February / March 2019 update:
Hi, everyone. As you may have noticed, I have been pretty absent from this site while I was trying very hard to save my friend Jane (who was like a Mother to me), after she was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. I've been working on this post forever, and I'm sorry for the delay in posting this, but I feel like I've been on a rollercoaster that I couldn't get off for the last 9 months (longer than that, actually, but.... to describe the latter half as stressful, would be a grand understatement).
I felt like I needed to give a really good explanation as to why I have been absent for so long, so that people could understand why I haven't been able to communicate as much as I (usually) wanted to. I used to have a lot more help, contacting people who got in touch with me, but lately it seems like everyone I know has been swamped (will explain more about this further down in this post).
I have tried so many times, to write this post, but this was painful for me to write, and it always ended up turning into a damn novel I couldn't seem to shorten or finish. Honestly, for about a year and a half, I've had a hard time finishing a lot of projects. I think that's what happens when you are experiencing extreme anxiety. I don't know about you, but for me, anxiety = lack of focus, and I've been in anxiety overload.
Since about the time Jane started showing the first signs of a serious illness (the summer of 2017), I've been dealing with every negative emotion you can think of (in addition to anxiety). I could write a book about the reasons I was experiencing them all at once: sadness, depression, despair, frustration, guilt, anger, shame, fear, panic, and ultimately... I felt like a failure for not being able to save her. Sadly, Jane passed away, and I've been trying to dig myself out of a very deep depression ever since.
Jane had several different factors against her that I realize, would have made it just about impossible for her to beat her cancer. So I try to tell myself, I should focus on the fact that her life was extended, at least. Most people with cancer don't have all of those same factors going on, and some of them were HUGE. But I don't know if I will ever get over the fact that I wasn't able to help her turn things around for good. I still miss her every day.
It doesn't help that I feel like, I sort of made it my job, to give other people hope, but it's really hard to put on a smiley face when the bigger part of you just wants to crawl under a rock and cry. Like I said, Jane was like a mother to me in many ways, and losing her has left a huge hole in my heart.
As anyone trying to care for a loved one with late stage cancer has probably learned themselves: Cancer can be a vicious beast, and trying to turn someone around from it can be ALL CONSUMING. Especially if you're hell bent on saving a person's life, like I was. I assumed that because I was able to help my husband to recover from cirrhosis, then surely I must be able to do the same thing for Jane... but I was wrong, and it's been hard for me not to feel frustrated and defeated. I had to give up a lot, to care for Jane. This blog is kind of like a ship I'd built, and when Jane got sick, I felt like I had to abandon the ship in order to try to save Jane... and myself.
I need to point out that, if it wasn't for Jane, this "ship" never would have built at all. It was because of Jane, that I moved to the place where I live, and if it weren't for that, I never would have met my husband (who was in the same city). Nor would I have been able to take the time to build this blog. So she really had to be my first priority, period.
I had lived in Jane's house (a rental) for over a decade. She was our landlady, but she hated it when I called her that, because she knew she was more like family to me and my sisters. She was my Dad's best friend and partner, before he died, and she has spent more time supporting me (and my creative projects) than anyone ever has in my life. She didn't have any kids OR any family in the area, so I was the closest thing she had to a daughter, and I had to do everything I could, to save her. And sometimes, that meant like I had to work like a horse with blinders on, doing research, and anything else I could think of, that could help her turn things around.
Trying to save Jane was like trying to prevent a massive tsunami, and I went from trying to save her life, to trying to save her house. I've spent the lasts few months trying to keep the house we're in, from going into foreclosure, and it's been a constant battle.
Quick note - I re-read this section below, and it made me go ugh, it REALLY needs some serious editing, but that would involve additional time I don't have right now. So if it seems like I'm going on and on about the same things, I apologize in advance. I don't mean to sound like Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, who makes me want to go Jesus Jimmy, stop complaining about needing donations.... either make Wikipedia a PAID-ONLY site, or use advertising, for god's sake. Nobody wants to hear you whine about your financial woes - just CHARGE THEM! And yet... here I am, doing kind of the same thing, because I'd LIKE to keep this site free to most people.
If you've tried to get in touch...
Again, I want to sincerely apologize to anyone who has reached out to me, if you haven't heard back from me (or anyone else) yet. I tried to let people know that it might take a while for someone to get back to them, because I was usually unavailable (but I just didn't anticipate it would take so much longer than I expected, to get back to everyone). I did write on my blog that people who really wanted to talk to me, directly, could book an info session (during which I'm able to answer questions and explain things in more detail).
