Welcome back to the “My Vietnam” series on Lightning Bug. If you’re just joining, this ongoing exploration treats the Vietnam War as more than distant history—it’s a living thread in personal lives, family stories, refugee journeys, and the quiet ways trauma and resilience echo across generations and oceans. Part 1 (”Having a Dad”) reflected on my father’s fortunate avoidance of the draft and the war’s indirect shadow on our family. Part 2 (”Hung Lam”) shifted to a tender, awkward first love in 1988 Philadelphia with a shy Vietnamese refugee classmate—Hung Lam—whose family’s escape from the war’s aftermath brought Vietnam’s human cost directly into my young life. Now in Part 3, I turn to a lifelong friend’s lens: Christopher C, whose early photographic portraits of Vietnam veterans added another intimate layer to the war’s legacy. Your comments, shares on X (@RhusToxidendron), and subscriptions keep this series alive—thank you for engaging deeply.

How Chris Entered My Life

I first met Chris after I moved to the village of Parkerford, Pennsylvania, in 1984 to live with my paternal grandparents. He was a boyhood friend and neighbor of my close friend Larami, and I came to know Chris, his younger brother, and his parents through countless after-school visits, parties at his house, and just hanging out with the same crowd. Chris didn’t attend the public school the rest of us went to—he went to a much smaller, alternative private school instead. We knew a lot of the same people, shared a deep love for what remains of the countryside in southeastern Pennsylvania, and he has strong Ithaca roots from his college days. Over the years, Chris has consistently made a point to leave me a message whenever he’s heading up to our neck of the woods for the Grassroots Music Festival in the summertime, and we’ve managed to reconnect a few times.

After college, Chris invited me to an exhibit of his photography at a hip restaurant in Pine Forge, Pennsylvania. The owner was the mother of one of my high school classmates, Tara, on whom I secretly had a crush. (Tara’s mother, Gracie, that is.) I was living in Center City Philadelphia at the time, and the chance to get back to the country of rural Chester County—maybe even see Gracie—plus check out what Chris was up to, motivated me to catch the R5 train out of 30th Street Station. I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by Chris’s photos, but I was. After all these years, I still have a postcard of one of them.

That’s why I reached out to speak with Chris when I started writing this series. I thought that he, too, might have his own Vietnam. I’ve been processing our conversation ever since. There were some really weighty facts I didn’t know, and looking back in time, they help things make more sense and help me understand the people I grew up around a little more.

The Photographic Project That Bridged Generations

As a senior at Ithaca College’s Park School of Communications (cinema/photo major, still photography focus), Chris was stumped on his capstone. His professor, Janice Levy—a documentary photographer who still teaches there—suggested portraits of Vietnam veterans, fitting his political activism and journalism leanings. “It wasn’t really my idea,” he laughs. “I was mostly trying to get a good grade.” Yet it became something more.

He contacted local veterans’ groups, photographed the men in their environments, and asked them to write personal statements about the war’s lasting effects. These handwritten reflections appeared beneath the portraits, creating a dialogue between image and voice. The exhibit opened around 1993 at Gracie’s 21st Century Cafe and Catering in Pine Forge, PA—about a year after graduation, right before he met his wife. It included the veteran series alongside his work from Grenada (Rastafarian communities in deep poverty) and San Francisco homelessness. (You can still visit Gracie’s today at gracies21stcentury.com—a vegetarian-friendly spot that’s been serving the area since 1988.)

As children of the 70s, we were too young for direct impact, but the war’s tail end lingered. Chris recalls nightly TV death counts and the 1975 fall of Saigon helicopters—images so ingrained they feel like personal memories. “Vietnam was a disaster,” he states firmly, critiquing the domino theory as fearmongering and U.S. intervention as unwarranted meddling. He speculates on JFK’s assassination ties to military-industrial complex opposition to peace talks.

Family Service, Quaker Roots, and Views on “Just” Wars

Chris’s perspective is layered by family military history and Quaker pacifism—respect for service alongside deep skepticism of intervention. His father enlisted in the Army National Guard in 1962 at 22, foreseeing Vietnam’s quagmire, earned a rifle medal for sharpshooting, and discharged just before Bay of Pigs escalation. His mother was on a high school rifle team—perhaps contributing to Chris’s own “natural eye” in occasional target practice.

Neither of us grew up Quaker, but we were both clearly influenced by the little Quaker meeting we attended as teenagers—Schuylkill Friends in Phoenixville, PA. There is something about that which makes me quite hopeful, realizing that the lived actions and role modeling of these mostly quiet and dignified people influenced our young minds and hearts in ways which blossomed and still shape our decisions so many decades later. Children and teenagers watch how we carry ourselves as adults, and our actions really do matter.

True Heroes: Larry Liss, Bob Henry, and the Cost of Valor

The conversation’s emotional core came from veterans Chris knew personally.

Larry Liss, a Berwyn family friend (early 80s now, still vibrant), enlisted ~1965 as a Huey pilot. His 1967 Cau Song Be rescue—disobeying orders to save ambushed troops by carving a jungle LZ with rotor blades under fire, making multiple runs for 80+ evacuations—nearly led to court-martial. Instead, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross (upgraded to Silver Star in 2024), with PBS coverage. Chris knew him since infancy, learning details as a boy (ages 6-10), shaping his view of war’s trauma. (You can read more about Larry here, here, here and watch a riveting documentary about him and his fellow soldiers here.)

Bob Henry, a Marine “gentle giant” who moved nearby ~1976, rarely spoke of service but died of leukemia ~15 years ago—possibly Agent Orange-linked. Neighbor Hy Mayerson’s Dow Chemical lawsuits against Agent Orange added activism fuel.

What probably moved me most about my conversation with Chris—which actually moves me to tears—were his references to the men who were possessed of independent thought and brave hearts, who made decisions in the moment that saved lives, both American and Vietnamese, sometimes in direct contradiction to the orders of their commanding officers. While I write about My Vietnam, I mentally toggle back and forth with the crucible of the pandemic, the difficult decisions we have had to make, giving up friends, family, work, to try and forge a new path based upon honesty, integrity, and courage.

Chris spoke at length about the My Lai massacre, one of the darkest stains on the American effort in Vietnam. While Lieutenant Calley was later convicted for ordering the slaughter of civilians, Chris pointed to the true heroes of that day: the soldiers and at least one officer who refused to participate and actively intervened. They turned their machine guns around, positioning themselves between their fellow American troops and the Vietnamese villagers. One officer reportedly warned that if the killing continued, they would fire on the Americans themselves. “Those are the real heroes of Vietnam,” Chris told me, “the guys that stepped in and stopped that from continuing. They would have killed everybody in that entire village and burned it to the ground.” In the moral morass of that conflict, these independent thinkers and men of conscience rescued something essential — a shred of our national morality — through raw courage and clarity in the moment.

God bless him, Chris made one of the most sincere and touching comments I have ever heard from another human, especially one who himself has chosen to get Covid boosters: “I’m not a vaccine injury denier. I understand that you and Kerrie were both injured by the Covid shots. It happened to some, including both of you, and I’m sorry for that.”

Activism, Nuance, and Everyday Choices

Chris’s activism began in the 1970s when, at just seven years old, he joined his parents and the community in protesting the construction of the Limerick nuclear power plant, just seven miles from their home in northern Chester County. That early experience, rooted in the Quaker values of peace and stewardship that shaped both of us as teenagers at Schuylkill Friends Meeting, has flowed directly into his choices today. Last year he and his wife installed solar panels on their house because, as he put it, “something told me that energy prices were going to skyrocket.” On bright, sunny days they now generate more electricity than they use, effectively eliminating their carbon footprint while acknowledging there is no true zero-sum game—“everything you do is going to have a cost to it.” He’s equally deliberate in how he spends his money: after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos “bent the knee to Trump” and the Washington Post’s troubles, Chris switched to Walmart on the advice of a friend, noting that Walmart has kept its DEI programs intact and offers the same prices and selection. He’s also become an advocate for next-generation nuclear technology, praising China’s small thorium-salt reactors that can power 20,000 homes without meltdown risk and run unmanned. “Why aren’t we building these here?” he asks, contrasting them with America’s outdated 70- or 80-year-old plants. For Chris, these are all practical expressions of the same principle: do as little harm as possible to the planet while recognizing that every choice carries trade-offs.

Chris stresses that life and politics are rarely black-and-white. “Most people are pretty center of the road,” he told me, “and they don’t see things in black and white. Life is a real gray area situation.” He points to his next-door neighbor of nearly twenty years as living proof. The man comes from a conservative family—his father was a cop—and initially their political differences were stark, especially after Trump’s first election. Yet over time, through long conversations, the neighbor came to agree that the military-industrial complex “does a lot more damage than it does good.” Chris sees this shift as evidence that when people move beyond labels, they often discover far more common ground than division. “If you go far left or far right, you’re going to end up in the same place,” he warns—zealous extremism leads to the same dead end.

Nowhere is Chris’s blend of rural realism and thoughtful regulation more evident than in his views on guns. Growing up in northern Chester County, where gunshots echoed through the woods every deer season, firearms were simply part of the landscape. Influenced by his parents’ shooting backgrounds, he enjoys target practice but draws firm lines. He and his wife own only a shotgun and a couple of rifles, stored in a biometric safe that opens only to their fingerprints. They have never owned handguns—“they’re far too dangerous; it’s a lot easier to hurt or kill yourself with a handgun than with a shotgun.” When their son was young, Chris made a habit of asking every playdate parent whether they had firearms in the house and how they were stored. “If they told me they’re in a safe and only we have access, I’d say, ‘Okay, fine, see you later.’” He has also been a persistent advocate for age-appropriate firearm safety education in the Owen J. Roberts School District, approaching the police chief, principal, and most recently the school board directly. “You want to reduce harm? Bring back this education, K through 12,” he argued. In a district that has become notably progressive, with an all-Democratic board, the idea is finally gaining traction—proof, for Chris, that responsible gun ownership and education can bridge divides rather than widen them.

Tying the Threads Forward

Chris’s portraits, veteran friends, and activist life add another intimate dimension to Vietnam’s legacy—trauma, heroism, protest—persisting in personal choices and societal debates.

To check out Chris’ photographs and travel articles, please visit www.ChristopherCarroll.com .

Stay tuned for Part 4. What Vietnam echoes resonate for you? Comment, share on X, subscribe—your engagement grows Lightning Bug.

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Larry MacKenzie is one of my numerous father figures. He is the biological father of my high school friend Larami MacKenzie—Dr. Larami MacKenzie, that is, respected interventional neurologist in the UPenn system.Larry was a professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia. He was beloved by his students and gave decades of blood, sweat, and tears to them before retiring. He was also the founder of the ACE Program at CCP, and in the summer of 1988, between my freshman and sophomore years in college, he asked me to be his administrative assistant.

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Make new friends indeed! Enrollment that summer was a little low, and so Larry suggested that I participate in several of the classes in order to swell the ranks. I chose two: photography and law.

As far as my administrative duties, I was an utter failure. Or rather, we failed together. Larry was always a frenetic and somewhat disorganized fellow—brilliant, kind, insightful. He was fun and inspiring as a teacher, a vocation he obviously loved. Administration? Forget it. He couldn’t direct or delegate to me any better than I could anticipate or execute his half-baked instructions.

