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She didn’t have time to wait for the shuttle, so she abandoned her scooter and pressed on. At the top, she found a campus shuttle stop, but the next bus wasn’t going to come for another half hour. Fuming at herself for not having left earlier, she got off the scooter and started pushing it up the hill.

Halfway up the slope, the battery died on her. His office was up a big hill so she headed out for the appointment on her scooter. One day, four months into her twelve-cup-a-day diet, Terry was scheduled to meet with her boss for her annual review. Then she started parking even that at the door of the clinic and using a cane to walk between exam rooms - her feet made friends with the ground again. Soon, Terry ditched her reclining wheelchair for an upright electric scooter. In addition to her new diet, she had also acquired an electrical stimulation device, which physical therapists use to help build back up atrophied muscles. Over the next year, Terry’s strength came home to her. “That’s when the magic happened,” she says.
#Susannah flood legs and feet full
Organ meat was especially efficient, a full house, crowded with vitamins. Grass-fed beef and oily fish, too, which supplied valuable omega-3s. As an established adherent to the Paleo Diet, she already knew how rewarding a relationship with bacon could be. She also embraced nuts, avocados, coconut milk, and coconut oil for their fats. She sprinkled nutrient-dense kelp powder and green tea extract on her meals. She made sure she got a variety of greens and deeply colored produce. Terry started eating twelve cups a day of berries and vegetables, packing in all the heavies - beets, mushrooms, broccoli, blueberries, cabbage, and, of course, kale, that nutritional ingenue. Here was food offering a possible way to recovery. When too many of these collect in the cell, they can damage the mitochondria.Īntioxidants - hundreds of vitamins and other substances that are abundant in fruits and vegetables - are thought to mop up this toxic grime before it can cause trouble.
#Susannah flood legs and feet free
How might this have worked? When mitochondria produce energy, they also emit exhaust, little molecules known as free radicals. This flood of good stuff, the authors suggested, protected against mitochondrial dysfunction, among other mechanisms of aging. In one study, mice with an accelerated aging syndrome that were given a mixture of thirty-one specific nutrients lived longer lives. Terry then looked into what was known about mitochondria upkeep. They’re often referred to as our cells’ power plants, but are involved in other functions as well. Mitochondria are the tiny, units within most of our cells that convert fuel into energy. A couple of papers mentioned that malfunctioning mitochondria could play a role in MS. She’d have to skip some steps.Īfter months of midnight digging, her shovel hit some interesting nuggets. She obviously didn’t have that kind of time. Terry knew that it could take decades for a discovery to make it through all the safety trials, let alone be incorporated into medical practice. They were also the longest shot if something worked in a rodent, the odds of those results being repeated in a human were minute. She focused on animal model studies because they were the cutting edge. Perhaps by reading everything on MS, she’d find something her doctors had missed. Completely used up by the effort it took just to get through a day - she was a clinical professor at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City - she would log on to PubMed, the mammoth database of biomedical literature maintained by the National Institutes of Health, scanning for all MS research. Every evening after saying good night to her wife and two children, Terry would rev up her laptop. So when the disease started to overpower Terry, and the available medicines could no longer help her, she refused to concede. The athletic woman whose physicality had once been central to her identity now no longer had enough core strength to keep from op- ping forward.īut industrious and independent, she’d never been one to go along with anything imposed upon her. As a result of the MS, Terry’s muscles had atrophied from disuse.