For anyone who's tried to call me direct (without booking an info session): Why there are times when I CANNOT pick up the phone
I am still working very hard to get back on track and save Jane's house (the roof over my head) from foreclosure, and it's taking all my energy to do so. Please understand that I really LOVE talking to people and helping people. It's just that I can no longer afford to talk to people who call me direct (I apologize if you found my number online and I haven't been able to remove it yet). Someone with cirrhosis (or someone trying to deal with a family member who has it) needs a LOT of help, and there is just no way I can make that a 5 minute phone call. You cannot get off the phone with someone in a crisis, in less than half an hour (and honestly, it is usually more like 2 hours, when you add up the time I spend emailing them later). Which means that if I even pick up the phone at all, there is some urgent thing on my to-do list that won't get finished, which means there is some bill that probably won't get paid on time.
I have always considered myself to be a high energy person, but I started to notice, last year, that when I get off the phone with a person who has cirrhosis (or a family member who does).... I only have half the energy as I did, before I got on the phone. I didn't notice this, at first, because I was usually so wired, I felt like I had energy to spare. But after a while I started to realize, it was really hard not to absorb some of the anxious, frustrated energy of every person I talked to, in a crisis. And that "crisis energy" was starting to build back up, in me! If it was just one person, or five, or even 100, that would be one thing, but it wasn't. It is heartbreaking that doctors don't offer better solutions for people, but they don't, so there is never a shortage of people who really need help.
Work vs. Volunteer Work
I am at a point right now, where every single thing I do, needs to be very clearly WORK-RELATED, and MOST of the work I have done, regarding this blog, has been volunteer work. Which I was happy to do in the past, but my family was NOT happy about it, and I can't blame them. I justified it for a long time, because I was helping people, and I remembered how frustrating it was, that there weren't a lot of people out there, who'd been through what I'd been through, when I DESPERATELY needed someone to talk to!
It feels wrong for me to not jump in and help people, because I know that the person I'm speaking with is usually going through a crisis. I've had people literally begging me to call them back, and a few people were in tears. NOT picking up the phone makes me feel like a horrible, mean person. But then that takes my crappy feeling to a whole new level, because I know I have already done a lot to help people for free, and feel like I don't deserve to feel like a bad person. I've spent at least a thousand hours working on this blog, so far. So in the back of my mind, I can't help feeling like... wait... I'm going through a huge crisis myself, and I've said this on the blog. Why are people asking me to just help them, if they're not willing to help me, in return?
When being the Good Guy actually makes you The Bad Guy
When my parents were living together, when I was a kid, my father used to help a lot of people for little or no money. He wanted to be "the good guy" - and was always busy helping people, but not always getting paid for it. My parents fought about this, a lot, and now I understand why. My husband's ex wife is sooooo pissed at both me and my husband right now, because I don't get paid for a lot of the work I do, and that's been causing a HUGE financial strain on our family. I am starting to realize, I am repeating my Dad's pattern.
I loved my Dad, but if I could go back in time and talk to him after he spent all day helping people while he wasn't getting paid, out of the goodness of his heart - while I was literally going hungry some days - I would have said, Dad: "You have NO BUSINESS helping someone who isn't helping YOU to support YOUR OWN FAMILY."
By writing this blog, I really felt like I was making an effort to help people, but if they needed additional support, I had to limit my time to just a handful of people, since I barely felt like I had 2 hours in a week, to spare. I didn't even have time for my own husband or family. I was so busy with helping people over the last 2 years (most of whom hadn't bought anything), I really neglected my family in a big way, and am trying to find ways to make it up to them. I hope the people reading this will be able to understand why I had to reserve my time for the people who were supporting me (by requesting a paid info-session), as much as I've tried to support them, by sharing resources on this blog that took me over 1000 hours to learn and write about.
When a loved one's illness takes you so far away from the things you need to do, to keep your own life afloat, you can find yourself in a state of panic, realizing that you literally do not have enough working hours in the day, to pay your own bills.
So, please believe me when I say, it wasn't that I didn't WANT to help the majority of people who contacted me. It was more so that there were days I felt like I couldn't even turn on my computer, because I was so overwhelmed, and knew that the more time I spent answering emails, the more I was going to keep sinking into a deep hole that was getting wider every day.
With everything going on with Jane, I've had very little time to work, so the time I did spend working was time that had to count (as if I was working at my old day job in corporate America). Every time I pick up the phone or send someone an email, it costs me money, in that it takes away from time I need to spend working (in other words, doing something that directly helps me keep a roof over my head).
This is a very awkward thing for me to talk about. I have a very deep-rooted belief that we are all here to help each other - and for whatever God forsaken reason, this used to make me feel like I should try to help everyone, for free, all the time. I think I got it in my head that this is somehow "normal," because - again - that's what my Dad used to do, and I often see my sister doing the same thing. But what happens when you set out to "save the world" is, your end up hurting your own family, in the process. So I had to do a major priority adjustment, and I've made the conscious decision to help myself and my own family, before I can help anyone else.
