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 Dr. Perez Garcia 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 Dr. Perez Garcia 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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