Healthcare Choices Paving the Way For Physicians and Patients
An Interview with Sandy Yozipovic
by Tina J. Garcia
Tina: Sandy, your story is inspirational - suffering from one disease after another - and then your transformation into an advocate for choice in healthcare. Will you please share with us the difficult road you have traveled in reaching your final destination as a patient advocate?
Sandy: Well, sure, but my story is a bit crazy. You see, I had never been sick a day in my life until I was sixteen years of age. I was very active in sports as a state badminton champion and a cross country runner and was busy all the time. The first bout of illness was when I experienced acute muscle spasms that laid me up in the hospital for three days. They just came out of nowhere, and soon afterward, I recovered, but that was the first and only time I was sick when I was younger.
Then, at age twenty-one, I was stricken with a rare illness called Guillain-Barre Syndrome. This Syndrome paralyzes all the muscles in your body. In less than two weeks, nearly my whole body and half of my face were paralyzed. For eight and a half months, I was diagnosed with a severe, acute form of Multiple Sclerosis. That was devastating for a twenty-one year old, who thought she had the world by the tail.
I said, "What do you mean, I'm gonna' be a quadriplegic the rest of my life?"
I only had use of half of my face and mouth with one eye paralyzed open. I never had to have the tracheotomy, because the paralysis had been a compression from the head down and the feet up. Fortunately, the paralysis stopped at my lungs and my heart. But let me tell you, it was the scariest time of my life.
I had three relapses in my first year, and it took about a year and a half of major physiotherapy to learn how to talk, walk and balance, chew and swallow, sit up and go down the stairs. With Guillain-Barre Syndrome, you lose your sight, taste and sense of touch. I still don't have hot and cold sensations in my hands and feet from that disease. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, I recovered as if nothing had happened, except that it left my immune system impaired.
From 1983 to 1985, when I had GBS, they found no cause and knew no cure for it. The same was true for MS back then. My mom did research, but there was very little on these conditions. So, how do you handle this rare disease that afflicts 1 in 100,000? Some patients recover to a degree and some don't. For me, it just took time.
At the time, for treatment, they were using steroids and I think daily blood transfusions with dialysis. I opted not to do any treatment, because there was no screening for HIV. I figured time would take care of it, and it did prove to be a day-by-day recovery. The mental attitude was the hardest, but I looked at every day that I was alive as a gain. Little by little, I was able to swallow and form words again, progress from eating Jell-O to eating rice and so forth. My body needed time to heal itself until I regained full function.
I also had intense head pain and was given strong medication for severe arthritis. I didn't like the medication, because it altered my thinking. I realized I didn't want to be on mood-altering drugs. After I recovered from that, I was told I would not be able to have children. But two years later, I met my husband, Mark, we got married, and even though I was high risk, I gave birth to my son, Cody. During my pregnancies, I experienced Guillain-Barre symptoms again, and the same thing happened when I had my second child, Christie. After my daughter was born, the neurologist and the obstetrician said it wasn't a good idea for me to have any more babies.
In 1999, I had severe headaches again. They were just like the headaches I had when I got GBS. I'll never forget when I went to Mayo Clinic and the doctors said they had never seen anything like it. I was in fetal position from the severe pain, a pain that made me black out. I'd be standing up one moment and then I would be on the floor. My little five-year-old girl, rubbing my head would say, "It's gonna' be alright, Mama." And my son who was ten asked, "Do I need to call 911?" This happened for about a week, and the doctors didn't know what the heck was going on. Thankfully, they gave me some medication that helped.
Then, to top it off, at age thirty-nine, I was diagnosed with end-stage colon cancer. I was getting treated through the Mayo Clinic. I had emergency surgery to remove a tumor the size of my fist that was doubling in size every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I also went for a second opinion at Sloan-Kettering in New York City, and they gave me a twenty percent chance of survival, due to the aggressiveness of my cancer.
The cancer had spread quickly. On the Friday before my surgery, I was stage three and four days later I was stage four. It had already metastasized and was going toward the major organs. I'm so lucky it didn't. The emergency surgery was performed on the morning of September 11, 2001. In fact, all surgeries in that hospital were stopped that day, due to the events of 9/11, all surgeries except for mine.
After that, my husband went into research mode and found that the traditional chemo and radiation were not the only treatment options that were available. You see, after all these millions upon millions of dollars that have been raised for cancer research, cancer cure and racing for the cure that has been going on for the last forty years, they still have only two options - chemotherapy and radiation.
