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From Surviving To Thriving: A Tale of Transformation
by Devin Ryerson, DC
The world was full of endless possibilities and it seemed like nothing could ever go wrong.
It was December 1998 and I had just graduated as a Doctor of Chiropractic. I was 27 years old and had moved to Pacific Beach in San Diego, feeling great about finally being done with college.
During that time and throughout my life, I subsisted on fast food, the main staple of the Standard American Diet (appropriately referred to as SAD). It was all about the double western cheeseburgers with large curly fries dosed with copious amounts of ketchup and the obligatory 32-ounce soda with a refill for the road. I was just one of the average Americans who combine to spend $110 billion on fast food every year, as reported by Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.
Combine that kind of diet with battling California freeway traffic every day in a cranky stick shift from Long Beach to Whittier to attend classes eight hours a day, then studying another six hours each night and on weekends, plus working the occasional job to make ends meet.
I like to think of that overachieving time in my life as the “Alex P. Keaton Era” referring to the character in the 80s TV show, “Family Ties.” At the time, I was flying high and hardly ever considered the fact that almost 1.4 million people in the U.S. die of heart disease, cancer, and stroke every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
My frenzied lifestyle is what led to the next turn of events, just one week after graduation. In the midst of winter, I was sick with what seemed to be an ordinary cold. I will never forget the size of the lump in the side of my neck that would present itself with each violent cough over my bathroom sink. There it was, quite literally the size of a baseball. It would seemingly disappear without a trace as long as I didn’t cough. Of course, I denied the existence of that lump and what I knew was the inevitable for several days. We humans have a real gift of conveniently deluding ourselves, don’t we?
I had a fellow DC have a look at it and of course, she burst my bubble with the inescapable news: “Devin,” she warned, “that looks like a tumor, and it might even be Hodgkin’s Disease.” Damn—here I was, newly minted, out of college, only 27 and ready to take on the world in beautiful San Diego. I figured I would secure a cushy associate job in La Jolla, date all kinds of pretty women and make a bunch of money. I figured wrong. I spent the next several months, including my first summer in San Diego, wearing a black beanie pulled low to conceal my complete lack of hair and eyebrows. My skin was ashen white and I was nauseous from the chemotherapy. This was the polar opposite of my San Diego dreams.
Being a fan of Charles Darwin and rationality, I’ve never been the superstitious type, nor have I ever given much credence to corny and illogical clichés that make people feel better about themselves. However, conveniently enough, I got cancer for a reason. And that reason was to take a step back, relax and just breathe.
My experience with cancer is something that has taken me onto an entirely different road. It has changed me completely. From day one, I immediately gave up eating red meat and pork. My evolution, as it were, was one big learning experience. As any cancer patient can attest, it is an adapt-or-die situation—give up the bad habits or decrease your odds of survival. This is something that the oncologists don’t tell you. They can give you the stats and survival probabilities all day long, but what modern medicine fails to do is at the most fundamental level of health. It’s not spiritualism or support groups, it’s something that even the oncologists can get onboard with, but typically don’t. This fundamental aspect is the body’s own immune system.
Of course, I learned the importance of the immune system in college histology class, but it wasn’t until I was hospitalized with pneumonia that I got a chance to apply some of this knowledge. Here I was, halfway through chemotherapy, and my immune system was completely shot with very serious pneumonia. So critical was it, in fact, that I was advised to sign an Advanced Directive, which is a document that allows you to legally decide who will make health care decisions for you and to state your wishes for medical treatment if you become unable to speak for yourself. Your Advance Directive may be used to accept or refuse any procedure including life-sustaining treatment. I guess they felt I might not come back out the same way I came in. Fun stuff.
To make a long story short and as you are keenly aware, I survived. It took a seven-day hospital stay to figure out just what kind of bacteria was living in my body and a ton of antibiotics to fight them. For the duration of my treatments, I vowed to look into what alternative methods would keep my immune system primed up so I could avoid any similar run-ins with disease ever again. The pharmaceutical injections I had been instructed to give myself obviously didn’t work so well, plus the side-effects were terrible. So I decided to go all-natural, from there on out. As part of my adapt-or-die evolution, I continued to modify my diet to include more plant-based and organic foods. I began learning to keep stress levels down to keep my immune system up.
