In mid-November 1997 I had a closed head (brain) injury after catching my heel on broken concrete at a Mobil Oil Station in Dallas. I fell flat with full body weight hitting on my left cheekbone. After regaining consciousness, I was helped to the office where I filled out paperwork with an ice pack on my cheek. I had no medical insurance, so an ambulance was not called and I was afraid to go to an Emergency Room and incur medical bills that I could not pay.
I also cracked a tooth and went to an environmental dentist a couple weeks after the fall. As we talked, he told me about Dr. Phyllis Books, a chiropractor who works with cranial injuries and children with ADD. He had gone to her because he had been unable to read without falling asleep. After one treatment, it had never again been a problem for him.
I called her from his office and she said, “Stop by on your way home and let me take a look at you.” When she examined me, she said, “You have a great deal of new injury and a lot of old physical injury plus considerable emotional injury throughout your entire body.”
Two months after the accident, I gradually began to notice that I was losing some ability to form thoughts or sentences and often used the wrong words. I would sit at the computer to write sections of my latest book but the words wouldn’t come or they would come in the wrong order. Then the words began to get jumbled within the sentences.
People would call and I didn’t know what to say. I tried to “fake it” in conversation, but soon began avoiding the phone. When I got up in the morning. I couldn’t remember what to do. My greatest difficulty has continued to be with names, nouns and numbers. Soon I could no longer conduct my business and answer simple customer questions about health, hormones and nutrition. Within a few months I had lost my business and was living on what I had saved the previous two years.
It wasn’t until a few months later that I found Dr. Books’ card and I stood in the kitchen and wept, clutching the card and thanking God. I was in bad condition by then. Not only couldn’t I think straight, but also my entire body was in severe pain. After each session of being worked on from head to toe, I felt like I’d been run over by a truck! After three or four treatments, she said I would be to have some dreams and to please tell her about them.
In the dream that was the most vivid and insightful, I was laboring to swim down a river in about two inches of water flowing over a rocky streambed. It was exhausting as I swam and swam until I finally reached a walled in clearing, littered with garbage, trash and dead bodies. I looked around and saw something moving in the far corner. When I made my way over to it, it was “me”!
I said to “me,” “you have to get up and get out of here.” “Me” stood up and began struggling to carry several bags and suitcases. I said to “Me, “Put that down, you can’t take all of that where you are going,” So “me” put on a knapsack, picked up a satchel and together we stepped over the wall and walked away. My accumulation of emotional baggage came as the result of a 42 year emotionally and verbally abusive marriage.
I had a total of 17 treatments from May through June of 1998. In July I moved to Phoenix to take care of my mother. Whenever I came back to Dallas to visit, she gave me some follow up treatments just to make sure everything was holding.
She has been a true lifesaver for me. I cannot begin to imagine how I could have recovered full function without the treatment she provided. It has been an enormous blessing to me. I have recovered full mental function and have written four books since then, and taught a number of seminars.