Sadly, our relationship never fully recovered from that summer. I remember early morning starts, driving across the countryside to his house in rural Birchrunville, and then setting off together for the stressful, traffic-packed commute into Philadelphia via the Schuylkill Expressway. It was NPR in the morning on the way in, and NPR in the afternoon on the way home. We had our fill of Terry Gross’s Fresh Air interviews. As I write this, I remember that the crucible of that experience helped me decide very early in my life that I would go to great lengths to avoid a daily commute. In fact, I have succeeded on that count for decades. With the exception of six years of a one-and-a-half-hour commute back and forth to SUNY Upstate in Syracuse, I’ve always kept my commute to walking, biking, or driving ten minutes or less. But, I digress.

What I want to get to is the pretty young lass who caught my eye that hot and humid summer. She was a delicate-boned and shy woman in my photography class whose name was Hung Lam, and she was an immigrant from Vietnam. I persisted in wooing Hung Lam. I can’t say her first name without saying her last name—it just doesn’t feel right. In fact, my understanding is that Hung was her family or surname, and Lam was her given or personal name. I just couldn’t get the hang of it. If she called me Marsland all the time, instead of Scott, that would have been weird. But calling me Scott Marsland in conversation would have been odd too. Nevertheless, it was Hung Lam, which was just the first of many pitfalls to intercultural and interracial love.

Hung Lam carried herself with an elegance that felt almost otherworldly to me—thin but not frail, her movements fluid and unstudied, like a water bird gliding across a still pond. At 5’7”, I was only slightly taller than she was, and that small difference made her seem even more delicate when I gazed upon her in the summer sun of the courtyard. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, glowing with a quiet health I hadn’t seen before; her hair, thick, lustrous black and cut in a short bob, framed her face in a way that was simple yet striking, unlike any girl I’d known. Even her scent was elusive—not perfume or shampoo, but something natural and faintly feminine, a gentle warmth that drew me in without explanation.

Like most people in the majority of the world, Hung Lam was small and thin like me, but she carried herself with a strength and capability that felt quietly reaffirming. I grew up surrounded by tall, strong, muscular men—always the small one, always measuring myself against them, and feeling childlike. In her presence, that old comparison fell away; here was someone who moved through the world with the same compact frame yet seemed entirely at ease in it. I couldn’t name what pulled me toward her so strongly, only that it was new and insistent, overriding my embarrassment, my uncertainty, my lack of confidence. I acted on it anyway, clumsy and hopeful, because the attraction felt bigger than my fears.

It helped that we were in Photography together. This gave me a plausible reason to spend time together, and permission for my gaze to linger upon her. I suppose it also gave her latitude to be seen, and appreciated. The moments when our eyes met, and she offered a smile, were like kindling for my fire, which I would go over in my mind when the school day was through and we headed our separate ways.

What we never got to, and which I wish we had, was what exactly her name meant. Common Vietnamese surnames include Hung, often from Sino-Vietnamese 雄/Hùng meaning “hero” or “brave.” Lam or Lâm, from 林 meaning “forest,” appears as both a surname and a given name for females, sometimes meaning “blue/indigo” or linked to nature. Hung Lam was my blue forest, my indigo hero, my natural goddess, deserving of my adulation. Despite long uncomfortable silences, hills of awkwardness, and sweeping deltas of uncertainty about where this was all going, I pursued her. In that attempt, I began to learn more about Vietnam and refugees.

As I learned more about her background, I felt the larger wave of Vietnamese refugees who had arrived in Philadelphia after 1975. This immigrant community largely consisted of those who fled as part of the “boat people” exodus from communist rule. Many first passed through temporary camps like Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania—a major processing site for Southeast Asian refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s—before resettling in the city with support from organizations such as the Nationalities Service Center, which provided housing, English classes, and other aid. Initially scattered across areas like West Philadelphia, they faced interracial tensions, discrimination, and economic hardship in a city recovering from decline. Yet they gradually concentrated in South Philadelphia along Washington Avenue, where by the 1980s the area evolved into what became known as “Little Saigon.” Early arrivals established homes in rowhouses, opened businesses, and revitalized commercial strips through Vietnamese markets, restaurants, and shops—often integrating with or near Chinatown—laying the foundation for one of the East Coast’s largest Vietnamese communities despite initial mixed reception.

Hung Lam lived with her brother and his wife. They supported her and served as her proxy parents, living in a modest row home in East Falls. It’s worth describing this neighborhood, because at that time in my life I was still a country kid from rural (as-of-yet undeveloped) Chester County, and it seemed odd to me. Nestled at the western edge of East Kelly Drive where it spirals down from Exit 340A on the Schuylkill Expressway (I-76), this spot marks a striking zone of contrasts in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park system. On one side lies the serene, tree-lined beauty of the historic riverfront trail, with its lush greenery, rowing boathouses, and peaceful Schuylkill River views evoking a timeless escape into nature. On the other, the relentless roar and frenetic rush of I-76 traffic thunders overhead, creating a jarring juxtaposition between tranquil parkland serenity and the high-speed urban pulse just feet away. Was there something about this location that reminded the Hung family of their distant homeland?

The Ill-Fated Date

My boyhood friend Larami was a person of focused passions. As teenagers, his attention was on drumming, music, girls, food, and far-ranging political discussions. I used to sleep over at Larami’s house all the time and we had free rein. On one of the rare occasions that I invited him to sleep over at our house, I remember going out to the kitchen at midnight and making Dagwood-size sandwiches. He drove my Pop-pop nuts. I remember him telling Larami’s father once, “We have two crazy boys on our hands.” What Pop pop didn’t say, which I heard in my head, was “It’s nothing that boot camp with the U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune couldn’t straighten out.”

As an adult, Larami has engaged in passions as far-ranging as building a wooden kayak from scratch to smoking jerky to brewing home craft beers. He’s smarter than a whip and ended up being an interventional neurologist in the UPenn system, so there’s a lot of brains behind that wide-ranging curiosity.

Looking back as an adult I shake my head and ask, “What was I thinking?” Over the course of the summer, I was gently coaxing conversations and connection from Hung Lam, who was very retiring and shy—or at least that’s the way her personality manifested in this new culture and new language. Inviting her out on a double date with Larami could have predictably ended our budding romantic story. In fact, that is what happened.

The fourth person to join us was Celeste. She was a young and hot Frenchie, visiting for the summer, granddaughter of Larami’s longtime neighbors the Leveques. I was familiar with Celeste from the occasional late-night episodes of going commando, i.e., skinny dipping in her grandmother’s swimming pool. In Larami’s company, she was quite engaging, prone toward laughter and streams of conversation in French, because Larami was also a francophile with a fine accent.Larami picked the restaurant, which was a Japanese sushi joint. I remember the food being excellent, but the price was a little high for my small pocketbook. Hung Lam looked intimidated by the repartee between Larami, Celeste, and myself. It’s possible that I could’ve still redeemed my relationship with Hung Lam, but for what happened next. I tried to draw her into our conversation, but she mostly smiled and listened.

When we left the restaurant, it was past 9 PM, pitch black, and pouring rain. As we drove down East Kelly Drive in the manual Honda Civic hatchback that Larami had borrowed from his parents, he was leaning into the curves and stepping on the gas in a way that could be very enjoyable between two teenage boys on country roads, but appeared to frighten Hung Lam. We went through some deep puddles, which sent out a spray on both sides that made Larami and Celeste laugh. So he sped up for the next puddle and effectively drowned the Civic’s spark plugs, bringing us to a full stop on that busy road. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we were close to the AM/PM mini market just across from the Falls Bridge, and it was a tiny car. In the pouring rain, with Larami steering, Hung Lam, Celeste, and myself got behind the car and pushed it down the road, up a slight incline, and into the parking lot of the mini-market. By that point, we were all soaked (well, not Larami).

There wasn’t such a thing as cell phones in our lives at that time, so we had to scrounge up some change from under the seats and use the payphone to try and reach Larami’s father. Larry was used to rescuing Larami from his crazy escapades at all hours of the day and night, and fortunately had a AAA membership. He called for a tow truck, but it was a Saturday evening and apparently there were lots of other calls. We sat in our wet clothes in the stuffy backseat of the car for more than an hour waiting for AAA to arrive.It certainly didn’t help things that Hung Lam’s brother was her father figure and probably against his better judgment had given her permission to go out on a date with these strange Americans. It also didn’t help that we were running more than an hour past when she expected to be home. I don’t remember if she was able to call him from the payphone, but I’m betting that she wasn’t. As I climbed out of the backseat to say goodbye in front of her row home, I could see the figures of her brother and (who I assume was) his wife standing in the front window looking out. They must’ve been waiting with worry for some time. As my heart sank to my feet, Hung Lam gave me a weak smile and said thank you for dinner, and “See you.”

Time collapsed after that, and I remember going on a long road trip to Torch Lake, Michigan with my mom, stepfather, and sister to my step-grandparents. Hung Lam occupied my thoughts, and I spent most of what little money I had set aside from savings for college tuition to buy her a beautiful cherry wood hand mirror from a local co-op in Michigan. I think that I mailed it to her with a note, and a prayer that I would hear back, which I didn’t. I hope that she still has that mirror, and that when she looks in it she sees that time has been gentle to her beauty, and that she conveys the confidence of someone who has overcome adversity and built a good life for herself in another world and time.

I have spent much of my adult life listening to patients tell stories of trauma that arrived suddenly and left lasting marks—post-viral syndromes, vaccine injuries, the slow burn of cancer. In my own life, the largest trauma of the 20th century arrived the opposite way: indirectly, through its absence.

My Vietnam is not a war memoir. It is a series of reflections on the war’s negative space—the frame from which my photograph developed. My father threaded the needle of the draft era and came home whole enough to be my dad for eleven years. Hung Lam, the shy classmate who caught my eye one Philadelphia summer, carried the war across an ocean in her family’s refugee journey. The pho and lemongrass that now season South Philly streets once belonged to jungles half a world away. And somewhere in the background, always, are the cousins, brothers, and sons who did not return—whose empty places still shape the families that remain.

These pieces are small exposures: a box of stale C-rations discovered by a curious child, an awkward first love across cultures, a song or film that carried the war’s echo into American living rooms, a father who chose the Air Force to steer his own fate, a bus driver who once flew Phantom jets, a Vietnamese patient whose French bridged decades of colonial memory, homeless veterans at a Texas soup kitchen table, a MASH nurse recalling the boredom and chaos of her service, a mother-in-law’s lifelong grief over a brother who died before their father could reach his hospital bedside, a home-cooked meal shared in fear and warmth, and a WWII Marine grandfather standing before the Vietnam Wall with my dad to find a cousin’s name. I plan at least ten parts, but there are easily twenty substantial stories waiting to develop from this same negative frame. Together they form the image of a life touched by a war I never fought, yet could not escape feeling

Having a dad

My dad passed away shortly after New Year’s 2000. He had been fighting (because we still used that language) kidney cell cancer since 1997. A man who had always stood military straight-backed and tall, surpassing six feet, with a lean and muscular body which he kept in shape, had withered to a skeletal thinness that made me recognize myself in his diminished frame.

The father of my infancy, toddlerhood and childhood was a man who smelled of aftershave and clean. He had an easy smile, and patience with my unending questions, from the profound to the profane. “If God made the world, who made God dad? Why is the sky blue dad? What do earthworms eat dad? Why don’t girls fart dad?”

