How and Why I Know God Answers Prayer

In 1977, I was diagnosed with desquamative interstitial pneumonitis (DIP, which I call the dippy disease), an autoimmune illness, which is still regarded as terminal. Life expectancy is three years if it’s chronic, 18 months if it’s acute.

The diagnosis was made at the Armed Forces Institute for Pathological Research at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, MD. My primary physician was associated with the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at a famous children’s hospital. He was nationally regarded as tops in his field, pulmonary.

So, the facts of this case are that I was told that I was terminal and should get my affairs in order. The autoimmune diseases are self-limiting and their origins are not clearly understood. They treated me with very high doses of drugs daily as a desperate last course of action.

I was 5’7-1/2” and weighed 117 pounds normally. Within three months, I’d ballooned to 167 pounds, due to water retention. My hair fell out, and I developed acne infections, which I’d never experienced before; for these, they treated me with tetracycline.

In retrospect, I’m glad they scared the you-know-what out of me, because they galvanized me into action. I had a friend, who worked at a local medical library, run a Medline search on DIP, but only one paragraph existed in the literature, so she broadened the search to interstitial pneumonitis, which produced a 1-1/4-inches stack of photocopies.

I bought Cecil’s Textbook of Medicine and Guyton’s Medical Physiology and began educating myself. I studied, pondered and pestered the doctor with questions until I saw a peculiar parallel.

Grossly simplified, autoimmune illnesses “seem” to mimic baseline malnutrition. Not severe enough to cause scurvy, pellagra or anything so obvious, but enough to perhaps cause other systems to break down.

I evaluated my diet and broadened my search to include nutrition. Here I had an advantage. I’d worked for a packaging magazine during the late 60s to early 70s, and was their designated “expert” on food, drug and cosmetics packaging. As such, I attended every food and drug industry meeting held, including those devoted to labeling for nutritional content. Listening carefully, because I was a writer-editor, I’d already concluded that eating anything canned or served from a steam table was tantamount to sweeping the floor and eating the dirt I collected.

I’m not fanatical about diet, but I always supplement my diet. This personal knowledge about the food industry and nutritional labeling led me to investigate vitamin mega-dose therapy: The Doctor’s Handbook of Vitamin Therapy contained charts of vitamin requirements based on sex, age, height and weight. I located myself on the chart, noted the daily dosages for a “healthy” adult and then doubled that.

I created a shopping list, and hit the nearest health food store. I had hated taking large “horse pills,” but learned to swallow 20 capsules at a time. I wanted to live!

The proof is that today I’m alive and healthy. One has to ask, How long do you call it “remission” before you say it’s healed?

Here comes the part of my story that some people might label as “weird.” I dreamed about what was wrong with me, and in the dreams, which lasted every night for 18 months, several men explained what I had to do to accomplish my own healing. They coached me through the many complex steps it required.

It all seemed very businesslike: They were my teachers and coaches, and held my feet to the fire when I wanted to quit, because I so often failed. I came to understand somehow that I was their “project.” Finally I came to believe that it was all a mutual project, somehow we were all interdependent.

The three, who were always present nearby during these dreams, first explained that my mental and emotional malpractice (their terms) and constant bouts of intense emotional negativity had altered my chemistry, neurotransmitters and hormones to create a disease state. I’d built in the predisposition to a chromosomal defect when I built my body for this life, and unfortunately succeeded in producing a defect that is an undiagnosed first cousin to cystic fibrosis.

What I would give to clearly remember all the critical details of what they showed and taught me! So much seemed so unimportant at the time, when I was so scared.

Remember, this was in 1977. Personal computers were not widely in use (I got my first one in 1985), color monitors were still television sets, and holographs were a rarity few people were familiar with or had even seen. Yet in my dreams they used these tools to illustrate and demonstrate to me what was wrong, and how I would learn to repair my own DNA by weaving Light.

Using a desktop membrane keyboard that had colors instead of letters, they simulated a popup holographic projection of my human genome, as I had originally built it, where the weakness was, and how I had further debilitated it with emotional negativity. Then they showed me the perfect gene I was to build under their tutelage, by visualizing it.

Countless nights I woke up crying in frustration, rebellion and despair, but they wouldn’t let me quit. Every time I went to sleep, I went to that room.

Finally I could build a duplicate gene by mentally concentrating on it, and they removed the “original.” I started again until I could do it perfectly “from scratch” and memory.

Then they talked to me while I built it, destroyed my focus, and I failed for months again, miserably, until I learned to hold focus and split my attention. Then they placed me in a huge, busy room, reminiscent of the New York Stock Exchange “trading pit.” I failed nightly again for weeks until I could do it “cold.”

The day that I awakened, having dreamed that they’d told me, “Congratulations! You’ve graduated,” was the same day my doctor told me that I was “in remission,” but would remain “a functional pulmonary cripple” all my life as a result of lung scarring.

Three years later, I consulted him about a different matter, and that doctor asked me for a lung x-ray, “Please?”

“Oh, all right,” I said, just to make him happy. Well, you guessed it, even the scars were gone. He wept, and asked what I’d done, because, he said, he knew he had not cured me.

I said, “Do you promise not to laugh at me? I’m sure you’ll call all of this the ‘placebo effect’, but I always told you it would be the vitamins and prayer that healed me. I also used a visualization technique: I saw myself standing on a huge palm of a hand that radiated Light upward into me, my head covered by another palm, radiating Light down into me, while declaring, ‘I am healed, and in God’s hands.’”

He accepted all this and asked many questions to help him incorporate visualization techniques into the treatment program, which he headed, for kids with cystic fibrosis at a famous children’s hospital.

In the late 90s, I socially met a colleague of my original primary care doctor, who exclaimed, “I know who you are! You’re the ‘miracle woman’ who caused Dr. HS to convert to Orthodox Judaism.” Shocked, because my doctor was agnostic and intellectual when I’d dealt with him, I asked how that could be. Dr. DM said that Dr. HS had told him all about me saying, “Truly, I saw the hand of God at work in her case, because I really thought she would die. I was sure she would.”

My final point is this: Prayer, visualization and “knowing the Truth” of health remain my favored tools. Health is the ongoing process of becoming whole and remaining that way. It’s up to each of us to integrate our scattered bits of consciousness and soul substance.