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4.  Blessing

        Years rolled by.  I got a good job in a large neuroscience lab at the University of Arizona.  And I moved out of the old house to an apartment.   I stayed in touch with Donato 3 and occasionally with Dr. SGA. 

        Once I prepared a talk about IPT to give at the weekly seminar for my  neuroscience lab.  My lab director did not like one of my graphs,  and interrupted me in the middle of my presentation, abruptly ending the meeting.  

        I even tried doing an IPT experiment with mice in Frank Porreca's well-known pharmacology lab at the U of A.  I wanted to see if insulin and glucose would potentiate morphine in relieving pain.   But I backed off when I got tired of trying to milk a drop of blood from the tiny tails of the mice to measure blood glucose level, the same tails I would then dip in hot water for the tail-flick response.  If I were to do the experiment again, I would just mix glucose and insulin with the morphine for a preliminary test.  And then I would try an intravenous glucose/insulin IPT protocol in rats, with a hot-plate foot-flick test.  A simple experiment.  I have too many other things to do these days, and I like rodents too much.  But I do hope that someone else will carry on this work.

        In 1988 I visited my biological father, Milton Frank, in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he was the U.S. ambassador for several years.  In 1990, in his exit physical, he discovered he had fairly advanced and fast-growing prostate cancer.  I visited him at his apartment in Santa Monica, California, and told him about IPT, and about Donato 3 just a short drive away.  He wasn't interested, having complete trust in his doctors at UCLA Medical Center.  Maybe I should have invited him to come with me just to meet my friend Donato. 

        He went through a lot of different grueling cancer treatments at UCLA and in New York.  And in 1992 I found myself at his bedside in the UCLA hospital during his last night on Earth.  His body had weakened and had lost so much weight.  His immune system, devastated by chemotherapy, radiation, and too much steroid (prednisone), had allowed him to develop PCP pneumonia, which is also a common cause of death in AIDS patients.  (I read later that doxycycline should always be given along with steroids to prevent just such an infection; I don't think they gave it to him.)   He was struggling to breathe, and I helped keep him from pulling off his uncomfortable oxygen mask, which was hissing loudly at maximum flow.   I felt like Luke Skywalker holding his Darth Vader father, dying from the emperor's mortal wound, with his corporate mask now removed to reveal the beautiful vulnerable being within.   I told him it was like he was on top of Mount Everest, and climbing higher and still higher, into the thinning air.

        The sun came up on my father's last day on Earth.  In the early afternoon, he seemed to be rallying a bit.  A couple of his doctors came in.  Clearly they knew they were seeing him for the last time.   They looked to me like they were feeling guilty.  He was in bed dying, and their treatments, certainly the best they knew how to do,  had helped put him there.  He looked at them, and pulled his oxygen mask away from his face a little, and he said, weakly but clearly, "My son Chris here has a new treatment for cancer called Insulin Potentiation Therapy..."   The doctors acted startled and backed away, as though they had just been spoken to by a ghost.  In a lifetime of talking with presidents and kings and beautiful women, this was one of the last things he ever said.  An hour or so later, his skin turned bluish, and his breathing diminished into small reflexive puffs, and then stopped, and all the heart traces on the monitor turned to flat lines...

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iChrisWorld is a trademark, first published on this website on September 24, 2003.