My father was one of the few people in this life who called me Scotty. (Dr Robert Yoho did this naturally, but few people have dared). He generally said it with a warmth and friendliness, such that I knew he cared about me. And when he said it with more volume and a rising inflection, I knew that I best pay attention.

I was a curious kid. I know that kids are curious, but I mean, really, I got into things that I probably shouldn’t have. I got into places that defied my short stature and relative weakness. It was determination of spirit that propelled me. One of the things I found was a box of C-rations from my dad’s service in the US Army. It was buried in a trunk in the attic. I was born in 1969, and he went through boot camp in the early 1960s, so that little care package from the US government was old. That didn’t stop me from chewing the gum (it lasted about five minutes), eating the peanut butter (it was as chewy as the gum) on stale crackers (tasted like cardboard), and smoking all four of the cigarettes. I didn’t inhale back then, so who knows how good they were. Not yet did I connect the C-rations with Vietnam.

There were other remnants of my dad’s military service. His old olive drab army jacket hung in the foyer closet. I saw him wear it sometimes, like when he was outside on a colder day, working on the Model A Ford he was restoring. His combat boots were in the closet too. I remember their smell of worn leather and shoe polish. I tried them on when no one was around, as I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a soldier, and of course they were outrageously oversized for my little boy’s feet. There were patches from his uniforms, that said US ARMY, or Marsland. There was an insignia of his rank, private. There were the pictures of him in my baby book, looking smart in his khakis, with a crew cut that he had never sported since his discharge.

It wasn’t until I was fourteen, when I ran away to live with my paternal grandparents in Pennsylvania, that I began to grasp what my father had avoided—and how narrowly my own life had skirted the same fate. Amid the chaos of that upheaval, I found myself dreaming of the US Navy and the Naval Academy. My stepfather Em had introduced me to the US Naval Sea Cadets back in Connecticut, and I took the program seriously, throwing myself into drills and weekends. After the move to Pennsylvania, I leaned hard on my Pop pop to drive me once a month to Reading, PA, for the USNSC sessions—determined to keep that small piece of structure and purpose alive.

The first time Pop pop drove me to Reading, as he dropped me off, he commented, “This is where your dad would come for his reserve duty.” I asked him more about that on the way home, and came to understand that my dad had been lucky. He had threaded the needle, so to speak, joining ROTC while he was at Penn State, and landing a reserve position with a JAG unit in Pennsylvania. Ed Rendell, the future Governor of Pennsylvania, was in the same unit.

One of the quiet gifts of that luck hangs on our wall: this painting of a snow-capped mountain rising above a serene lake, framed in gold, signed simply “Marsland.” My dad tried his hand at painting, sometime between my birth and young adulthood—not as a professional, but as an ordinary man who wasn’t afraid to pick up a brush and see what happened. He produced several pieces like this one, each one surprisingly lovely in its own right: the soft blues of the water, the deep greens of the forest, the calm majesty of the peak against a gentle sky. Married to a professional artist, I can see clearly that it’s not “expert” in the art-world sense—no groundbreaking technique, no gallery ambition. And yet it’s extraordinary precisely because it came from someone without formal training, someone who simply wanted to create something beautiful and gave it a try.

This painting is one of the negatives from which I draw meaning in my own life. It reminds me that my father was many things—a patient question-answerer, a Model A restorer, a man who smelled of aftershave and clean—and aspired to be many more. Because he didn’t go to Vietnam, he had the years, the quiet evenings, the space in his spirit to sit down and paint a lake and a mountain that probably existed only in his imagination or a photograph he once saw. The war’s absence left room for small, tender acts like this—acts that now sit in our home as proof that life, when spared certain shadows, can still bloom in unexpected colors.

It wasn’t until many, many years later, after my dad had been dead for at least a few years, and I was still grieving the man who I had finally reconnected with, just in time to lose him again, that I realized how lucky I had been. I didn’t grow up with a man who was a ghost, killed in a far away land, for a dubious justification of national interest. Nor did I grow up with a man who had gone to that far away land, and come back, but not fully intact in his body, mind and spirit. Even though I didn’t have him for my whole childhood, thanks to divorce and family dysfunction, I did have a dad for the first eleven years of my life, and I knew that he loved me. Vietnam didn’t get to take that away.

This year we had one of the most lovely Christmases of all time. We slept in, and had four of the kittens and cats come join us before we got out of bed. I felt inspired in my gift-giving this year, and was pleased to see Kerrie touched and tickled. The favorites were knit stockings to hang by the chimney with care, and framed photos of cats who have passed in the last few years.

The day was not without its lulls and moments of sadness. Kerrie flung open the door to the bathroom while I was wrapping up with my usual four minutes of cold water and Wim Hoff breathing. “Is there no more milk!?!” I said, “Sorry Boo, I used it to make dinner last night.” Mushroom and Napa cabbage lasagna by the way; another way to use up the farm share. After shaving, I sought her out in the kitchen, and found a big old saddo. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Lucky me, I’m married to a very insightful and reflective woman. “You know, I just wanted to make some mac’n cheese. My Granny used to make the best mac’n cheese when we would drive up to her house for Christmas. And you know what? I really miss my Granny.” Awww, come here for a hug.

On the trail down by Cayuga Lake we braved gale force winds to stretch our legs and get some fresh air. The wind sounded like a jet engine roaring through the treetops. The cold is not unpleasant when there is a cozy warm home awaiting your return.

There was blissful harmony in the kitchen as we prepared dinner. I was simmering a yummy broth from farm share parsnips, leeks, onions, garlic, and carrots. There were lovely golden rutabagas to cook with butter, and a leftover kohlrabi remoulade with fresh tarragon and pistachios. I made homemade applesauce of which my Nana would have been proud. Kerrie coaxed a beef roast to a medium rare arrival, with a gravy that had no lumps. She brought up chocolate cookies with toffee that she had hidden in her studio.

As we were washing the dishes, and putting them away, I smelled cigar smoke. It was the rich and spicy scent that I loved as a boy. Nana and Pop pop had an understanding. He wouldn’t smoke his cigars in the house, but he was permitted to light his cigar inside, before going outside with our Scottish terrier, Max. He would turn and give me a mischievous look as he took an extra puff on his way out the door. I sniffed the air again. There was most definitely the lingering trail of a cigar, Pop pop’s cigar. I didn’t tell Kerrie, but you know what? I missed my Pop pop. Whether it was my olfactory lobes playing a trick on me…or what I actually believe, my Pop pop letting me know that he loves me. He was there in spirit, enjoying the warmth, fellowship and tasty food.

We slid into the evening with an episode of the Netflix soap opera, Manifest. Thanks to Michael and Teresa Capuzzo for turning us onto that confection. Then we played A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, as we started a new Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle of ice skaters bathed in holiday lights at The Rink at Rockefeller Center. Kerrie said, “You know, I never tire of this album. It’s just so good.” I nodded in solemn agreement. We went to bed at a reasonable hour, as I had patients to see in the morning. This morning, as I kissed Kerrie goodbye, turning to trudge up the hill to work, she said “I’ll miss you today.” I replied, “I’ll miss you too.”

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Dr Anthony Fazio and I first met in the summer of 2005. We were both interested in starting a free clinic in Ithaca, NY, and joined a steering committee for this precise purpose. I later became co-chair of that steering committee, together with Dr Justine Waldman. My memory of those early meetings involves sitting around a large folding table (think church potlucks) in cheap plastic chairs, dividedc into two factions. On the one side of the room, which is where I sat, were RNs, NPs, and physicians. On the other side of the room were the massage therapists, craniosacral therapists, acupuncturists, and herbalists. One of the herbalists was named 7Song, and that is how he spelled his name. He looked like the Jesus portrayed in the paintings on the walls in my childhood Sunday school, only angry, with long greasy hair, and a ratty sweater with holes in the elbows. Deena was a massage therapist covered with tattoos, body piercings, and possessed with an oppositional defiant attitude. Anthony struck me as an odd fellow, with a greying Afro, tinted glasses, and a biting sarcasm delivered in the lingering New Jersey Italian-American accent and speech pattern of his origins. There were lot of crossed arms on both sides, with palpable suspicion and distrust.

Looking through the retrospectoscope, it was something of a miracle that we figured out how to work together, raise funds, build walls, paint them, solicit equipment, and art, craft policies, hire a director, coordinator, and engage volunteers. We had some powerful opponents outside of our conflicted steering committee; the largest and loudest being Cayuga Medical Center, the local hospital which feared us encroaching upon their Medicaid income. Can you imagine? We spent hours debating language. How were we to describe what we were doing? Were we blending conventional and alternative, allopathic and homeopathic, Western and Eastern? Ultimately, the Ithaca Free Clinic (IFC) opened in the Winter of 2006, and became the first integrated (one of the words we agreed upon) free clinic in the United States. Nearly twenty years later, it is still open, in a different and larger location, and serves more than 4,000 patients a year.

I remember attending the first IFC Gala, and hanging out with Anthony. It reminded me a little bit of going to a junior high school dance with my friend Billy Tkacz, at least before Kelly McGill dragged me off to a corner for some sloppy French kissing. In that celebratory environment, I came to understand that Anthony abhorred such social occasions, and was both painfully intellectual and introverted. It would be too much to say that he hated people, because in his daily actions and lifelong contributions to his fellow humans, he demonstrated persistent care and love. Although on more than one occasion over the years, in private, I listened to his discouragement with other humans. It’s an occupational hazard of being a healer to the chronically ill.

Anthony never stopped volunteering at the IFC. His acupuncture and traditional Chinese herbalist care was very popular among the clinic patients. He extended himself to become a board member of the Ithaca Health Alliance for several years. Given the woke politics of Ithaca and the fractious nature of just about any board of anything in this town, that is no small act of giving.

I fell to the wayside shortly after the clinic opened. In the quintessential email blunder, which combined my usual candor and then hitting the send button to the entire steering committee by mistake, rather than one confidant, I unintentionally shared some insights that canceled my leadership role with the IFC. It felt awful at the time, and stupid, but to be honest, I was ready for some rest after pushing hard for the previous year.

Acupuncture was a foreign idea to me at the time that I met Anthony. But over the months of our work together on the steering committee for the IFC, and the pitched discussions as we articulated our hopes and desires, I became intrigued by his work. After the clinic was open, and I had left in disgrace, I encountered some personal health challenges. I developed severe reflux, and my astute PCP, Dr John Paul Mead, diagnosed the origins. My cardiologist had ramped up my total daily dose of potassium to 60meq. That would be three horse pills a day. John Paul told me to knock off the potassium. Following this with the advice of another astute clinician in the Emergency Department where I worked, Mike Ronald, FNP-C, two weeks of a PPI got me back on track. It also made me interrogate my regimen of cardiac medications, including Lopressor, a beta blocker, which helped promote my latent asthma, and was making me depressed. This wasn’t the first time that my kind and brilliant cardiologist lead me down the garden path with his protocolized treatment. (He later encouraged me to get Covid boosters through his N-95, even after I tried to explain how I had been injured by the Covid shots).

I contacted Anthony to ask if he had any bright ideas. He turned to his extensive collection of aged and modern books, and identified an acupuncture treatment for dysrhythmias developed by a British physician in Hong Kong back in the late…1800s. I began seeing him every couple of weeks, and within two months, was off the Lopressor. I didn’t have to restart the potassium, my asthma improved, and my palpitations (PVCs and PACs) became far less frequent. Following this experience, I would return every four months or so for what Anthony called my tune up.