There is a LOT you can do to help yourself - please read the posts in the right column of my blog
I have said this before but I'll say it again.... My husband was was never just drinking detox water. He was always doing about a dozen different things at once, and we didn't even know about the water or the first few years after his initial diagnosis, so I'm hoping that everyone who's tried to get in touch, who hasn't gotten a callback about the water yet, has been able to make use of the many free resources I've provided on this blog, which helped my husband tremendously when he was first diagnosed in 2011, and when he went into the hospital again in 2013/2014. I actually had to pay good money to learn whether some of these things worked, or whether they didn't (and my husband had to be a guinea pig for the majority of it).
Some people who wanted additional information did book info sessions, but for anyone who did not: Again, I'm truly sorry if the people I'd asked to do callbacks, haven't been able to get in touch with you. It was ultimately my fault for not notifying people sooner, that a major backlog was developing, and that the people I'd hoped could help me, weren't able to get through the whole list.
The woman who used to help me with calls and emails about the water, got very caught up at her other job, and she didn't have as much time to help me with all the calls and emails (there were other factors, but that was the main reason). She has been extremely helpful to me in the past, but the reality is... it takes 2 hours per person, to fully educate a person about the water, and to be honest, neither of us have had that kind of time, recently.
My private blog about the water
I spent several months building a private blog that I could use to educate people about the water, so they could read all about it on their own time. For a while, it was a great way to tell people all about the water, without having to spend hours talking on the phone, or sending emails. But for whatever reason, Blogger developed a glitch in the system that prevented many people from being able to get access. I think I *MAY* have finally figured out the solution, but for the last 9 months or so, it has been sooo frustrating. I contacted Blogger about it a few times, but never heard back from anyone, and my efforts to find the answer on how to fix this problem on my own, via a google search, yielded no results.
So I felt like I had to send emails instead, and it literally takes about 12 emails per person, to properly educate someone about the water. I quickly found myself getting very behind in work, and feeling completely overwhelmed.
My husband has tried to help me out, making calls to people who've requested info about the water, but he works 50 hours a week at his day job, and has to spend extra time with his kids lately (one of them is kind of going through a crisis). I gave him a list of people who needed callbacks, but he hasn't been able to get through the whole thing. He did make a lot of calls, but he has a really hard time emailing people, and that's a critical part of the process. My husband is a really smart guy, but he is also a really slow typist. Why touch typing is not a necessary class in every school is beyond me!
I have been wanting to hire someone to help me with calls and emails, but I have to be picky about who I choose. My goal has been to hire someone, and send an email to anyone who hasn't heard back from me, and ask them if they would mind if someone else contacted them with the information they may have requested (they would not see the details of your situation - I would remove that part).
I even asked my two most trusted girl friends if they could help me, but they were going through their own crises as well!! I should point out that I live in area where it seems like, everyone I know is constantly scrambling to just keep a roof over their head. My husband and I often talk about moving to a nice, quiet farm, but we're still a ways away from being able to do that.
I would have just disabled the page about the water (or peoples' ability to request info), but over the years I have created soooo many links to the page, from all over the website (not anticipating I'd ever be going through this kind of situation where I found it so difficult to keep up), that I didn't feel like that would fix the problem, either. I've been trying to get all the info from my Blogger blog about the water, transferred over to a different website, because I don't know if I can trust Blogger's private blogs as a reliable resource in the future (even if I am hopeful that I've figured out how to fix the current glitch). It's such a big project, I didn't have the ability to get it all done in a timely manner. It's still not all transferred yet, but hopefully this post will hopefully explain to you what's been going on.
I have been trying to make some kind of affordable resource guide that people can purchase, that will have a lot of information that I have found to be helpful (organized in an easy to read format). I CANNOT give medical advice, but I can share my research, and give my own personal theories about why certain things may have worked for my husband. I want to make it so that there's just one document (or blog) with info about the water and other things my husband has been doing. I do feel like it's important to see the whole picture, because the water is not a CURE for anything. There is no magic "fix all" product I've ever seen. My husband was always doing about 10-12 things at once... it's just that, it seemed like the water appears to have helped him with detoxification, better than anything else I've ever seen.
In my strong opinion, there are four major elements of health, that have to be addressed, in order for a person to truly heal from cirrhosis, and I plan to talk about these things in my resource guide (I do talk about them on the private blog I made for people who book info sessions, so if you book one, you can read about it).
Why In-Depth Research is CRITICAL
Please believe me when I say, if a person tells you the name of a type of water that's worked for them, but they do not give you a VERY THOROUGH education about this water, they are doing you a huge disservice. And unfortunately, half the companies you will find online, that promote this type of water, will not give you a real education about it (though they have really good marketing materials that will make it appear as if they are thoroughly educating you). But you would not believe what is left out of those materials.
