Day 38.  4 days and all I can think of is what am I going to eat. 4 days and I can eat anything I want.

Weight 91.1 kg.  Down 0.6 over the last 2 days. Total loss so far 22 kg and it looks like it too. I have empty skin hanging down just about everywhere.

Blood pressure 104/67 pulse 90. Blood/glucose 4.2 mmol/L. Ketones around 12 mmol/L

I intend to keep recording after I start eating again. For a while anyway.



Just want to finish off about dangerous tongues.

As I already said I was looking for a cure for my 4th daughter's porencephalic cyst which left a hole in her left hemisphere about the size of a golf ball. By now she was about 10 years old and living with her mother and sister and step father to be. I'd kept up to date with what research I could find by spending occasional Sunday afternoons in the Sydney University medical library. I was sharing a house in Spicer st Woollahra with a crazy artist who's girlfriends middle name was Dolly. His middle name was Lloyd and I pointed out they were anagrams of each other. They parted not long after.

Now for whatever reason I noticed that in some research there were similarities between my daughters condition and a condition called 'Diving Reflex' where children trapped under ice for hours even days had been resuscitated intact using a slowly blood warming technique. What had happened was their bodies had gone into deep hibernation caused by the cold water triggering nerves on their face which made highly oxygenated blood shunt around their heart and brain effectively protecting those organs from damage. This is boring me.

Now I think I had all but given up mary jane due to a real scary incident which was actually good when I think back. For a few weeks I noticed if I smoked I could feel a sort of whitish haze above my head. A light of sorts. But one Saturday afternoon my flatmate brought everyone back from the local pub for a smoke. Now with a room full of people puffing away, one was a temporary girlfriend,  I ended up getting stoned and the light came down onto my head and it was tight, very tight. It moved down my head like a huge elastic band and across my right shoulder and bang the room was full of light. I vomited into the empty fireplace.

I knew what it was. My Nanna had told me my mother had died giving birth to me. I was stuck in the canal but they pulled me out. They managed to bring her back but she was forever weak and spent most of my childhood in and out of hospitals until she died when I was ten. They would not let young children into the hospitals in those days so I only saw her sometimes through outside windows. I first grieved for her when I was about 60.

Anyway back to the main story. Want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

One weekend, house to myself, I put a cold towel on my face while having a relaxing smoke. Suddenly my tongue flattened out and lodged itself hard up against the back of my throat. I could not breathe and I had just exhaled. My tongue would not move. I knew I had only seconds before I passed out. On the table there was a pencil or an empty biro metal case and I jammed it down the side of my mouth between my jaws. The tongue gently relaxed. Notice I say 'the tongue' not my tongue. The bastard tried to kill me.

Now what was that? My success in initiating a 'diving reflex' gave me a clue. Obviously deep diving mammals would need to seal their airways otherwise they couldn't open their mouths to catch their prey. I searched the libraries but no mention of the 'deep water' tongue anywhere. I phoned up the vet at Taronga Zoo who specialized in seawater mammals and strangely enough her wonderful name was Miss Mammary from US of A and no she did not have any info for me.

It was about then I guessed that Cot Death or SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) might be a diving reflex as most children die in cold weather usually in unheated homes. I then spent 3 winters in Hobart because the small town next to it called Bridgewater had the highest death rate from SIDS in the world. I got an unpaid job at the University of Tasmania with a professor trying to link SIDS to secondhand smoke. He wasn't really trying but it paid well. He let me see all the mortality data. It was obvious that there was a link to a freshwater lake in the town centre that at winter nights gave off a cold mist called the Bridgewater Gerry. All the death were close to it.

I passed on my information to the local medical establishment who listened for a while but on my 3rd year of badgery nicely asked me, the truck driver from Sydney, to quit. So I wrote a letter to the Hobart Mercury voicing my concerns about cold pillows or damp faces on babies. A few months later a Japanese woman wrote to the same paper that they had no SIDS in Japan because they always put the babies to sleep on their backs. Then a young Sydney doctor came to Hobart and helped organized mothers of newborns to put them on their backs. The results were dramatic.

The real problem still is in my view that the babies aren't dead until they do an autopsy.

And that's why many fat men who die from Metabolic Syndrome effects can be resuscitated intact. They've gone into deep hibernation possibly using a different form of the diving reflex otherwise there's no way their brains wouldn't be damaged after 6 hours. Or so I think.


So what was the link between diving reflex and a cure for my daughter? Well I reckon if she breathed a mixture of helium and oxygen, same as deep water scuba divers it just might help her. But she'd learned to live a life she enjoyed with her disability and wasn't interested in my crazy experiments so there was no point.

Or was all for my benefit?