It's still not about what you want -- case study #2

(Remember: personal details have been changed to protect people's identity.)

Mischa was too young to be dying of pancreatic cancer. Unlike Mileni, he had a loving family around him, who were devastated to be told that he had only days to live. Pancreatic cancer is invariably fatal, but often the end can be delayed with chemo; in his case it came on so fast, and so unexpectedly, that chemo was not really even a viable option, though it was still tried, then quickly abandoned as hopeless. We found out about Mischa through the friend of a friend of someone who came to one of Bill's workshops, and we rushed to his bedside.

I used to have a huge phobia about hospitals and dying, but my earlier experience with Mileni acted as a kind of shock treatment for it, so I had no second thoughts about walking into Mischa's room on the oncology floor of a local hospital. But Mischa's appearance still shocked me. He was yellow and skeletal, and so drugged with painkillers that he was barely conscious. I had to wait for him to be conscious enough to understand me before I could ask for his permission to treat him.

Mischa had stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver and was in a state of imminent liver failure. He had so many tumours on his liver that the word used by his doctor to describe them was "innumerable". Bill told us that he himself had not treated anyone with stage-4 pancreatic cancer (because by the time treatment could be arranged they were usually gone) and that our biggest challenge would be that anyone in Mischa's state would likely have already given himself up for dead. We would be, figuratively speaking, dragging him back from the edge of the grave, and psychologically that could be quite a challenge for him.

Once again we had three treaters, and this time everyone stuck with it. We took turns treating him singly or in pairs, so he received at least an hour and a half of hands-on treatment every day. We also had a "Greek chorus" of people offering distance treatments, with a standing date at 10:00 p.m. as everyone in the group who could take the time joined in to send energy to Mischa. The very first night he woke up, looked at his sister sitting next to him, and said "I feel all this energy -- what do I do with it?"

His body's response was almost immediate. By the very next day something had changed. His legs seemed less swollen and the rash on them began to heal. He became more conscious. By the weekend he was able to stand and eat. He became less yellow and needed less pain medication -- in fact five days after we started treating him he stopped needing pain medication altogether. By then he was also able to walk short distances without assistance. Eight days after we started treatment he was released to go home, and his doctor told him that she considered his survival a miracle.

Upon his return home Mischa continued to improve. Eventually there were walks to the park and back, then trips to the mall, then weekends at the cottage. Six weeks after the beginning of treatment he had bloodtests done and was told that his blood values were all normal or near normal. His jaundice was gone. He was putting on weight. His doctor told him that he had normal liver and kidney function. About two weeks later the medi-port for the delivery of chemo was surgically removed as no longer necessary.

We were ecstatic. We kept telling him that he was making history, and that he would get to go on Oprah to tell his story. Bill followed his improvement with great interest. We were making history, too, validating his technique. We would all go on Oprah together! It was a great to have done this, to have gone into the hospital room of someone beyond hope and brought him back from the brink. The future looked rosy.

But there were signs that all was not well. Mischa started having pain around one of his kidneys. Tests were done for a kidney infection or kidney failure, but all the results came back normal. Then the pain moved to his lower back. Then he became listless and tired and unwilling to eat. We suspected some other kind of infection and suggested the possibility, but because he had no fever that was not taken seriously (energy healers generally speaking are not taken very seriously anyway, and certainly not allowed to diagnose). We were surprised that we could not affect the pain, as often pain relief is one of the first outcomes of our treatment, even when the pain is significant. (In fact the chief reason we suspected an infection was that we had already observed that when it comes to infections, we are not all that effective.)

Mischa died quite suddenly, ten weeks after he had been told he had days to live. He did have an undiagnosed infection. Was it a case of massive bad luck, or a case of us trying to argue with something bigger than ourselves and losing? Was he meant die, and did we interfere with a larger purpose by treating him? If the infection had been discovered sooner and he had been treated with antibiotics in time, would he have survived to full remission? Unfortunately we will never know.

Postscript I had the opportunity to present Mischa's case to a group of oncologists in 2009. When I told them that Mischa had not died of cancer, they looked at me and said, almost in unison, "no cancer patient dies of the cancer". They die of complications their weakened bodies cannot fight off. So maybe Mischa dying of something other than his cancer was not as significant as I thought, but his ten-week remission remains an extraordinary event.