Back in 2006, my life completely flipped upside down. I came down with a terrible case of West Nile fever - a brutal, very high 105 F fever, caused by a mosquito-borne virus where Western medicine had virtually nothing to offer, other than keeping the fever down and pushing large amounts of IV fluid. The hospital approach at the time where I was working as a Registered Nurse, often involved treatments that suppressed the immune system, but my wife, God bless her, knew better than to take me down that road.

The illness left me disabled with panhypopituitarism – the parts of my brain that signal hormones had been damaged by the fever, simply weren't signaling properly, meaning I was producing virtually no adrenal, thyroid, or sex hormones. My hormone panels came back showing I had the hormone levels of a 90-year-old man. I was 38.

I was dying. I could feel it, my wife would ask me something simple — "...what do you want for dinner," or "...do you want to go for a walk tonight" — and it would take me so long to process the question that she'd get frustrated with me. These weren't hard questions. I just didn't have the capacity to answer them anymore without prolonged mental processing at a very slow rate.

I’ve actually lost about two years of memory during that stretch. I remember my whole life in detail, all the way back to being in diapers — except that two-year window. It's just gone, people will say: “Remember _________” and I cannot recall any detail of memory from that time.

Discovering the Bob Beck Health Protocol

Desperation set in because we simply couldn't live like that. Alternative approaches were never foreign or scary to me, I had learned early that alternatives were often as effective or better that drugs.

West Nile is in the flavivirus family. There's no antiviral medicine that works against it. You keep the fever down and keep fluids in the patient. That's the treatment, and most people will pull through if they have a strong immune system.

At the hospitals where we worked, the doctors were giving West Nile patients antivirals anyway. I'd ask them, “Do you realize this is a Flavivirus? It won't respond to antivirals, and those medications suppress the immune system of someone who needs it to be at 100%?” They'd tell me, “I have to do something...” and that's why Ava never took me to the hospital. She nursed my fever at home with medications to bring it down from about 105 F to 99-101 F and forced me to consume a lot of Pedialyte fluid. After a week or two she said my fever finally died out. I had lost about 30 pounds, was very weak and “brain foggy” and unable to function.

When Western medicine had nothing to offer to help me, Ava started digging. She set up an Amazon Books account — this was 2006-7, Amazon was still fairly new — and started ordering books, everything we could find, including The Body Electric. She'll tell you I did a lot of the digging too. I'll take her word for it. That stretch is almost entirely gone from my memory.

That research led us to Bob Beck's protocol.

With no other options really working, we fully committed.

What I Actually Did

We weren't dabbling. Here's what the routine looked like:

Ionic colloidal silver — I drank about a quart a day for the first month or so, keeping an eye on it to make sure I didn't overdo it.

Ozonated water — a quart most mornings, plus two more spaced out each day, always on an empty stomach.

Blood electrification (wrist pulsing) — I worked up to doing this two hours a day. I didn't start there. I built up to two hours slowly, over about two months, then held it there for a couple more months. After that I dropped back from every day to two or three days a week, kept going for a year or so, until I just felt like I didn't need it anymore.

Magnetic pulsing (the hand wand) — once or twice a day, and I did my whole body. I'd start at my left foot and just moved up the legs — pop, pop, pop — up through my legs (I'd do three passes across each leg since it penetrates about 7-9 inches of tissue) … up through my torso, my arms, my face, my head.

And the Brain Tuner on my ears. The whole shebang, every single day.

We had our blood looked at under a dark field microscope by an acupuncturist I was seeing. We'd read that blood analyzed this way normally dies within 15 to 45 minutes. Ava's untreated blood died off within 30 minutes. Mine was still alive two hours later. The acupuncturist said he wanted to see how long it lasted, so we called him two weeks later. Still alive. Ava had read about a man who had what they called "immortal blood" — he pulsed 18-20 hours a day for about a month, had his blood looked at, and over a month later, the blood was still active on the slide. To me, that's not “woo-woo". That's data. That's something worth digging into, researching.

The Results

I won't pretend this was an overnight fix. Following the protocol got me maybe 20% better. Around the same time, we switched to eating organic. Ava insisted, I fought her on it. But that gave me another chunk of improvement, roughly 20% on its own. Stacked together, I went from operating at about 10% (near dead), to somewhere around 50%. Getting further than that took a couple more years and a lot of trial and error - figuring out what else was working against me. I discovered I couldn't drink water out of plastic bottles anymore; within hours of doing it I'd feel sick/weak. We also eventually traced part of what triggered the whole immune weakness thing in the first place:

I'd had a root canal a few months before I got sick, and years later after constant infection in my gums around that tooth a holistic dentist found a broken drill bit lodged in that tooth poking up into my sinus from that procedure, along with small abscesses that never showed up on X-ray. Every time I sneezed, we could smell a terrible “dead animal” odor fill the car. Once that tooth came out, smell was gone.

What the protocol actually did for me wasn't fix one specific thing — it strengthened my immune system so my body had a fighting chance against everything else that was going on. Think of your body like a fortress. Sometimes the bad guys get inside the walls. The question is whether you've got strong soldiers in there to deal with the enemy, or whether they get to tear the place apart from the inside. That's what this gave back to me: strong immune cells. It helped save me from the inside out. I recovered, went back to work as an RN and have continued all the things that helped me since. Life is complex, our bodies are complex, but getting that edge against the diseases of life matters...a lot.