The day I was discharged from the hospital after the surgery, Mark had been on the computer researching and talking to some other people and just happened to find a naturopathic doctor here in Phoenix. This physician said that he couldn't help me, but recommended we talk to a new, young, up-and-coming doctor who was opening a new facility called Envita Medical Centers of America. The naturopathic doctor said that Envita was on the cutting edge, because they were bringing all the top therapies under one roof to battle all types of disease, but particularly cancer.
Let me explain a bit about chemo and radiation. The chemo and the radiation break down the immune system, so the treatments can get rid of the cancer and the toxins. But you really have to build your immune system, so when those cells are coming back and reproducing every twenty-four to forty-eight hours, they're coming back stronger each time. This concept made so much sense to Mark. So, Mark actually talked me into it, because I was in a fog not knowing what I was going to do. When I was faced with this situation, not knowing how long I had to live, it was a dilemma wondering whether this new approach would work.
The treatment at Envita was not covered by insurance and was going to cost us money out of pocket. This made the decision that much harder. At the time, even though my surgery and the six-month, follow-up protocol of chemo and radiation therapy were covered at eighty percent, our portion was still a whopping $120,000. So, even though we had money at the time, because of the medical costs we were already paying for, we really couldn't afford the new therapy. So, what it boils down to is that you can't afford to get sick in this country.
However, I decided to try the new cancer center and went to Envita for treatment with Vitamin C and ozone therapy, and really focused on the nutrition aspect of it, which is the key. But then there's also the attitude. And I really think it's the attitude first, and then the nutrition and then whatever other treatments are going to be a powerful combination in fighting off disease.
I'm forty-seven years old now, but when I had the cancer I was thirty-nine. Since the Guillain-Barre Syndrome, my body had been able to fight off disease. So why did it give in when I was thirty-nine? What made the difference? Well, I think it was lifestyle, nutrition and stress. Those are the big factors to disease in the body. I was off balance. I was running a business with my husband and raising two kids. It was just that I'm an A-type personality and it caught up with me.
I never made myself a priority, because I'm a giver. Everybody else seemed to come first and then I took the leftovers. I learned that we can't do that for longevity. You've really got to find that balance. So, I had stopped the chemo and the radiation after four months, because my white blood count went to 1.6. They stop administering chemo at 3.4, so I was below the danger point. I don't think another two months of chemo would have been effective anyway.
So, I continued with only the advanced natural treatments at Envita to fight my cancer. I felt good, and I didn't look like a cancer patient. I didn't look sick and I had energy. And I had hope! I began questioning why we don't have the option of both traditional and integrative therapies, using the most advanced natural therapies in the world. These are therapies that the body can handle. They don't chemically alter the body in any way. They give the body what it's lacking in order to fight the disease. This made so much sense to me.
Then at Envita, a new Chief Medical Director, Dr. David Korn, joined Envita's team of doctors. He reviewed my case and noted the Guillain-Barre Syndrome, the headaches and the colon cancer. He wanted to test me for Lyme disease. I agreed, because I grew up on a farm, and we were always picking ticks off of our dogs and horses. Sure enough, last year I tested positive for Lyme disease and Bartonella. Dr. Korn related all of these health issues to Lyme disease. It took me twenty-five years to be diagnosed properly! As you know, Lyme disease has been linked to ALS, MS, Parkinson's and arthritis. It all makes sense to me now. At this point, I'm an advocate for Lyme and a poster child for several diseases.
The other life-changing experience for me was when a family came to Envita. They had heard about my story, and the mom and dad brought their fourteen-year-old son to the clinic. We got to know them quite well and became very close. Their son was an athlete, and his goal was to become a football player. Unfortunately, he had bone cancer in his knee, and his doctors in Wisconsin wanted to amputate his leg. That was their solution for beating the cancer. That's because they don't have anything outside of surgery, chemo and radiation to stop it.
However, when you understand the natural side of medicine, you can see that those treatments are limited. So the boy started the treatments at Envita, and after two weeks, the swelling in his knee went down and the pain went away. I'll never forget getting ready one morning to go to Envita to get a treatment, and I got a call from the father. He said that he just got a call from the doctor in Wisconsin. The father told me, "We have twenty-four hours to bring our son back to Wisconsin or our five other children will be taken to Child Protective Services, along with our son, and we're going to be taken to jail. They're meeting us at the tarmac."
I'm like, "What???" I said, "Why?" He said, "We missed our pre-op appointment to amputate his leg, because we were here and we got so excited with the results of the treatments. We wanted to see how far these treatments could go to maybe get rid of the cancer."
