion) was both unusual and unfortunate because I have less vitality and a much smaller runway of time in which to deal with it. The disease had already been given seven months to cement itself in my tissues. The good news is that to date there appears to be no lasting organ damage—a saving factor I attribute to my TCM doctor friend Angelo Druda’s herbal prescriptions over the previous months.
The rheumatologist’s concern is that my UCTD might develop into a more debilitating form of autoimmune disease, some precursor symptoms of which had already begun to appear. He put me on hydroxychloroquine, a drug originally created to prevent or treat malaria that had since also become the standard treatment for UCTD. I was told it will take three to four months to show signs of effectiveness. Meanwhile, I was advised to watch carefully for signs of Raynaud’s Syndrome (in which stunted blood circulation turns the hands white and blue) and for any indications the disease is invading my lungs. The long and the short of it is that, although hydroxychloroquine might be able to bring my UCTD under control, it cannot not cure it. Accepting that outcome would have left me in perpetual limbo and, at my age, make it increasingly unlikely I could fulfill the service for which I had been preparing much of my adult life.
It so happens that UCTD can be cured. I have no way to account for the benefits of the many prayers offered by you and so many other friends. What I do know for sure is that your donations funded a healing regime that slowly but tangibly began to work in the following weeks, not the 3-4 months hydroxychloroquine (which I’m also taking) needed to ramp up. I decided to sign up for care from Global Natural Health Solutions (GNHS), an integrative medical group created by Kim Elia and Mitchell Fleisher. Mitchell Fleisher, a very impressively credentialed M.D. who has already overseen the cure of a number of cases like mine, is GNHS’s Medical Director.
I am still at the beginning of my healing. As many of you know, I have always been thin. I’ve weighed around 150 pounds for most of my adult life. Today I weigh 135 pounds, and my physique shows it! Even so, although my strength and mobility are still quite limited, I can now get out of bed or up from a chair by myself, climb stairs, prepare a simple meal, and even walk half a mile without assistance. In fact, for the first time in five months, just this morning I was able to get into and out of my bathtub without help. In this, I have also been helped along by the low impact exercise I do daily on the sophisticated rebounder that Sara Touralette and Scott Gough gave me. This would not have come about from taking the hydroxychloroquin alone. The GNHS homeopathic and nutraceutical protocols have clearly done much to accelerate my healing. In addition to regular homeopathic consultations and taking the recommended daily homeopathic formulation, I am also swallowing, in seven tranches taken throughout the day, 78 nutraceutical capsules prescribed by Dr. Fleisher. Many of them are extremely expensive, highly bioavailable formulations not typically found on Amazon. Dr. Fleisher now recommends that I begin a three month course of peptide therapy, which is too expensive for me at the present time.
All this has enabled me to get back to work on a project that has occupied me for the past 25 years and that I hope will be a real service to both the Dharma and the world. Back in April, 2023, a Japanese foundation pledged to endow the project with $25,000,000, which they subsequently failed to deliver. I am now working with a truly reliable group of talented colleagues who have good prospects of funding the venture out of the profits they hope to realize from a new technology they are currently bringing to market. I’m keeping the details of the project itself under wraps until the money actually comes through. All I can say for now is that it has attracted the enthusiastic interest of very talented people who wish to serve a cultural renaissance here on Earth. Should we be successful, you all will be among the first to know.
Thank you again for your support. I am deeply fortunate to live among so many friends—some from many years back—who have been profoundly Touched by Bhagavan Adi Da and who so kindly and generously reached out to help a gurubai such as myself.
Love,
Bill