We would chat at the beginning of my treatments, as Anthony was placing needles. He was funny, and told me some great stories of his adventures. I learned that he was a martial artist with black belts, who had traveled to China, and back home, taught weekly classes in Tai Chi. I talked about my wife, our cats, work, patients, and family. He talked about his wife, daughter, dogs, patients and family. Based upon my dramatic improvement under his care, and listening to him over many months, I came to understand that he was a healer. Frankly, he was the first person I ever met to whom I could credibly assign that title.

After I graduated as an FNP-C from SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2014, I went to work with Dr Muhammad Wattoo. He is a physician’s physician, who cares for all of the former hospital CEOs, and many physicians in our community. We knew each other from CPR classes together over the years, and I found him to be extremely intelligent, patient, an excellent teacher, and one of the few remaining independent physicians in Ithaca.

Before we agreed to work together, I told Wattoo (as he is called) that I wanted to be able to use homeopathic remedies in my practice. He checked with his malpractice insurer, and as long as this was limited to 5-10% of my patients, it would be fine. I didn’t ask him about referring patients to Anthony for acupuncture, but I did that too. In fact, after working in Wattoo’s office for several months, he pulled me aside one day and bluntly accused me of getting kickbacks for referring patients to Anthony. I was shocked! First, because I thought that we both understood each other to be upstanding men with integrity. Second, because, well, it was just so preposterous. After I overcame my stunned silence, I asked him how many patients he thought I had referred to Anthony. He had been counting, and it was more than twenty. It was probably more like fifty! Then I asked him, “Are the patients getting better?” Now it was his turn to be silent, because the plain truth was that, yes, everyone I referred to Anthony had improved clinically. At that point I said, “Well, I’m not profiting from the referrals, and he has even made home visits to some of our sickest patients. In fact, my 90 year old man who had been bed bound and sliding towards his demise is now up and walking again, crowing that Anthony saved his life. If they are all getting better, then I don’t think there is more to discuss.” And I took my leave.

The world went sideways in the Winter of 2019, and I came to understand the truth about the plandemic, Ivermectin (IVM), and the pharma-influenced bent of the medical system I had worked in since 1997. I tried to find ways to prescribe IVM to people in my community. One local PCP who was Canadian-born and a graduate of McGill was willing to at least talk about it, for months, but ultimately decided that he couldn’t be my collaborating physician. He decided that the risk to his license and practice was too great. I then reached out to my former co-chair of the steering committee for the IFC, Dr Waldman. She spoke plainly, essentially telling me no, and good luck. After leaving SUNY Upstate in August of 2021, I briefly held jobs at the local county health department, and then a local prison for youth, before I was offered a position with Dr Pierre Kory’s telemedicine clinic. My wife Kerrie was prescient, and sent me off to my stepmother’s home in Connecticut for the first week the practice opened. I set up a card table and folding chair in Betty Ann’s bedroom, and over dinner each night told her about my new adventure. Kerrie knew that she didn’t want to listen to me talking to patients all day long. As she has told me for years, “You’re a strong cup of tea.” She had grown accustomed to having long stretches to herself, with me working 12 hour shifts and having a 1 ½ hour commute each way. Having me home for dinner and bedtime snuggle time was nice, but let’s not get carried away.

When I returned to Ithaca, I approached Anthony and asked if we could work out a deal. I needed an office to work out of, and we both could use the company. He readily accepted, and so for more than three years we have cohabitated in the clinic space of his acupuncture practice. What I didn’t expect, but have come to rely upon, is another live human being, who is not only a wise and experienced clinician, but who clearly sees the false narrative of the last five years. Heck, the false narratives of the last decades. Even on days when we barely spoke between visits and rushed bathroom breaks, just the smile and knowing look helped me stay sane.

Anthony is a jokester. He has a stuffed dinosaur, for whom I don’t know the complete story, except that “he helped me get through graduate school.” The dinosaur is named Cappy (not sure if the spelling is correct, but that’s my spelling). For months we had a playful game. I don’t remember who started it, but one of us would hide the dinosaur, and the other had to find it. House rules were that the dinosaur stayed in my office proper. I broke the rules a couple of times, and when Anthony warned me, I didn’t realize how serious he was. The last time I broke the rules, I hid Cappy amidst the Spathipyllum, otherwise know as a Peace Lily. It seemed like the perfect prehistoric forest to me. Nope. Anthony couldn’t find him, and when he did, after two days and one hint, that was it. No more Cappy.

About a month later I tried to renew our games by bringing my precious childhood Zotty to work. My maternal grandparents, Baba and Grandpop, gifted each of their grandchildren with a Zotty. The German toy company Steiff invented the jointed plush bear in 1902. Ours were post WWII models, which used caramel brown fur tipped with white for a fluffy and wild look. Zotty is a nickname from zottelig, which means shaggy or unkempt in German. Unkempt indeed! Zotty is fully jointed for posing, with glass eyes, and a growler box that emitted noise when you squeezed his abdomen. Mine stopped growling after a childhood of squeezes. Anyway, I thought that introducing my precious Zotty would work, and it sort of did for a little while.

There is also the ever changing sign in the bathroom. It varies between a zombie theme and a dinosaur attack theme. It spoofs the ubiquitous workplace safety signs in hospitals. On one Halloween, there were red spatters on the sign which made me do a double take. The sign still gets a smile from me whenever I see it.

Anthony has been very ill since early August, and is currently in palliative care. He hasn’t been able to see patients at the IFC, or teach Tai Chi classes in our community. The loss I feel most poignantly is his daily presence in our shared clinical space. I think he has made his peace with this world, but I’m not ready to let him go just yet. My patients have taught me to use the word cure, and every day I bring to work the word hope. Even when all the leaves have fallen off my favorite gingko in the whole wide world, I know that life still dwells in its roots, trunk and branches, and I pray that we will live to see another springtime, together.

An Idea

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PRESENT

Dr Pierre Kory opened our telemedicine practice, the Advanced COVID-19 Care Center, in February of 2022. We became partners in June of 2022, followed by renaming our practice the Leading Edge Clinic. In the years since than time, we have learned a lot about how to prevent COVID, treat acute COVID, and care for patients with post acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and injury from the COVID shots. I really don’t want to call them vaccines because, in truth, they are experimental, genetic therapy products at best, and bioweapons at worst.

As someone injured by the COVID shots, I’m very sympathetic to patients who become frustrated with the slow pace and not-so-linear path of recovery. At times, they turn in desperation to novel therapies, clinicians and practices which make promises of effective treatment – and frequently charge a hefty sum for their services. Part three of my series on Winning for losing is where I was headed all along. I wanted to make you laugh and smile with stories of small time gambling in part one, and shared my car follies in part two, because when we delve into the misadventures of my patients, it can get pretty dark.

The Leading Edge Clinic is a cash-payment telemedicine practice, and our fee structure can be shocking to anyone who has only ever paid co-pays for shitty conventional healthcare. Our prices reflect the true cost of delivering quality care, in which you spend a lengthy period of time in a visit with an expert clinician. Our course of care utilizes live, highly trained and knowledgeable Registered Nurses to deliver patient education and perform regular clinical follow ups, rather than Medical Assistants or computer bots. Thanks to Pierre’s relationship with the FLCCC Alliance, we have a very modest pro-bono fund which we can utilize to supplement care for existing patients, and once in a great while, a new patient.

In this context, I don’t blame a patient when they decide to bet it all on the roulette wheel of treatment. It’s just that, most of the time, it doesn’t turn out very well. One thing I have learned in our care of PASC and vaccine injury, is that ongoing trials of treatment, over time, is what has the greatest long-term benefit. There is no magic cure, in part, because we are living in a world contaminated with spike, and like a lobster trying to crawl out of the tank, as soon as you reach the top, another lobster may pull you right back into the morass. Recovering from PASC and injury by COVID shots is certainly not for the faint of heart.

A few weeks ago, during my ritual visit to the Ithaca Farmers Market, I stopped at the stand for Christi Sobel and bought four boxes of cards featuring her original artwork. Why would I do that? Because in the last two months, three patients have died, and when they do, I want to send a personal note to the survivors. Caring for PASC and the vaccine injured, and more recently, cancer patients, is not for the faint of heart either.

I’ll preface the stories below with the assertion that most of the practitioners who these patients went to are “the good guys.” My writing isn’t meant to pick on any of them, but rather to illustrate how much time, effort and money can be expended without clinical improvement for individual patients. This is the strongest argument I can make for the wisdom of limited, successive trials of therapy, with steady, modest gains, as the most successful path forward. All patients’ names are changed to protect their identity, but their stories are true.

RECENT PAST

Welcome to Hard Times by Charlie Crockett

Life's a casino
I'm telling you
And everybody's playing
Boys and girls
women children
Me and you
The dice are loaded
And everything's fixed
Even a hobo would tell you this

MILLY

Milly had been a writer before vaccine injury, and made a decent living at it. She was very proud of her sharp mind and financial independence. The shots changed all that, and there wasn’t a single visit with me in which she didn’t shed some tears or offer a few choice words for the rat-bastards who did this to her. If only she could get her hands on them. In my estimation, we were making steady progress, but, as happens sometimes, the incremental improvements only made her hungrier to be completely recovered. The day came when her package of visits was completed, and rather than sign up for another four months of care, she pivoted to a different solution. It was a clinic which promised redemption, for the small price of $20,000. She dipped into her life savings, and put herself at their mercy. They drew blood, tested urine, performed a wide range of studies which I had never before (or since) encountered, made pronouncements about her diagnosis, delivered an arsenal of proprietary pills and potions, and...she got worse. Just like with the slot machines in Atlantic City and a used car dealer on Long Island, there was no guarantee of success, satisfaction, or your money back.

She felt depleted, distraught, and humiliated. We didn’t hear from her for several months, as she gathered the gumption to return to us and relate what had happened, asking if we would take her back, while gathering up the pieces of her remaining health and trying again to rebuild some semblance of a functioning life. We did start again, and as we keep on learning, we were actually able to help her regain lost ground. There was, however, a new tension to each visit, because now Milly was $20,000 poorer, so that the cost of each visit, test, supplement or prescription, became a constant source of contention and complaint.

SUE

Sue is in her early twenties, and comes from a very modest working family in a Southern state. She has long standing mental health issues which have compelled her to continue living at home with her parents when she would have rather been living on her own. Upon the recommendation of her family’s long-time PCP, she received two mRNA COVID shots; the second one despite adverse reactions and an Emergency Department (ED) visit within hours of the first. Her health deteriorated rapidly, and she suffered a wide range of symptoms, from debilitating headaches, skyrocketing anxiety, chest pain, dyspnea, dizziness, palpitations, POTS (rapid heart rate with position changes and minimal exertion), severe bilateral leg pain, and neuropathy. She spent days in bed or on the couch due to soul-crushing fatigue.

