By: RandyLynn Barron

All my life I have been the beneficiary of what I thought was good health, which I promptly and consistently took for granted. I was not raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That enormous blessed rescue came to me when I was 37 and in the U.S. Navy. I have always had a “feeling” about what was good for my body to do, eat and drink and what was not good for it. Let’s call it what it is, personal revelation, even for a not yet member! I have experienced these “feelings” even as a little person three years young.

As a young person, I trained for the Olympics as a sprinter (100m, 220m and 440m relay) for about 8 years, played women’s professional football in the 1970s, and generally stayed very athletic all my life. I bore and raised two children and have two grandchildren. Even as I aged, I was not experiencing the same illnesses of my age peers. I entered my 72-year on August 22, 2020.

In my youth, I wanted healthy options at the meal table, but that was very seldom granted, except from my mother who was British. She believed in a little fresh veggies and fruits, and cooked them too. My father, a Cajun, influenced those choices of preparation by cheering Mum when she cooked things like Roast Beef, Pork Roast, Lemon Meringue Pie, and Dirty Rice (a dish with one or more meats—chicken, pork and beef, a few veggies like onion, green pepper and celery, and of course pepper and other Cajun seasonings).

Once I left home at age 19, I started to get that “feeling” to experiment with not eating meat, drinking more water and green drinks, and I felt better. I was still eating overly processed sweets and pastry (gobs of butter, dairy, salt and sugar), and when the fast food market was spreading like wild fire I jumped right into it. Even so, I still enjoyed basically good health. However, I was anxious a lot of the time and had lots of problems focusing my attention for more than a few seconds or minutes.

One day, I injured my back on the track. I lost my timing of 11.0 seconds for the 100m and still kept training. I could not get my time past 11.3, which for a sprinter is like minutes for a long-distance runner. My body forced me to stop training, and my coach agreed. Fortunately, I never took any of the drugs doctors wanted me to take and never accepted the “exploratory surgery” they strongly advised. As the years passed, I still worked out for my health because it just made sense to me, and it made me feel better.

Everything in the area of my health was going peachy, or so I thought, until in the summer of 2015 when I purchased some meat from a local butcher, cooked it and ate it. That is when my healthy world came crashing down. I got a nasty case of pinworms. I mean nasty. I tried some natural type remedies that did not fully kill them, so I took myself to a doctor. He gave me a drug, which I took for two weeks. I was told to come back after that time. I did. He told me, “The worms are no longer a problem for you.” I said, “I think they are.” He said, “Well, you are fine now.” I did not feel fine.

For the next four and half years, I experienced getting weaker and sicker. My intestines and bowels were painful almost all the time. I had an intense itching, which started in my abdomen and eventually included my back, legs, arms, brain, head, neck and the bones in my rib cage. My brain was really foggy. I had almost no energy. My weight climbed to 178 lbs (I am 5’8”).

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