YES, I’VE DECIDED, I’M GOING TO WRITE THE BOOK. I’m already at it for the past week. I have 24 years of a parent’s lay experience and all the pitfalls we landed in and I’ve had two immense, hard years of grieving. So who is better qualified to write a parent’s perspective on the subject?

It goes like this: I fully believe, as others do globally and nationally, that Crohn’s disease is caused by a pathogen, Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis, or MAP, from Johne’s disease-infected dairy cattle (see PARA, www.crohns.org and www.johnes.org). It survives the flash-pasteurization process we now know and use and it gets into our food chain. Some people’s immune system can fight it off, others’ can’t. So then we have to look at what strengthens or weakens the immune system. I for one believe that “auto-immune” diseases are pure hokum — 1960s thinking. The immune system is NOT the enemy.

In the case of Crohn’s, the MAP molecule is a spheroplast, it sheds its own identity and rides inside the blood cell and therefore is systemic, hard to analyze for, and it travels throughout the human blood system creating havoc in the colon, eyes, tongue, muscles, anywhere it chooses to, making fistulas, causing intense ulcerations, pain, bleeding, diarrhea, organ damage, leaky gut syndrome, arthritis-like pain, multiple surgeries, and death. Approximately 1 million Crohn’s patients are said to exist in the United States alone, with more in the balance of the world, and the numbers are growing.

The MAP molecule riding in the blood cell is the enemy, not the “overactive” immune system conveniently “attacking itself,” as some would have us believe.

Look up any “auto-immune” disease and then look for the irritant, the pathogen, the man-made “garbage” molecule added there as a flavor enhancer, shelf-life extender, sugar-substitute, symptom-suppressor, color enhancer — the allergen that the immune system is attempting to fight off. Lower the immune system’s effectiveness with “immuno-suppressive” drugs? Not on your life! All you’re doing is giving free rein to the pathogen to do its damage without interference from the immune system.

Yes, I will quote medical and scientific literature references. Like I said, I’ve been at this for 24 years. Enhance the immune system! Think probiotics! Get the right balance to the microbes in the gut, the beneficial ones, and minimize the ones that we all have to deal with. Then follow Dr. Natasha McBride’s best-selling book, “The GAPS Diet (Gut and Psych Syndrome),” and learn all there is to learn about toxins in the blood from adverse microbes in the gut and their effects on our entire physical and mental health and well-being. (All this from me? A former engineer who did advocacy work for his daughter with Crohn’s disease for 24 years?)

Dr. Burrill Crohn (1884-1983), a leading gastroenterologist of his time, also believed MAP to be the cause of what we now call Crohn’s disease, named in his behalf. He was unable to prove it in his lifetime. But MAP can be arrested and is being arrested and examples are in the scientific literature. And easily found by direct links throughout the Internet. No hokum, no jazz, no BS. Cures, not just “symptom-reduction.” When did we give up on cures in the U.S.? When increased med sales became the profitable and only goal, and not cures?

Stay tuned, email me for updates. Gonna be a Hoot. Cathy Bray wishes us all well from Crohn’s Heaven. Successful reading to all.

Wounded Buffalo
Poetry writing and the birds chirping
can have equal impact on
the orbital velocity of the Earth,
progress towards an enduring
peace in the Middle East,
and the price of gas in Venezuela.
A good hobby can even help heal
the wounded buffalo.

Poetry Bus & the Red Cross
I have no clue
where this stuff comes from.
I’ve been writing on this Poetry Bus
since 1970 and every day
in every way it’s a new route
and series of stops.
But this is no way to run a business
and make any money.
But then poetry from us
doesn’t do that.
Thank God for day jobs
and sagging gates and falling fences
and other household things
that need repair.
Poetry is like the Red Cross,
we need it badly, but who pays for it?

Singular Dove Sound
Cathy’s up on the wire
in the sound of a singular dove,
and it’s profound,
and we both know the sound.
I stop and keyboard this down,
a well-known raw emotion
into my cellphone and send it to
my email address before returning
to pull crabgrass from Nana’s
front gardening boxes.
Work and Heaven reside
on the same side of the street
as far as I’m concerned
especially when a dove
and a daughter sing to me.

One Working Foot
I always keep
one working foot
ahead of the other —
I used to think that
someday I’d sell a song
of mine and somebody else
would sing it —
But before that
I thought I’d have
a steady job
in CorporateVille (hahaha)
and even before that
along the road to somewhere,
I thought I’d sell a book
of poems or two.
Now I just keep
one working foot
in front of the other
and wait to see
how the mortgage company
is gonna make good
on our Loan Modification papers
after they collapsed the economy
and thus far have gone
unprosecuted.

Peter Bray lives, works and writes in Benicia.

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