Her family dipped into their life savings and paid for Sue to travel with her parents to Los Angeles, CA, home to one of two clinics run by AMA Regenerative Medicine & Skincare Inc., founded in 1999 by  Dr. Alice Pien and Dr. Asher Milgrom. Pierre knows Dr Milgrom to be a talented physician and fine human being; he presented at the first FLCCC Conference in October 2022. AMA focuses on use of five central therapies, which include IV ozone therapy, EBOO/F, and IV therapies, which effectively target mitochondrial health. AMA reports that together with stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen, their treatment has resulted in a speedy and complete recovery for approximately 70% of their patients. Unfortunately, after spending about three weeks in California receiving treatment from AMA, Sue was worse, and headed home with her parents. The center continued to call them for weeks, encouraging Sue to return for more treatment, but her parents had used up what money they had; there would not be another visit.

Months after this disappointing – and discouraging – trip, Sue and her mother had their first visit with me. It was challenging, because her symptom burden was so severe, and her anxiety so high, that the outline of pathology and treatment which I explained overwhelmed Sue. As I recall, she didn’t start any of the medications which I ordered, and didn’t show up for her second or third visits. At least six months passed, and we heard from Sue’s mother, signing her up again. At that time, Sue said she was now ready to try the interventions which we had initially discussed. Between Sue’s first visit with me, and her second visit six months later, I had begun to learn about Iliac Venous Compression (IVC) or May Thurner Syndrome in patients with PASC or those injured by the COVID shots. With my new understanding, Sue’s presentation was more clearly that of a person suffering from IVC, and we initiated plans to have an MR Venogram to evaluate this. The MRV was positive, meaning it showed severe left iliac venous compression, and we set up an initial telemedicine consult with Dr Brooke Spencer, our collaborating Interventional Radiologist in Colorado. Sue traveled to Colorado, had a stent placed, and returned home, showing excellent improvements over the next weeks. She is still a patient today, and we are steadily addressing the lingering, although significantly decreased symptoms of leg pain, headaches, and cognitive impairment. She has initiated treatment with Sulodexide, which is showing great promise for repairing injured endothelium, while also dramatically lowering microclotting, with less bleeding risk than Eliquis or Plavix.

FRANK

Frank is one of the most injured patients I have ever met. He has also spent more money and tried more therapies than any of my patients. Conservatively, by last count, he had spent more than $200,000 on trying to get better. Among the list of physicians he dropped big money with are Dr Bruce Patterson’s team where he paid $1500 per month for Maraviroc, before Patterson dropped the price (as he owns the patent for Maraviroc) to $500 per month. The Maraviroc helped him breathe, but as he reported, “It shrank my stomach to the size of a walnut!” He did countless cytokine panels (Patterson’s proprietary lab), with levels that went up and down with the wind.

Next he traveled to Panama for stem cell therapy, which he later repeated in the Midwest. Since May 2023, we have offered mesenchymal stem cells and exosomes (MSC-Exosomes) to patients. We replicate the stage two clinical trials of Vitti Labs, which use MSC-Exosomes to treat post-COVID pulmonary fibrosis, administering infusions on days one, three and five. But we also administer nebulizations and nasal administration of exosomes. This is about $40,000 worth of therapy for a third of the cost, because unlike most other practices, we aren’t marking it up 400%. I tried several times to persuade Frank to come see us for treatment rather than the physician he chose in California, but ultimately, he made a Hail Mary pass to Hollywood.

In Hollywood, he paid $42,000 to have fat cells sucked out of his body, have the stem cells harvested, and then injected back into him. He was in quite a bit of pain after this treatment, and ultimately, it didn’t help. Amidst his many expensive forays into promising treatments, he would pop in and out of visits with me, checking up on the latest developments we were exploring. I can’t say that I did much better than any other practitioner for Frank, although these days I wish he was still in touch, and that he could try Sulodexide (SDX). The anti-fibrotic properties of SDX offer some promise of reducing the pulmonary fibrosis which continued to plague him.

JENNIFER

Jennifer is a woman in her mid 30s who lives in the Midwest and has always been a clean-eating, physically active, outdoors-oriented person. The vaccines brought all that to an abrupt stop with persistent chest pain and shortness of breath. She has pursued treatment with many different practitioners, and went so far as to travel to Cyprus to have aphoresis treatment with Dr. Marcus Klotz. The out-of-pocket cost for that treatment alone is more than $10,000, not including the airfare and the cost of food and lodging while in Cyprus. Unfortunately, not only did the treatment not help her get better, but long-term, she thinks it led to her clinical deterioration.

Dr Klotz is in the ZeroSpike forum which I participate in with about forty other practitioners worldwide. When he was extolling the virtues of his treatment in the group, I challenged him, because Pierre and I have had consistently negative experiences with aphoresis. Patients either get worse right away, or they have neutral effect, or they have some short-lived benefit before getting worse again. I can’t say that no one ever benefits from it, but when you have negative feedback like this right in front of you, with patients under your care, it makes a stronger impression than a stranger’s testimonial.

After I raised questions, Marcus, to his credit, qualified his statements to say (I’m paraphrasing here) “Well, there are more than forty methods and machines used to perform aphoresis. Most of them don’t work very well and some make patients worse. We are using The Big Green Monster, a machine which is no longer produced, very technically challenging to learn how to use and maintain, and we only have them in our clinics in Germany and Cyprus.”

Okay, that sounded more consistent with our clinical experience.  During one of her most recent visits, Jennifer filled me in on some of the details around her experience in Cyprus. “I have a bone to pick with Marcus. When I was in Cyprus, I asked him for data about the treatments that they were giving, and what the mechanisms of action were. He tapped his head and said, ‘It’s all up here.’”  She went on to note that she herself was a scientist, and told Marcus point-blank,“That is not how science works Marcus. You need to keep track of data and be able to present the factual evidence of your clinical successes, and failures, mechanisms of action, and the rationale for treatment.”

INSPIRATION

When I was in nursing school in the early 1990s, one of our assignments was to identify a nursing philosophy which we found compelling, and write about it. At the time, because I was working full-time and going to school full-time, it felt like a poor use of my time, and not immediately relevant to my practice. Over the last thirty years, I have slowly come to appreciate the value of this exercise. The nursing philosopher I chose to study was Sister Calista Roy, who taught at Boston College and developed the adaptation model of nursing.

Originally, Roy wrote that health and illness are on a continuum with many different states or degrees possible. More recently, she states that health is the process of being and becoming an integrated and whole person. Roy's goal for nursing is "the promotion of adaptation in each of the four modes, thereby contributing to the person's health, quality of life and dying with dignity".  These four modes are physiological, self-concept, role function and interdependence.

I think the most important insight of her philosophy is this: health is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, but reflects the individual’s ability to adapt to various environmental stimuli. Health exists on a continuum and is constantly changing based on the person’s ability to respond and adapt to changes in their environment. A healthy person is one who can successfully adapt to physical, emotional, and social challenges, achieving a level of balance and well-being across different dimensions of life.

This is not just a matter of semantics. As more and more of us struggle with chronic health challenges, it is a very practical matter to reframe our definition of health to include adaptability and support a positive sense of self. Last week I spoke with two patients, both far along in their recovery, which has been noteworthy to family and friends. Yet those patients think they have made no progress. Until they have reached 100% recovery, they think that they are unwell. A shift in perspective will serve them better.

OUR PATIENTS

I will be the first (maybe the second, because the patients will say this first), to say that not every patient story of treatment with us represents a resounding clinical success. None of us was taught in school how to treat injury from a bio-weapon! What I can also say is that every one of the twenty people who work in our practice cares deeply, has suffered financial losses, has endured persecution for acting on their/our convictions, and is mission-driven.  This is not just a job for us. It is a calling.

When patients discontinue care with our clinic, we don’t hold it against them or take it personally. As Pierre has said to our team many times “If I was vaccine injured, I would also be doing everything I could to recover.”  We don’t blow ozone up people’s asses, we don’t have an HBOT facility, and we don’t do aphoresis.  We do continue to learn from our own research, and from our patients themselves. We have provided stem cell and exosome therapy to a limited number of patients, more than half of whom have benefited from it.  We continue to add services for our patients. Aly Burt, RN is skillfully providing the Safe and Sound Protocol to help stabilize the vagus nerve in patients with dysautonomia and adrenal fatigue. We continue to advance our treatment of patients with safer anticoagulation which actually heals the endothelium and more effectively breaks down the fibrotic changes directly and indirectly provoked by the spike protein. Dr Sid Lawler is our Medical Director of Adjunctive Cancer Care, who brings her twenty years of clinical experience as a hospitalist. She is leading our participation in a five year study using repurposed supplements and prescription medications, in conjunction with a keto diet.

Our scheduling, nursing and medical team includes people who have PASC or have been vaccine injured themselves, and whom we have recruited to join our team. Our experience has been that from the front end to the back of the house, people who have gone through what you are going through are often in the best position to be empathetic and provide insightful and informed care.  As someone who is injured by the Covid shots, I would say the same about myself.  At the end of the day, we are all looking for a path to winning from losing.

P.S. I’m more than halfway through Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth by Anonymous (Author), Zoey O'Toole (Editor), Mary Holland J.D. (Editor, Foreword). I hope that you have your copy and are reading too, so that you can join me in a live book discussion in the near future.

In my Substack Road trip I made reference to traveling to Long Island to pick up a 2011 Volvo C30.  I did this back in April 2024. The entire day was an adventure, as I set off with $5300 in cash in a money belt strapped inside my shirt, feeling like I was going to conclude a drug deal. My favorite part of the trip was the ferry from Bridgeport, Connecticut to Port Jefferson, New York and back. When I lived in Denmark, I always enjoyed the ferry rides between Jutland and Sjaelland. Some ferries in Denmark have a lavish buffet with their open face sandwiches that are delicious. And then there’s the good Danish beer.

In the four months since I bought the C30, I have had a lot of time for buyer’s regret. I was so focused on my desire to come home with THAT car, that I willfully overlooked numerous flaws, which would have nixed my decision if I was in a more rational state. There are numerous significant impairments (aka dents) to the car’s quarter panels. It has had a couple of brushes up against poles or other cars that it shouldn’t have, and although they aren’t rusting, they are certainly not in mint condition. The windshield had a crack in the bottom right corner, not obvious to casual observation, but a full-stop roadblock to passing NYS inspection. This was later replaced to the tune of $400. The battery needed to be jumped before I even left the seller’s parking lot. Replacing the battery was another $400. (We favor sturdier batteries for the cold New York winters). The air conditioning wasn’t working, although the seller had stated in his Craigslist ad that it ran crisply cool. There was a check engine light on which he vaguely reassured me was because of some recent repairs to the engine and “After driving 50 miles it will turn off.”  The right fog light was broken. The back left reflector was cracked. Probably the most significant thing, which is more a matter of aesthetic, but has definitely impacted my enjoyment of the car, is that it smells like dog. It does not have a sweet smell.

The list goes on. When I got it back to Ithaca, I took the car to the dynamic duo which we have trusted for more than twenty years. Ana Snyder runs the front of the shop and her father Art Snyder makes it happen under the hood.  Art taught at BOCES for a while and any visit to his shop is likely to get you a lecture in physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering.

Because they are located twenty minutes outside of Ithaca, over the years I have typically brought our car to the shop and waited in their pleasant and cozy porch, or in warmer weather, outside, where one can enjoy their extensive plantings and abundant avian visitors. Art’s classic line after he has looked over your vehicle, ambled out of the shop and up the steps to the porch, is “Well, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Which would you like first?”

