John was violently opposed to ordinary medical treatment; he especially would not have taken antibiotics even if he had died without them because previous courses of antibiotics had been the precipitant of life-threatening conditions that first brought John to my care.  John used his last strength to get to me because he knew that had a hospital gotten its clutches on him the medical doctors would have done exactly as they pleased.

I gave John a colonic, a gentle, mental spanking, and put him to bed without any supper.  He started water fasting and did colonics every day.  He began gobbling vitamin C (as calcium ascorbate) a few grams every hour.  I put huge poultices on his sores made of clay and chopped lawn grass (we needed a week or so before a tray of wheat grass would be ready).  John’s sores were amazing.  Every day a new one seemed to appear on a different part of the body.  The old ones kept getting bigger and deeper.  The largest original ones were about three inches in diameter, smelled horribly and had almost eaten the flesh down to the bone.  His pain was severe; there was no position John could assume that didn’t irritate one sore or another, and it was a good thing my house was remote because John frequently relieved his pain by screaming.  John was never delirious, but he was always original.  He did not have to scream, but enjoyed its relief and howled quite dramatically.  I wore earplugs.

After about two weeks of water fasting, John counted up the total of his sores.  There were forty three.  Seven or eight of them were enormous, two or three inches in diameter and well into the flesh, but the last ones to appear were shallow, small and stayed small.  After that point no more new ones showed up and the body began to make visible headway against the infection.  Very slowly and then more and more rapidly, the sores began to close up and heal from the edges.  John’s fever began to drop.  And he had less pain.  I should mention that John brought an extremely virulent and aggressive pathogenic organism into our house to which we Americans had no resistance.  Both my husband and I were attacked where the skin had been broken.  However, unlike John, in our cases, our healthy bodies immediately walled-off the organism and the small, reddened pustules, though painful, did not grow and within a week, had been conquered by our immune systems.  And after that we had an immunity.

After about three weeks of his fasting we were thoroughly tired of hearing John’s cathartic howls, tired of nursing a sick person.  We needed a break.  John at this point could walk a bit and was feeling a lot better.  John had previously water fasted for 30 days and knew the drill very well.  So we stocked up the vitamin C bottle by his bed and went to town for the weekend to stay in a motel and see a movie.  As they say in the Canadian backwoods, we were bushed.