If you don't have your health, you have nothing. Sure, it's a tired old cliché, but there will very likely be a time in your life where you realize that nothing is more true. Protect your health, preserve it, and when it tries to get away, fight as hard as you can to get it back. I know that from experience. I've written about my struggles with my health over the past three years: about how a malignant tumor nearly did me in and left me with only one kidney, and about how the sutures from that operation caused me a lot of pain and prevented me from fully healing the seven inch scar until I paid to have them removed. Now I have another chapter to add to the saga. I'd like it to be the last.

At the end of last year I had the sutures from my surgical scar removed, which solved the problems I was having there completely. Note that those were internal sutures. They held the muscles together, not the skin. After six months of healing I didn't need them anymore, but removing them would require another surgery, something that was rarely ever done. The sutures were meant to be permanent. The trouble was that the surgeon had sewn them in using an outdated technique. As a result the sutures dug in and caused sharp stabbing pains whenever I used my abdominal muscles. It was frustrating, and what was worse was that all the doctors and surgeons that I saw told me that the problem was due to scar tissue, not the sutures, and that my troubles would slowly go away over time. They were all wrong, completely wrong. But I still had to pay to have the sutures removed. My insurance wouldn't cover the procedure. The bastards. But anyway, I'm just glad that I could afford it. It needed to be done.

In the months that followed I found myself in a similar situation once more. My abdomen was fine, but my energy levels had dropped again. They'd been down ever since I first got cancer and had been drifting between low and very low ever since. Something was wrong with me but all the blood tests and scans showed nothing. My doctors had no idea what the problem was and told me that I would either get better with time, or suggested that I was depressed and needed something like Prozac to make me feel better. I would have been insulted by the idea that depression was causing my fatigue, but I know that doctors sometimes get kickbacks for prescribing popular drugs. My doctors simply had no other answers for me. So once again I went back to the internet to try to figure out what was wrong with me.

I began to wonder if I was going to have to actually become a doctor in order to find a cure. I was already taking over part of the job that my doctors and specialists were supposed to do. They could only give me fifteen minutes of their time every month and that is not enough time to look into something that doesn't immediately show up on the standard tests. As a result, "Do no harm" became "Do nothing". I was on my own. Like it or not, that is the direction that our health care system has gone in recent years. If you have something that modern medicine has identified, like cancer, you get prompt and powerful treatment. But if you have something that is unusual and difficult to diagnose, you might have to do a lot of the legwork yourself, especially if it is a chronic lack of energy. Most people will write you off as mentally ill, a malingerer, or a lazy slacker if you complain about being fatigued all the time.

None of those labels stick to me save for the "mentally ill" one (he he). And although I may be a number of things, depressed isn't one of them. Sure, I write depressing music and I may not have a positive outlook on the future and the world, but I have always had a strong drive to do my best with whatever hand I get dealt. I look at it very simply: there is no alternative, so always fight hard.

I'd taken up cycling back in the late 90s. That was when I moved out to California and noticed that there were all these bike lanes everywhere. That was a huge change from Michigan, where your only riding choices on city streets were an irregular sidewalk and a pothole-ridden gap between speeding pickup trucks and the curb. Once in California I broke out my old ten-speed and whipped myself back into shape. In time I fell in love with the sport and increased the distances that I would go on my rides. By mid-2001 I was able to ride over a hundred miles in a single day and did that on most weekends during the summer. It was great. In July I'd watch Lance ride live on TV in the Tour de France in the morning, and then cruise up into the hills for my own stage in the afternoon. Lots of Fireaxe tracks got written while I was out on those long rides, "The Citadel Must Fall" and "River of Madness" being two of them. During the summer of 2001 I rode long and I rode hard and I enjoyed every minute of it.

That was when cancer struck. No one knows how you get kidney cancer, but I suspect that it was because I was drinking the filthy California tap water and breathing filthy Saddleback Valley air on those long rides. The air is cleaner where I live now, but the tap water is even worse. The stuff tastes like jet fuel. I'm not kidding. I drink distilled water now exclusively and when I get a mouthful of southern California tap water I want to spit it out. It's disgusting.

But along with cancer, something else struck me that year and the next as I slowly lost my ability to ride long distances and then lost the ability to ride at all. My immune system was getting more and more taxed by the cancer and ended up seriously weakened. That's never a good thing because there are dormant infections in our bodies that are held in check by our immune systems. When our immune systems become weakened, those infections wake up and spread around, making you sick and lethargic, and some of them have adapted to have such survival mechanisms as triggering the hyper-coagulation of your blood. Hyper-coagulation is where your blood gets thicker and the walls of your capillaries end up coated with a layer of fibrous tissue. The infections then hide in that layer which protects them from your immune system. The layer even protects the infections from antibiotics and thus you relapse after taking courses of them. It's nasty shit and I had it bad. But as I said, none of it showed up on the standard tests my doctors performed. Of course, neither does cancer until it is just about to kill you. So I wasn't going to wait around and do nothing. I had to find out what was wrong with me.