About three months later, I was given a clean bill of health via CT scan. Immediately, I asked to have my PORT-A-CATH® (an implantable venous access system used for chemotherapy drug delivery) removed from my chest. My doctor advised against this, just in case the cancer should ever return. Yeah right, I said! Get this thing out of me; this cancer is never coming back, and if it does, I couldn’t dare imagine going through this system of treatment ever again! My hair and eyebrows grew back (as did all my other hair) and I can safely say that I had moved on from the “Alex P. Keaton Era” of being a totally stressed out overachiever, eating double bacon cheeseburgers and dreaming about making a million bucks. I progressed to a completely different level—one reserved more for a retiree, than a 28-year-old. I bought a one way ticket to Costa Rica in the spring of 2000 to attain a low stress lifestyle. Gone were those La Jolla dreams of fancy 
cars, women and big money. Costa Rica was just what I needed: no hype, no pressure to always perform or be cool...just a small cabina to live in with a hammock on the beach.
Things were great down in Playa Hermosa. I had acquired a 1984 Pontiac station wagon for a mere $400 and met some of the nicest and most interesting people from all around the world. It seems that everyone that lives in Costa Rica, especially the expatriates, has a story to tell, mostly concerning some financial tragedy. All in all, it was a truly amazing place for me to just start over.
For awhile, life was beautiful and I was happy—I kicked cancer’s ass and I was surfing perfect waves in warm, clean water. What could possibly go wrong?
What went wrong is that my dad came to visit me in Costa Rica. Worried that I really wasn’t coming back home, he had come to inquire about my mental wellbeing and newfound ambitions (or the lack thereof). For all intents and purposes, he was right; I wasn’t ever coming back. I had a car, a bank account, and all my worldly possessions in Costa Rica. Most of all, I had my life and my health intact and wanted to keep it that way. Moving back to the states would surely cause undue stress and immune system detriment—and maybe even the dreaded relapse.
Unfortunately, this time the cancer was in my dad. During his 10-day Costa Rica adventure, he dropped about 25 pounds. Initially, we thought it was a parasite from the water. After trying several parasitic medicines and doing some brief physical exams, I thought it would be a good idea that I fly back to the states with him to get a definitive diagnosis and proper treatment. Within about a month, my family got the news that he had advanced Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. He was given six months to live.
It turned out that he outlived the grim prognosis by one full month. It was during those seven months that I really learned what cancer is and how it affects the patients and families. I watched as the modern medical establishment gave up, opting for experimental drugs within the province of clinical study. For my dad, his mental state was so far gone that he could not make a conscious decision to take his illness on. Imagine a guy, 52-years-old who once stood 6’4” and weighed 270 pounds, being reduced to 155 skeletal pounds. Unable to cope with the pain, he eventually lost the dignity of bowel control and ended up on life support while being pumped with experimental chemotherapy drugs through three ports—two in his chest and one in his head. All throughout those seven months, I had developed a coping mechanism for myself that involved gathering information on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and posting it on the Internet.
Back in 2000, there simply wasn’t a whole lot of credible data or information about CAM to help people like my dad. I watched the hope and sometimes desperation that my mom would exhibit during his decline as she bought up anything on the Internet that even hinted of a cure. Since my dad was in a clinical trial of some sort, she wasn’t permitted to interfere with anything, which included those online miracle cure-alls. But she administered anything that she could get her hands on. I of course would investigate what she was giving and write about it on the website.
After my dad passed on, I decided to devote myself to publishing as much information about both conventional medicine and CAM approaches to cancer treatment on a website that existed as an information-only, non-profit entity. The objective was to help expose the facts about which natural products, herbs or vitamins warrant merit (or not) and which products are clinically proven to be not only safe, but could help the body help itself. I wrote about the dangers of how an herb or vitamin may interact with a conventional medicine, as well as my own story and how eating organic foods whenever possible is a must. Suffice it to say, this little non-profit information-only website was gaining a following without a shred of funding. I decided in 2001 to take what little savings I had to make the leap into what is now known as Pure Prescriptions.
Today, Pure Prescriptions carries on in the tradition of that little non-profit by supplying credible and practical health information. We persevere in honor of my dad and all those affected either directly or indirectly by “the big C,” offering free consultations, natural products and lab testing to provide an objective, rational approach that is the baseline of any CAM treatment. We strive to spread knowledge because the power to heal lies in your own hands.
Learn more about Pure Prescriptions and how to achieve optimal health at www.pureprescriptions.com or call 800.860.9583. Devin Ryerson, DC, is CEO and founder of Pure Prescriptions. Check out his blog at www.pureprescriptions.com/blogAsp/blog.asp.