After Art inspected the C30, I don’t think there was anything good.  He said, “Well Scott, you’ve inherited a few problems.” And smiled. The timing belt needed adjustment. There were carbon deposits inside the cylinders. A section of the exhaust system was rusted and broken. There was an oil leak of uncertain origin. The air conditioning needed diagnosis. The left rear shock had lost all of its fluids, so that both rear shocks needed to be replaced. The total bill was about $2000. My $5300 bargain, if you count the windshield, the battery, and  registration, etc. was now an $8000 car.  Even after that work was done, the steering wheel still tilted to the right, and would need realignment or at least centering.

Then I had a brief period of trouble free enjoyment.  With a new shocks, the car didn’t go KER-THUNK every time I hit one of the many, many Ithacan potholes.  The acceleration on this little car is just amazing, owing to a five cylinder transverse engine and a manual six speed clutch. I made some effort to eradicate the foul smell of the car and it faded a little bit. Combined with a little denial, it smelled just fine, especially with the windows down.

I took care of some little issues myself. I replaced the right front fog light. I replaced the back left cracked reflector. I replaced the two rear license plates lights, as it wouldn’t pass inspection without those. I got a new handle for the inside hatch. I even replaced the Volvo logo on the grill, which made it look sharper. Then I took it to the local Volvo shop to get inspected, as Snyder’s recently gave up on the expense and hassle of handling New York State vehicle inspections. It passed!

In June, I drove the C30 from Ithaca to Ocean City, New Jersey and back.  One of my goals for that trip was to drive for as long and fast as I could in order to heat up the engine block and catalytic converter to help burn off some of the carbon deposits Art had noted during his post-purchase inspection. The Atlantic City Expressway was especially helpful in this regard. While in Ocean City, I asked my cousin Danny to go for a drive with me. With Danny at the wheel, we headed off the island of Ocean City to some back roads where he could put the car through its paces, and this demonstrated to me that the C30 had even more muscle than I had thought.  

Back up cameras were not standard back in 2011 and I had only been in Ocean City two days when I managed to crack the right rear tail light backing into the driveway of the place where we were staying.  I felt nauseous because I saw dollar signs and figured that little mistake was gonna cost me at least $300. When I got back to Ithaca, I dropped the car off at the Volvo shop. I had made this appointment weeks ahead because they are so busy. The original plan was for them to center the steering wheel, but while at the shore I had called and asked if they could order the right rear tail light for replacement while they were at it. 

Why didn’t I take the car to Snyder’s? That is a fair question, and the best explanation (excuse?) I have is that the Volvo shop is a ten minute walk from our home and they have decades of experience in maintaining and repairing Volvos. Ithaca is a Volvo town, or anyway it used to be, but now it’s becoming a Subaru town. Maybe a Tesla town next. The annual Ithaca festival has a parade in which a dedicated group of Volvo owners drive their cars with ballerina skirts around them while hairy-legged men in ballerina outfits dance around and on top of the cars. This pre-dated the popularization of trans culture. If you think that sounds bizarre, it is.   Not to be outdone, in recent years, Subaru owners formed their own parade contingent and perform the Subaru Samba with synchronized door opening and closing. My colleague Dr Fazio recently told me that Prius owners had a brief period with their own contingent, but we agreed that although Priuses get good mileage, they aren’t nearly as cool.

So, the Volvo place is close, a ten minute walk away, but it is also kind of a pain in the ass to drop the car off on Sunday night and pick it up on Monday after work. Which leads into how I managed to have five visits with them over the period of two months. When I went to pick the car up the first Monday night I saw that the bill was $150. That told me that they hadn’t replaced the tail light. A back-and-forth ensued between me and the owner, in which I asked about the tail light and at first, he said they hadn’t ordered it. Then he double-checked in the back room, returning to say, “Actually, it’s in the back, and we forgot to do it, but it’s late, so we’ll have to reschedule.” At least the steering wheel was centered.

Two weeks later, we dropped the Volvo off again on Sunday night. I left a note with the keys in the dropbox saying that I heard an odd sound coming from the left front of the car. At the short, my cousin Danny had thought there might be something wrong with a wheel bearing. When I went to pick the car up Monday night. The invoice said ninety bucks and I thought “Shit!” They didn’t do the tail light again. Another conversation ensued with the owner, in which he said the sound from the left front of the car was due to part of the inside of the wheel housing rubbing against the wheel when it was turned. He was sorry that they hadn’t done the light, but it was late and they were busy, so we would have to reschedule.  I asked him if he would be so kind as to double check that they had the right rear tail light waiting. He went to the back for a minute, and when he returned, he said “It’s a good thing you asked, because it looks like we ordered the left rear tail light. We’ll have to order another one.” I said “Well, if we make another appointment in two weeks do you think that the light will be in?” he said “Absolutely.”

Two weeks later, we dropped the car off on a Sunday night (need I mention that this was quickly getting old?) I left a note with my key adding two requests. One was that the mechanic please turn off the “needs mechanical service” light which automatically comes up at 150,000 miles. The other was that the ABS warning light had come on briefly, indicating that there was a malfunction and then turned off the next day.

When I returned on Monday night, the tail light…had not been replaced. The mechanic turned off the check engine light and evaluated the ABS issue, cleaning the sensors, but somehow didn’t get to the light. I know, I know. Some of you are saying “Don’t go back!” Yes, I had another conversation with the owner. He was apologetic about not replacing the light, but not amazingly so. He said yes, it’s too late. We’ll have to reschedule you again. I took note of the mechanic’s typewritten message on the invoice, which said that the serpentine belt was old and should probably be replaced. Ever the eager learner, I asked the owner to clarify for me the difference between a timing belt and a serpentine belt, because I knew that the timing belt had been replaced at 110,000 miles, and we were now at 149.000 miles. He adeptly explained the difference between the two, which left me with the impression that replacing a serpentine belt was a relatively brief and inexpensive job costing a few hundred dollars. 

We brought the car back on a Sunday night two weeks later. I had a lot of visits in the office the next day, and was not able to get downtown to pay the bill before the Volvo shop closed. I asked my beloved wife Kerrie to do so in my stead and she texted me that the bill was $1500. Holy shit! That Monday we picked it up after hours. As soon as I turned the key in the ignition, I knew that something was wrong. There was a new, unpleasant sound coming from the front of the car, which sounded like an exhaust system  gone awry.  I drove home with a heavy heart, popped the hood in the driveway and could hear the sound and smell the exhaust rising directly from the engine compartment. No Bueno.

I called the owner of the Volvo shop first thing Monday. If you haven’t figured out by now from reading my Substack, I have a long fuse, but when you get to the end of it, I have one hell of a temper. I’ll call it a Marsland family trait, no matter your gender. To my credit, I kept my language clean and my tone civil. I explained my disappointment that I had dropped off the car for a limited specific job and got the car back with a new problem that the mechanic should have heard while driving the car out of the garage and investigated further. The owner didn’t disagree with me, and this time, rather than making me one wait two more weeks, he agreed to have the car come back in in the next day or so.

When I talked to the owner in our next conversation, he said “Yes, you were right. There is a problem with the exhaust system. The gaskets for the manifold need to be replaced and that is about a $600 job. But, that has nothing to do with replacing the timing belt and would have happened anyway. “   I didn’t argue.

My memory finally caught up with the current situation and I recalled that there had been a sticker on the engine block when I bought the C30 indicating that the timing belt had been replaced at 110,000 miles.  The Volvo mechanic had conspicuously removed it. I took the car in for replacement of a serpentine belt, and they replaced that and the timing belt. They charged me an extra $1000 for their effort, and gave me back a car with a new problem.  That evening was when I noticed the fluid leaking under the car. Oh no. The next day when I was driving home from an errand, the steering got funky and I barely made it around a corner using all my strengths to turn the wheel. I pulled into the driveway and said “That’s it! Time to go to Snyders.”

I had AAA tow the car to Snyder’s repair shop. I didn’t expect rocket-fast service, because I was abruptly dropping my tale of woe upon them. The next week I got an email from Anna and the report was far worse than I could’ve imagined. All the fluid had leaked out of the boot for the steering system and the rack and pinion would need to be replaced. $2300.  The exhaust system was damaged where the flex pipe exited the engine block and would need to be replaced, including the expensive catalytic converter, which would cost $5300. The water pump needed replacement, which at minimum would be a $700 job, but there might be other issues while repairing that. The caveat was that the total cost was uncertain. My $5300 bargain now needed an infusion of $8300 at minimum to be roadworthy. My first response to Anna was to ask, “Have you ever donated a car to a charitable organization?”

I’ll tell you that I’m a performance-improvement-oriented person. I think that is one of the things that makes me a good clinician at the Leading Edge Clinic. I’m observant, and although I can make mistakes like any other human being, I tend to learn more quickly from them and correct course. I’ve had several weeks to reflect upon my decision-making and path with the C30. I know that there were many signals from the beginning that this car would be trouble and that I should leave it alone.

I got to speak with Ana and Art in person last week.  It helps to have known each other for 20 years. They were both very kind. They are both faithful Christians and very gentle people who are slow to blame, but in our conversation they were both crystal clear that the damage to the exhaust system was directly related to the timing belt replacement, which didn’t need to happen.

Anna said “You can just chalk this up to a midlife crisis.” I’ll tell you that, at least up until this moment, I didn’t think that I was having a mid-life crisis, I thought I was having an I bought a junky used car that I shouldn’t have and now it’s broken crisis, but hey, Anna was calling it as she saw it. I replied, “A very expensive midlife crisis.” Anna replied, “They always are Scott, they always are.”

Art’s therapeutic commentary related to his love of flying. When you are standing inside the shop getting your invoice and paying your bill, aside from one of the many cats walking around, you will see a photo of a younger Art Snyder shaking hands with another man in front of a single turboprop plane with the caption that he had just received his complex flying license. I also know that Art belongs to the East Hill Flying Club here in Ithaca, because we had once attended a pancake breakfast fundraiser at his invitation. Art said “Sandy [his wife] says that flying is a very expensive hobby, but it’s a lot cheaper than seeing a Psychiatrist.“ Thanks Anna and Art. Between the two of them, I left our conversation with the decision that one way or another, I would be driving a C30, and that was okay. 

P.S. After an Art’s diagnosis of the C30, the Volvo shop agreed to repair the exhaust system without charge. It’s not going to the junkyard just yet.

If you read Lightning Bug strictly for clinical content, skip to the P.S.S. at the end, and come back in two weeks, because today and next week, I’m going for the pure pleasure of Marsland family-style storytelling. Next week I’ll write about gambling on a used car, and in the third installment, the misadventures of patients seeking that magic bullet, no matter the cost or outcome.

VERY RECENT PAST

Almost every summer since I was developing in my mother‘s womb, the Marsland clan has gathered in Ocean City New, Jersey in one configuration or another. This is largely due to the generosity and hosting of my aunt Sue  and uncle Bruce. This last June I headed down to Ocean City in my recently acquired Volvo C30, while my wife stayed behind in Ithaca. Sometimes a girl just needs some alone time.

My uncle Bruce has been interested in horses and racetrack betting since he was six years old, hanging out at the local race track near where he and my dad grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania. He’ll usually come down to the shore for the first couple of days, get restless, and head up to Atlantic City for an afternoon and then head back to Delaware. He’ll come back down to the shore later in the week.