I said, "But you can't leave! The treatments are working!" The father said, "We have to leave. We only have twenty-four hours." So, I called the doctors at Envita, and they said, "Sandy, it's the law." I did not know that children under the age of eighteen had no rights or say in their healthcare, or in choosing what options to fight their disease. Nor do their parents. That's why you saw this young boy all over the national news recently. People are wondering whether this mom is being bad. No, she's not a bad mom. He's already done rounds of chemo, and she knows it's not good for him. It's hurting him, and maybe there is another way. Maybe they just need to work with both ways.
You see, the traditional side is not open to working with both, and that's unfortunate, because the advanced natural medical side is willing to work with both treatments. The natural docs know it needs to be a partnership.
So, the family went back, and Child Protective Services met them at the airport. They interviewed all of the kids and the grandparents to see that the grandparents were fit to care for the family. The parents talked to CPS and calmed them down. The parents took their son, who had cancer, to the surgeon and the mom talked the surgeon into trying to save her son's leg, if at all possible.
They told the surgeon, "We don't want him to lose his leg; he needs his leg." When they went into surgery, the cancer that had surrounded his femur and his knee was completely dead. The tissue was dead. The cancer was gone. So, all they had to do was remove the muscle tissue where the cancer was, so he didn't lose his leg after all. It just looked like he had a big shark bite.
Here's where the kicker was that I couldn't stand. We knew the Envita treatments worked. We knew that kids respond so well to integrative medicine. When you combine the use of high-dose vitamin C, ozone therapy and the right nutrition, you stack the odds in your favor. This family was so excited, because at first, their son was not given a good prognosis. What they were told was that, because their son who was under eighteen had been diagnosed with this type of cancer, he had to do six months of chemotherapy, which was the standard protocol. He was not allowed to come back to Envita. He had to do the six months of chemo.
That six months of chemotherapy crushed him. He hated it, he didn't want it and it wasn't necessary. Every chance he got when he was on spring or summer break, whenever his parents could scrape the money together, he would come to Envita for treatments. The grandma came out with him, his grandfather and his sisters also came out and stayed to help him. Mark and I also gave him a place to stay at our house, so I could take care of him. He could not come back to Envita until he turned eighteen.
We did whatever we could to get him his treatments. And we did it in a hush-hush manner, because we knew it was working. That six months of chemotherapy was a big problem for him. You see, what most people don't know, is that up to eighty percent of the kids who take that type of chemo for childhood cancers have it return as a form of lung cancer.
He made it until he was nineteen years old, but he passed away in September of 2008 from lung cancer. His bone cancer never returned. It was the side effects of taking the six months of chemotherapy that caused the lung cancer. We believe Envita Medical Center was able to give him five more years, and he was golfing right up until two months before he passed away. He was playing football. He was an inspiration and never wavered in his faith or hope.
So, in 2005, we started the Fullness of Life Foundation to help relieve the financial burden for these families, so that they could have their kids treated and we could supplement the costs of that. We believe that every child deserves the right to receive complementary medicine or integrative medicine that's going to help stack the odds in their favor. We believe that the more survivors we have, the stronger our voice becomes, because this is the medicine of the future. This is the way healthcare should be. It shouldn't be just one kind of treatment, with everyone close-minded, because the pharmaceutical companies have a monopoly on treating diseases. It shouldn't be about that.
Why do we have so much disease today? Look at our nutrition and diet. Look at how North Americans live today. We have a completely different diet than any other continent. The reason disease is on the rise is because of our diet. It starts with that. Our attitude toward health plays a big part, too. In this society, we think we can take a pill and the pill is going to fix everything. People want a one-pill-fix-all, but our bodies are not designed for that. Any chemical you put into your body causes a reaction, a chemical upset or imbalance somewhere else, and the body has to readjust. It might prevent or get rid of some of the symptoms, but it doesn't get to the cause.
That's why it's so important to get into the cellular level of the immune system. We need to adjust and manipulate the immune system, so it can function as it should, by giving it the right nutrition, by giving it the right supplements and by giving it the right enzymes and nutrients. In this way, it can thrive and survive and run at its peak capacity throughout your life.
So, that's why we started the Foundation, and already we have had several children under our wings the last few years. We had a girl who came to us at age fourteen. She came from hospice care, and before Christmas, was given only a few months to live, if that. Her mother brought her to one of our big fundraising events and learned about the Fullness of Life Foundation. Now, she's a part of the Fullness Family.
She has been fighting brain tumors since she was eleven months old. To this day, last January 2008, after having an MRI, she has no more brain tumors. She is completely cancer free. That's why we are here to prove that you need both traditional and integrative medicine. We usually get the kids after traditional medicine says there's nothing more they can do for them. They don't have enough weapons in their arsenal. Traditional practitioners think integrative medicine is quackery; they just don't realize that integrative medicine works.
Part 2 of this article will be in the next issue of the PHA!