Just giving a person half an education about the water is kind of like handing someone an envelope that appears to contain a trip for a vacation to a beautiful foreign country.... but you're really just handing them a one way ticket, without a hotel room. After they arrive, their tour guide bails on them, and they have no idea what to do. They don't realize, their trip is about to turn into somewhat of a nightmare because they're unfamiliar with the territory, and are going to have to spend all their "vacation time" trying to figure things out.
Most people don't understand anything about this type of water, when they first learn about it. It's foreign to just about everyone. And many companies who make it, take full advantage of this fact. They know that, when someone doesn't know the territory, it's very easy for people to believe everything they say, because they will believe the people who look the most trustworthy. I learned, the hard way, that the companies that looked the most trustworthy, were the ones that were telling me the biggest lies. And sadly, many people have fallen for what they say (but they don't realize they got scammed, until several months after they've already made a purchase).
Part of the reason I started to burn out
I have had a lot of people contact me, asking me about the water, and I'd spend hours with some of them on the phone... sometimes doing conference calls with their family, and sending over a dozen emails! But then.... they didn't actually look at all the materials I sent. Many people would just disappear into the wild blue yonder, and when I'd never hear back from them again, I just cringed, knowing that some of them had probably fallen for one of those deceptive companies. Most people are only able to make ONE purchase, and if they find out later, that they made a purchase that wasn't actually working for them, they were stuck with it (some companies give false guarantees and warranties that aren't actually honored).
Sometimes, people would contact me to say that they'd fallen for what those other companies said (aaagh) and they had made a purchase that they regretted, but now were ready to get the same type of water we have (every once in a while, a person can afford to make 2 purchases, but it's not common). Again... I used to feel really guilty about this (and somewhat responsible), because I felt like it was partly my fault that they'd wasted a lot of money. I'd always think, how could I have made those materials faster and easier to read, so they actually WOULD read what I sent?? Or did they just not believe what I was saying?
So, I really made a huge effort to make the materials easier and faster to read (or at least, skim through), over the years. But still... there is only so much I have time to do. If a person still isn't going to look at all the information I've put together.... that's on them, not me. Educating oneself about this water DOES require a lot of education.... but it's WORTH IT! And I've made an effort to condense the info in such a way so that most people could probably make a decision in about 2 hours (vs the 2 weeks it took me, to make up my mind).
I know all this probably sounds overly dramatic, but I have seen too many people end up in worse situations when they're not fully educated about the different types of water that are out there. The biggest mistake people make, is when they find materials that claim to be educational, and they have no idea that half that stuff is made up. It's sooooooo hard to believe (I didn't believe it, either), but I've found resources that can show you what's real, and what's not.
If you still want information about the water...
If you want to know more details about the water, you can still fill out a contact form, but like I said earlier... please understand that I'm still getting through this backlog. I am planning to hire someone to help me, soon. Please know that I will probably not be the person who calls you on the phone (I've been able to make a few exceptions when I had time, but I just don't have enough time to do it on a regular basis). I will not share your personal details with the person who ends up helping me - just your name and contact info. I do speak to other people (without cirrhosis) about the water, so the person going through the list I give them will not know your story, or what condition you have (they wouldn't be able to talk to you about anything besides the water, anyway). But in the event that you do buy a machine, I will know who you are and what's going on with you, and I'd love to talk to you about your situation at that time, if you'd like.
If you want to book an info session...
I still do have some time to do a couple of info sessions every week (I typically end up spending a few hours with each person, when you add up the time it takes to do email follow ups as well). Because of the time it takes, I'm not going to be able to keep doing these info-sessions for long. There are SO many things I put on hold in the last 5 years, that I really need to get back to (including spending time with my own family). So, as soon as I can come up with a more efficient way to share what I've learned, I'm going to stop doing the live calls, and will just reserve my time for people who've gotten machines from us. Those who get any type of machine from us, can also speak with my husband, if you'd like to, and have any specific questions for him : ).
Again... thank you.
I want to give my sincere thanks to everyone who showed some patience and understanding while I've been going through this crisis. I'm truly sorry to have let some people down while I've been trying to get my own oxygen mask on. It hasn't been firmly affixed for a long, long time, and I'm going to try to put it on, and keep it on, this year. When I do, I want to help as many people as I can.
When life throws adversity in our direction, it might take us down for a while, but it's up to us, to learn from those bad experiences, and try to figure out how we can use those bad experience as fuel, to make our lives better (and hopefully, the lives of those around us). While you're going through your own struggles, I hope you will be able to find some useful information in this blog, and when you're able to find something that works for you, I hope you will take the time to share it with others.
Sincerely,
Ellie
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