My cousin Danny, and second cousin Summer left mid-week so that the remaining Marslands were me, my cousin Lisa, my second cousin Emily and my aunt Sue.  While we were lounging on the beach soaking up the sun one afternoon Lisa had the idea that we should all go to Atlantic City that evening. I’ve only ever been to Atlantic City once, when we saw an Elvis impersonator with my aunt Sue and uncle Bruce, so I said “Why not?” 

Our general plan was that each of us would allocate twenty bucks for the slot machines and see how things went. I hung back and Emily went first. I was just taking it all in. The lights, the sounds, the characters, the cigarette smoke. Standing in the non-smoking section, I was getting more secondhand smoke than I remember since being a kid in some restaurant with the same absurd idea. All the smokers were seated over here and all the non-smokers were seated over there, as if we weren’t all sharing the same air.

Emily is a sassy young woman. I wouldn’t expect any different from the only child of a sassy mother and a spitfire father.  She comes by it naturally. With a couple pulls of the lever and a few pushes of buttons, she had already lost five bucks. “This sucks. Why does anyone do this? This is really dumb. I don’t know why we came here. I don’t like this.”  Next.

We wandered into a different section of slot machines and Sue took some turns. At least two times on our way over there, one of the security officers stopped us to ask Emily for ID. That’s what you get for looking so young and pretty. Sue didn’t lose quite as badly as Emily, but the net effect was a loss. Next.

We walked around a little bit until we settled into another section of slot machines and Lisa began to play. I stood behind her, fascinated. Although Emily‘s luck wasn’t great, she seemed to be good luck for Lisa, because the numbers kept on climbing. Before long, Lisa had converted $20 into nearly $90 in credit. 

Lisa then had her second good idea of the evening, which was that we go to the bar and get some drinks with her winnings. We took “our” receipts to the cashier and then moved on to the bar.

If you enjoy casinos, please don’t take any offense at my impression, but my experience was that it was all a bit of a freak show. The glazed look of people sitting in front of machines who appeared to have been there so long that there were cobwebs growing on them was disturbing. There was no end to the variety of human beings engaged in this activity. Our waitress looked like an anorexic Farrah Fawcett with Botox lips and frosted hair on stilettos. I think her name was Heather. Looking around, I felt like we were the obvious outliers, in our Lands End and L.L. Bean beach garb, but maybe in this bizarre Twilight Zone of the casino, it doesn’t matter—-come one, come all.

I’d never been to a casino per se, I had never played slot machine, and I thought I would go for three of three and order a drink I’ve never had before. So, I ordered a martini. Little did I know how complicated this would be. Having watched endless episodes of M*A*S*H, I thought that all people made martinis with gin and vermouth, and when the waitress-a-la-Farah-Fawcett asked me if I wanted vodka in my martini, I said “No thank you, can I please have a classic martini with gin?”  That garnered a pouty puff of Botox lips. The drinks came, including my martini in a classic martini glass with two enormous green olives on a toothpick. I took my first sip as the three ladies scrutinized me to see what my reaction was going to be. Not bad. Different. The olives were delicious.

We had a nice visit and enjoyed our drinks. $90 later, Lisa asked me “Are you going to play the slot machine Scott?” I guess I was. Not knowing casino etiquette, I asked if it would be OK to take our glasses back onto the floor as I was enjoying the look of my martini glass. Yes, I was getting into this. 

Now it was my turn. I sat down at the machine next to Lisa and bet “big.“.  At least the first five pulls of the lever brought wins and very quickly I was up to $70. Aunt Sue was standing next to me and that was when she said “You should decide now how much you’re willing to lose and when you’re going to stop.”  Wise words from experience, not so easy to follow. With about 10 more pulls, I had decreased my earnings by $20 and stopped.

Against her protest, I gave Lisa my net winnings and happily pocketed my $20 bill back in my wallet as the buzz of my Martini continued to slowly creep over me. An aside; you all know that there are families which fight over paying the bill and then there are families which FIGHT over paying the bill. Thankfully, in the Marsland family, you typically have to be sneaky about paying the bill in order to show your appreciation. I’ve learned to duck out to the bathroom and hand my debit card to the waitress.

Having had a nice time, feeling flush with our winnings, having enjoyed our very expensive alcohol, we called it an evening and headed to the parking garage. When we came to the parking attendant booth, he asked if any of us had a club card. Aunt Sue said yes she had one, but she hadn’t brought it with him. He gave us a $10,000 smile and said “You’re good!” and lifted the gate.  We all cheered! When you are a small -time once-in-a-lifetime gambler, saving $10 on parking can feel like five cherries just lined up on your slot machine. 

P.S.

Thanks to those of you who answered the reader survey re: a book group. Only subscribers with an email on file received it, as I’m not sure how else to ask you. The results can be seen at this link. It looks like Turtles All the Way Down, Vaccine Science and Myth, Edited by Zoey O'Toole and Mary Hollan will be first up. I’m reading it right now, and will propose a date and time in the next month.

P.S.S.

Give me an extra day and I will go wild! Lightning Bug now has two indexed lists of previous editions and their contents. Both are alphabetized, one by title, and a shorter one by clinical content. I plan to keep updating this periodically.

Mr Gali was my fifth and sixth grade teacher at Webster Hill Elementary School in West Hartford, CT.  He was a short and stocky man with a stern face and menacing, thick eyebrows.  He had a passive-aggressive way of massaging the shoulders of us misbehaving boys, which both taunted our nascent homophobia and established him as the Alpha male in the room.  As with most people – especially those that loom large in our past – he was complicated.  

He had a friend who we called Mrs Barker.  She was an elegant woman with red hair that she wore in an old-fashioned beehive doo.  At my young age, it was hard to say how young or old she was, but from this vantage point I would guess her late 50s.  She wore neatly tailored pantsuits, or a blouse and slacks, and always had light scent of a flowery perfume.  

Mrs Barker and her husband had lived in Japan for some time, and on some of the occasions that she would join our class, she brought treasures from her travels, including the most beuatiful silk kimonos and caligraphic scrolls.  Her stories stirred our imaginations with news of a peaceful people, who ate fish and rice for breakfast, while sitting on bamboo mats, lived in homes with moving rice paper walls, and who use terms such as Chan and San.   Until we grew older and could venture out ourselves, this was an engaging way to expand our understanding and awareness of the world beyond our immediate experience.

I was aware of birds as a boy, because there were many trees around our home and in the mature neighborhoods of West Hartford, CT.  But I had never touched a bird, or seen one up close, until Mrs Barker.  What would have been weird or creepy from another person, came off as eccentric from her, i.e. when a bird would fly into a window of her home and break its neck, and she would wrap it up in a plastic bag and put it in her freezer.  (I always imagined them right next to her half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream).  She would then bring them to our classroom, so that we could feel what light as a feather really was, and admire their bright colors and delicate features in detail.  

Our class once made field trip to Mrs Barker’s house.  It was a quite a spread, almost a museum.  There were more kimonos on the walls, as well as numerous vases and sculpture from her time in Japan.  She encouraged us to touch and smell, which was so different from don’t-touch field trips to the Hartford Atheneum.  She was always happy to entertain our many questions.   I didn’t even get in trouble, because my mind was present, and I was able to pay attention in this classroom of life.

RECENT PAST

One of the reasons we moved to Ithaca, NY nearly twenty five years ago was Cornell University.  No, we didn’t attend as students or work there as minions or Ivy League demi-gods/goddeses.  But we knew that the presence of such an old and esteemed institution of higher learning conferred many opportunities and resources to the surrounding community.  

Cornell was part of my childhood.  My great grandfather had attended the state side of the school (as compared to the private side) and studied agriculture, twice!  It was a source of friction with my great grandmother’s newspaper tycoon parents that Walter Stanley Marsland, Sr was happy as a clam to grow cash crops in New York and Florida, trucking his family back and forth according to the season.  His son, my great uncle David, studied at Cornell as an undergraduate in chemistry.  As a result, my Nana and Pop pop had a thing for Ithaca.  They came to Ithaca for their honeymoon in 1937, and later they would visit Uncle David while he was in school.  

One of my Pop pop’s quirks was that he enjoyed picnics all year round, when more delicate souls wouldn’t even consider spreading out a blanket and nibbling on fried chicken and fresh pie.  Several times during my childhood, I rode along for four hours with Nana and Pop pop from Parkerford, PA to Ithaca for a picnic.  I remember the suspension bridge, the gorges, and the vast Cornell campus.  I remember being cold, and quietly wondering that nobody else seemed to be doing what we were doing.     I remember my Pop pop and Nana laughing, and looking at each other with a surprising tenderness and twinkle in their eyes.  Perhaps remembering their honeymoon? Then we drove another four hours home.  

True to our expectations, one of the resources Cornell has provided to Ithaca is the Lab of Ornithology.  I don’t think I ever even heard the word ornithology before we came to Ithaca, and it took many years of living here before we ventured into this realm.  The birders among you are likely familiar with the Lab of O as a tremendous resource of pictures, sounds, and knowledge of all things birdy.  There is a physical building that is a seriously expensive pile of stonework and architectural extravagance.  Then there is the land and the paths around the water features, with blinds for watching the birds in any season.  On Saturday mornings, if you can get your sleepy head out of bed and show up by 7:30am, you don’t even need to bring binoculars (provided) to join a group for a walk and bird watching.  

I’ll just say birders are weirdos.  And, I’m finally old enough that I’m glad to be counted as a weirdo among weirdos.  Birds are simply amazing.  There are so many different kinds, doing so many different things, in so many different ways, and regularly performing feats of aeronautical maneuver, navigation and long distance travel that it renders me silent.  I marvel at the miracle of it all.

PRESENT

My commute is a seven minute walk up a steep hill to the clinical space I share with my colleague of twenty years, a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbalist and acupuncturist.  Over the last week, I have heard the sounds of the birds returning to Ithaca, or passing through on their migration further north.  The Sapsucker greets the morning with its raspy chatter and a harsh, squealing weep.  The Robins emit their string of clear whistles.  The Black Birds lift my eyes and heart from my weary trudge with their shrill rising squee and concluding metallic click.

The deer which eat our perennials and frolic in the field outside my office window will soon be mating, and hiding their fawns in surprising places. The ground hog woke up much earlier than I can enjoy noting, and can be seen nibbling at the base of the bird feeder every morning.  Soon the family of skunks, or their most recent progeny, which has lived under our mud room for nearly a decade will show themselves.  I will have to be more cautious when I arrive home or take out the compost, so that I don’t get sprayed!

Sprouts, buds, tendrils and shoots are appearing all around us as reminders that we have made it throught another Winter.  I look forward to seeing what plantings survived, what volunteers landed in the soil from the excrement of a passing bird or a resourceful squirrel.  There will also be the encroaching invasive species which will test our perserverance again this year. 

My beloved steadily conceives and brings forth creative expression into the world.  She manifests this in glass and metal which require infinite variations of light to fully appreciate.  Her labor is Olympic, Athenian even, as she moves against the currents of a collapsing society, a devaluation of art, and loss of hope.  While I’m trying to help make life bearable for hundreds of patients, she ensures that life is worth living, because there is spark, spirit and beauty.

P.S.  It turns out that there was in fact a subscriber from Wyoming already, who was the recipient of a lifetime subscription to Lightning Bug.  The  50^th state from which I am still wishing, and desiring, oh, so ardently, a reader, is the wildly beautiful and rugged West Virginia.  Please announce yourself monsieur/mademoiselle/madame.