Without the internet there would be no Fireaxe. And to be honest, without the internet there might be no Brian Voth anymore. I'm not sure if it has saved my life, but the internet has helped me improve my health on numerous occasions. This is another one of those. While searching for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome the following link came up.

It was written by Dr. Holtorf who came to realize that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was a very real and very devastating syndrome when he came down with it many years ago. I'm glad that he did, in a way, since he has figured out a cause and treatment for the syndrome. His ideas are new, and not yet accepted, but I was willing to try anything that was scientifically sound and his theory certainly is.

Of course, I don't believe without proof and neither does Dr. Holtorf's clinic. So we got proof. Independently performed blood tests showed that I was suffering from everything that his theory predicts: hyper-coagulation of the blood, no less than five chronic infections, high values of reverse T3 - a measure that escapes most thyroid doctors, and a weakened but highly active immune system. Dr. Holtorf has his shit together. The best proof of all has come recently after several months of treatment. My energy is coming back and I'm back on my bike.

I'm not all the way back. Maybe I'll get there. Dr. Holtorf doesn't guarantee 100% recovery. I think that's because once the infections get into your system you can never completely get rid of them. So you need some kind of continuing maintenance. It's also possible that Dr. Holtorf is holding back on the final piece of the cure so that he can rake in extra cash in treatment. I don't really know. But a few weeks ago I was feeling good and so I set my sights on a milestone that I've wanted to achieve ever since I had cancer surgery in March of 2003.

There's a climb sixteen miles east of where I live. The road goes up for more than seven miles and the grade averages about five and a half percent. It's not quite an Alpine climb, but it's long and nasty and takes about forty-five minutes to get to the top. Of course, Lance could do it in twenty-five, but most people can't even push a bike to the top let alone ride all the way up. It's hard. After cancer surgery I had started riding again and I had tried to get to the top of that climb. I got close twice, but never all the way. Then the Chronic Fatigue rose up and slowly shut down my ability to exercise. I had to stop trying and I wondered if I'd ever be able to get to the top of that hill again. I kept telling myself that I would. I imagined myself at the top, holding my bike over my head and shouting victoriously. Getting to the top was going to be a symbol of my victory over cancer. But as the fatigue grew and grew, I began to doubt if that would ever happen.

Dr. Holtorf's treatment turned my body into a war zone. I was taking a handful of pills every day. I was taking drugs to tear down the fibrin linings on my blood vessels, drugs to kill bacteria, viruses, and fungi, drugs to strengthen my immune system, and a whole gob of anti-oxidants and other pills to clean up the carnage. The infections took their toll, but after weeks of struggling I was able to exercise again without feeling like a basket case for days afterwards. So I began to get myself back into shape. My body was responding once again and slowly I was getting stronger. I took longer and longer rides and one day I felt strong enough to climb a mile up that steep hill to see if I could handle the strain. I could, and so I decided that the following week I would make another attempt at the ascent.

Perhaps I wasn't ready. Perhaps I was too ambitious. Pushing myself is one of my faults and it may have contributed to me getting cancer in the first place. Still I had to try. I loaded up with gear, carbs, and clean water and headed towards the big hill. It was more brutal than I remembered. That was because I wasn't in as good a shape as I had been years before. But I took things slow and kept telling myself that if I felt that I couldn't make it that I could try again next weekend. The sun was pounding and I was sweating profusely. By the time I got three-quarters of the way up there was no dry spot on my shirt to clean my glasses. I had to stop and rest and I wondered if I could finish the climb. I was tired, but I still felt like I could go farther. The last mile and a half of the climb was the hardest. The grade there is seven percent and it doesn't let up. I hadn't been past that point since I got cancer. But now I felt better, and so I went for it.

It was hot. I had to go slow. But my legs kept churning. I kept waiting for my body to give up and tell me to stop but it never did. I didn't want to give up but I was ready to if I felt that I had to. I kept going. I didn't need to get to the top that day, but somehow I did. Yes, I made it. I had returned to a place where I hadn't been for almost three years. It felt fantastic.

At first I was too tired to celebrate. I had to wait a few minutes before finally hoisting my bike aloft and screaming out my victory over cancer, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the doctors who were wrong, and the many problems in our health care system. I finally felt like I had won. And as I came flying down out of the mountains at a modest 30+ miles per hour with the wind rushing past and my legs pushing me faster I began to remember who it was that I used to be. Victory at last.

Maybe this is a short-lived recovery. Maybe there's something else inside me that I'm going to have to battle in the near future. Maybe the next time I have to fight I'm not going to be able to win. But there is one thing that I know for sure, that I will always be fighting: fighting to stay alive, fighting to get what I want, and fighting to be who I am. And to be honest, I wouldn't have it any other way.