P.S.S.  This week marks the occasion of reaching 1000 subscribers to Lightning Bug!  There are so many Substacks, and posts and papers and, and, and to read, and yet some of you spend some of your time each week reading Lightning Bug.  Thank you! 

PAST

When I was in seventh grade, we moved to the sticks. Our home was across the road from a state game preserve, which was literally swamplands. We had no cable, and the primary source of heat was a big woodstove to which I dedicated many hours, stacking wood, carrying wood inside, starting fires in the morning, and keeping the fire burning during the day. The bus stop after school was a quarter mile from our house down a gravel and oil road. We didn’t have Atari and my parents worked. There was only so much trouble to get into.

The single TV channel we could get carried The Rockford Files with James Garner, and so my slacker afterschool routine was to grab a big mug of Lipton instant tea, a bag of pretzels, and plop down on the worn sofa by the wood stove to watch. I’m really not sure it’s fair to call the sugary mixture tea, as it bears so little resemblance to the real stuff. But I loved the salty sweet yeasty flavors of fake tea and pretzels, and couldn’t get enough of Jim Rockford’s misadventures.

Years before the handsome Tom Selleck played Magnum PI, James Garner won my heart. Magmum PI lived the cushy life in a Hawaiian guest house and rolled in a red Ferrari. Rockford was the cranky antihero who drove 1974-1978 model year Pontiac Firebirds, was a wrongly convicted ex-con, and lived with his dad Rocky in a trailer. He got beat up more often than not.

My favorite scene ever was when Rockford flipped his cigarette into the face of a thug. It was supposed to be a distraction, enabling him to land a punch and escape. Instead, the thug didn’t miss a beat and knocked Rockford off his block. It’s not that I liked seeing my guy get beat up. It’s more that I felt validated, like, “Yeah, you think you’ve got it figured out and it never goes the way you imagined. Blam!”

RECENT PAST

My Nana took tea to the next level. She would brew half a dozen bags of Lipton orange pekoe tea for-ev-er on the stovetop in a gallon pot whose sole duty was tea time. Then she would dump a little can of frozen lemonade in and voila! Iced tea Marsland-style.

In my late twenties I would make fun of my friend Brett and his tea habits. He wouldn’t be caught drinking tea made with a tea bag. In his cupboard were special decorative cans from Kusmi Tea with names like Prince Vladmir. He had a special tea pot which heated water to just the right temperature for a particular tea, AND he had a timer to brew it for a specified time. It all seemed so precious and pretentious, and I figured, well, unless you were English or a metrosexual, a bag of Lipton was adequate.

Fast forward twenty five years and I think that Brett could make fun of me! In the top drawer of my work desk I have a thermometer and a tea strainer. Teabag tea tastes like cardboard to me now, and there is a time and a temperture for all: two minutes for Sencha, three for green, four for black, and five for Pu’er. 160F for green, 170F for Matcha (and a whisk don’t you know), boiling hot for black. And no burned tongue for me, as it won’t pass my lips until it’s cooled to 140F. Rishi Tea, the largest American importer of organic teas became my go-to supplier.

With the pandemic, green tea went beyond yumminess to essential equipment for survival. I was working evenings at SUNY Upstate in the trauma center, and the drive home at 12:30am was 1 1/2 hours of bleak, cold, darkness. I calculated that I could start sipping upon departure and stay awake on the road, then drink a big glass of water upon arrival home and wash out the caffeine. It wasn’t until I joined Pierre at The Leading Edge Clinic and began learning how to fight COVID, then treat post-acute sequelae of COVID (PASC) and vaccine injury that I realized how important that green tea had been.

There are multiple studies now which demonstrate how the epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in green tea blocks spike entry into cells. See studies here, there and everywhere. It turns out that after spending hours providing bedside care to sweating, coughing, distressed acute COVID patients, that green tea was not only keeping me awake on the drive home, it was also blocking spike from taking hold in my body.

PRESENT

All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan, made famous by Jimi Hendrix:

There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief

Business men, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None will level on the line
Nobody offered his word
Hey, hey

No reason to get excited
The thief, he kindly spoke
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But, uh, but you and I, we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late, hey

If you’ve read this far, let me reward your curiosity and tenacity by introducing you to Baobab. After eight months of personal and patients’ use, tracking labs and monitoring clinical effect, I think it is some kind of way out of the confusion, and none too soon.

Baobab is a tree which covers half the continent of Africa. It dates back to biblical times, and was important to tribal people in arid desert regions, because both its hollow core and spongy bark could store water. It is an odd looking tree, which produces a large fruit the size of a football, which has a hard shell. When ripe, the fruit is a dry powder which can be mechanically separated from fiber and seeds. Every single part of the tree is useful to humans and animals alike. The leaves can provide forage for wild animals and livestock, the bark can be made into rope, the wood used for fuel, and the fruit for medicinal purposes. For these reasons it is often referred to as The Tree of Life.

Before there were words for these actions, Baobab fruit was antibiotic, antiviral, antifungal, antipyretic (fever lowering), and poison neutralizing. Tribespeople who hunt with poison tipped arrows and spears will mix Baobab powder with water to apply to the entry wound and neutralize the poison so that they can eat the flesh. Baobob has a pre-biotic fiber which modulates glucose metabolism, thus lowering fasting blood glucose levels. The fiber also creates a welcoming environment for an abundant and diverse population of bifida bacteria in the gut.

Baobab also has EGCG.

Last Spring, Pierre was at a conference in Hawaii and I was covering some of his patients. It was serendipity that I saw the labs come back for a family which had decided to measure the spike antibody for everyone in the household. Mom, college-age daughter and high school-age daughter were unvaccinated, with spike antibody (ab) levels of ~7,000, 3500 and 1500 U/mL respectively. Dad is a physician working in a busy outpatient clinic. He received two Pfizer shots, both from bad batches, and was exposed to ongoing shedding while delivering patient care in a healthcare environment. His spike ab was about 100 U/mL. I was stunned, and understood that this was either a lab error or a very intriguing aberration.

I picked up the phone and called this family, speaking with the mom at length. Dad didn’t take any medications, nor did he take any supplements. In fact, it took about thirty minutes to uncover what he could possibly be doing which would result in such a low spike ab level. Finally she said, “Well, there is this drink he makes every morning and takes to work. It has Baobab powder, and he mixes it with stevia and ginger. He only drinks it during the week, and sips it over the course of the day.” Why Baobab I asked? “It has a lot of vitamin C, and pre-biotics, but I’m not really sure. He’s been drinking it for years.” I thanked her and hung up, then spent the next four hours reading papers about Baobab.

As I read about Baobab’s many qualities, and then learned that it had EGCG, I concluded that the Baobab was somehow connected to this physician’s low spike ab level. He was patient 0. Researchers had considered Baobab to control COVID, but as far as I could tell, hadn’t pursued it further. I pulled $500 out of my piggy bank, messaged twenty patients whose spike ab levels were >25,000 U/mL or relatively high, and made them a proposal. Eat, drink, sip, but one way or the other get 1 Tbsp of Baobab in your body every day for a month, and then let’s recheck your spike ab level.

Within the month the feedback started to roll in, and I had my own experience to contribute. I started drinking the Baobab with my morning vitamins. That didn’t go so well, because I ended up with increased paresthesias (decreased sensation) in my toes and feet. After hearing the same story from three other participants in the pilot study, I suggested that we all sip it over the course of the day, like patient 0. The paresthesias resolved.

When the spike ab results started to come back after a month of Baobab, there was a signal. If patients ate it or drank it, there was a slight change in their levels. But if they sipped it, boy howdy! There were drops in spike ab levels reaching 5,000 U/mL over a month. That was enough for me, and I began guiding patients to sip Baobab, 1 Tbsp in 16oz of water over at least an eight hour period.

More feedback with additional patients revealed a few quirks of the therapy. If someone has severe mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), they may need to go low and slow. Well, just about all of our patients have some level of mast cell activation, so I guided everyone to start with adding only 1/4 teaspoon to 16oz of water and slowly advancing. Initially, some patients (including me) experienced some bloating while sipping Baobab. I’ll attribute this to the recalibration of our microbiomes as we build up the bifida.

Labs in patients who were sipping Baobab showed a declining fasting glucose, similar to what we see when we use Berberine. Patients also report enormous formed brown stools with a clean finish, i.e. no wiping necessary, and a sensation of complete bowel evacuation. Gotta love that.

Then things got interesting. We have been treating patients for microclotting for over a year now, and so some patients were beginning to retest. What I saw was multiple signals that unvaccinated PASC patients who were sipping Baobab dropped their microclotting scores by two points in 2-3 months. For reference, it often takes six months on anticoagulation with Aspirin, Eliquis and Plavix for a PASC or vaccine injured patient to drop his/her/their score one point. It would appear that not only does Baobab block spike entry into cells, but also that it helps break down microclots faster and safely. How?

The likely answer arrived a few weeks ago when I was reading a review article about natural products for antithrombosis. I learned that EGCG acts along the COX-1 pathway, same as Aspirin, to inhibit platelet aggregation and activation. Whereas Aspirin has about a 20% effect, EGCG has about a 90% effect.

Why not just take EGCG then? Well, you could. But any herbalist worth his/her/their salt would explain that when you isolate an active component of a plant-based remedy, you leave behind other components which synergize and ameliorate adverse effects. Given what I have seen clinically over the last eight months, my vote is to stick with green tea and Baobab sipping.

Where do you get Baobab? There are plenty of sources online if you want to shop around, as Baobab is an agricultural product.

How do you mix it? If you can make gravy without lumps, you can mix Baobab. I usually start the day by slowly tapping one Tbsp of Baobab into a cup of water as I stir it with a spoon. I smush out any remaining lumps, and then add this to a thermos with cold water, shaking and sipping every half hour over the course of the day. Every time I talk to a patient about Baobab, I take a sip!

What does it taste like? I would describe Baobab as having a mild citrus flavor. If it doesn’t agree with you, feel free to flavor it like patient 0. A few patients have complained that it has given them heartburn, and there have been others who can’t be bothered with the fuss and muss of mixing/sipping. My position it this: Baobab costs about $20 for a 1 1/2 month supply, blocks spike, breaks down microclots, builds up my bifida, lowers my fasting glucose, doesn’t taste too bad, and helps me have a very satisfying poop every day. Sold!

Baobab sipping is an economical way to combat shedding. My suggestion is to prepare your Baobab sipper before you head into any social interaction. Start sipping ahead of time, sip during the event, and continue sipping afterwards. In effect you are delivering a steady supply of EGCG and whatever synergy we haven’t yet isolated in a lab, which is blocking spike entry into your cells. If you are going to travel, bring the powder with you and once you are through airport security, mix it up at the water fountain and get down to sipping. Our patients and team have been doing this for months, and overall the results have been positive.

Cheers!

P.S. If you have ever seen a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, you can appreciate the power of a groovy soundtrack. My wife and I really enjoyed the updated series of Battlestar Galactica, and I’ll never forget when Jimi Hendrix’s anthem showed up in the narrative. Five main characters keep hearing the song in their head, and end up together in the same rom where they realize they are the Final Five Cylons. Internet wisdom says: “The song's biblical and mythical connections make it fitting for the show, as it foreshadows destruction and leads to a new world.”

P.S.S. I have no financial stake in any of the products I recommend, including Rishi Tea.