This doctor's name is Edmund Ernst. I will never forget Dr. Ernst. He told me the truth and I ran from it. He examined me and tested my blood. I had all the symptoms of SLE and my blood test was positive. I started the medications, which cost over $300 a month. That was a lot in 1975. Then I started reading about the side effects of the medications. Prednisone and Plaquenil were the most frightening. In about three months I felt better, but I was totally scared of the cure. I went back to Dr. Ernst and said, "I'm OK. I don't want to take this stuff." As I was on my way out the door, he yelled at me, "If you don't follow my orders, you are going to die!" He was right. I almost died.

I continued to have a multitude of symptoms and my health went up and down. I had pneumonia every year and sometimes twice a year. They called it "walking pneumonia." I guess that was because I didn't lie down, I just kept going to work. I managed to find doctors who didn't talk about lupus so I could pretend I didn't have it.

In 1985, when I was forty-three and having a very bad lupus "flare," I found a rheumatologist, Dr. Sugarman, in Fullerton, California. He also told me I had lupus. This time I decided that maybe I should follow the doctor's directions. Back on the expensive and frightening drugs, I began to recover, but just about the time I thought I was going to make it, my husband signed us up with a new insurance program. I was costing the company we had too much money. I managed to find a rheumatologist, Dr. Katz, who accepted the new insurance. Unfortunately, this doctor was eighty-three years old. He retired the year after I started with him. A bit later, when I asked an attorney to help me get medical care, I ended up with a divorce instead.

I spent the money I had left on doctor bills, expensive drugs, and rent ... and then there I was, terminally ill and out of any kind of help. I threw myself on the mercy of the doctors at a UCI medical clinic in downtown Santa Ana, California, and sat for hours with the other poor people waiting for a doctor. The gods sent me Ola Medhat, D.O., a resident in family practice. Dr. Katz had been her teacher at UCI. She said that if I sent for my records she would follow the treatment that Dr. Katz had started me on. Thanks to her, I didn't have to undergo endless testing and see numerous UCI doctors. Since I was almost out of money, I found I could get the treatment and medications from UCI at a reduced rate. UCI did not help me with some of the medications, but I got enough to keep going.

In the 1990s I was found to have adult onset diabetes, and if this story is starting to get a bit confusing it is because I was getting a bit confused. High glucose levels made me kind of dopey, as if I was drinking alcohol. At some point I qualified for Medicare. The good news was that when Dr. Medhat left UCI to start her own practice, I was able to afford to continue seeing her with Medicare as my insurance. The bad news was that I now had to pay for my own medications. So I did what many older people do: I skipped some doses, with the exception of my diabetes medication, because Medicare helped pay for that. By 1996, my diabetes had become worse and Dr. Medhat had given me a glucometer and testing strips to keep track of my glucose levels at home. I was staying with my son, Charles, at the time and when I finally asked him to read the instructions and help me work the glucometer I had already had it for two weeks. His comment on the glucometer was, "It takes a rocket scientist to figure this out. They shouldn't expect old people who are ill to understand it." When we finally took my blood sugar test, the result was almost 500. I told Charles I had an appointment with my doctor the next day, but he made me call the doctor immediately. I'm glad he did.

Dr. Medhat's associate, Dr. John Lara, answered my call and actually talked to me five times that evening, helping me get my blood sugar regulated with the medications I already had at home. First thing the following morning, I went straight to the doctor's office.

I learned that the Prednisone that made my lupus better was raising my blood sugar to dangerous levels. I had to start using insulin as I slowly reduced my Prednisone dosage until I was taking no Prednisone at all. Dr. Medhat mentioned hospitalization, but I refused to go. I had to keep in close touch with her and her wonderful partner, Dr. Lara, until they got my blood sugar under control. At first they had me come to their office every day, then every other day until I was going in only once a week.

Somewhere in this haze of elevated blood sugar levels I began to lose weight. The first ten pounds was kind of neat. I was overweight and the loss made my clothes fit better. At one pound a day, however, the next ten pounds was scary. I was probably going to die, just as Dr. Ernst had warned me all those years ago. At the time I'd been diagnosed, a lupus victim could live about fifteen to twenty years beyond the date of the diagnosis. My time was up.

But I didn't want my time to be up! My son was engaged to the girl every mother dreams her son will meet, and I had met that very special man. My time was up, but I didn't want to die now. I saw beautiful grandchildren in my future. I had an intelligent, thoughtful guy in my life. I wanted to live. I had to get off of the Prednisone, the medication that had helped me feel better but was now killing me. If I went off the Prednisone all at once, it would cause a bad lupus flare, which would probably mean pneumonia, a serious disease for those of us with lupus. If I didn't the stop the Prednisone, the diabetes was going to kill me.

I called my friend Patti Leviton, a hypnotherapist and guided image therapist, and asked if she would come to the doctor with me. Patti is a cancer survivor. She had more than one recurrence of her disease, and when she went back for her last cancer treatments she not only followed her doctor's instructions, but her husband, Dr. Charles Leviton, also treated her with guided imagery. Dr. Leviton is a teacher of guided image therapists, and I had taken his courses and qualified as a guided image therapist myself. I asked Patti to use the guided image therapy to help me get well.

Patti describes me as being on the exam table in a fetal position, weeping, when she got to the doctor's office. I told Patti and Dr. Medhat that I didn't want to die and I wanted Patti's help. Patti explained guided imagery to Dr. Medhat and told her about a lupus patient who had been gradually taken off of the drug Prednisone with the use of a conditioned response, something like Pavlov's famous technique with his dogs. Dr. Medhat listened to Patti and gave her support to this complementary medicine. I would continue with the medical treatment with Dr. Medhat and Patti would provide a guided imagery to enhance the medications I was taking.

I was taking eighty units of Prednisone daily. We divided this amount into two timed segments, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each time I took the Prednisone, I also smelled vanilla, took a dose of cod liver oil, and rang a bell. Sounds kind of weird? The vanilla reminded me of my grandmother's kitchen. The cod liver oil also reminded me of my grandmother. I can remember her ruining perfectly good orange juice as she tried to hide the taste of cod liver oil that she thought I should have. The bell? We just threw that into the mix to honor Pavlov.

The plan was that I would associate the taking of Prednisone with the scent of vanilla, the taste of cod liver oil, and the sound of the bell. Every two weeks I would decrease the dosage of Prednisone by five units and continue the ritual. A couple of times, however, decreasing the dosage caused an increase in my lupus symptoms, so I would have to go back up to the latest dose and stay there a while longer.

Patti also made a special guided imagery tape for me that was a fantastic voyage through my all body systems, affirming and enhancing the healing process cell by cell, organ by organ, system by system. I used this meditation tape several times a day. It wasn't hard to do because I could hardly get out of bed during the first few months.

Patti also told me about a homeopathic growth hormone (HGH) product, produced by a company called Dreamous Corporation USA. She said people were taking it for its affect on the aging process. I wasn't too worried about aging. In fact I wanted to get older. Getting older meant I was still alive. My doctor told me that she knew of AIDS patients being treated with HGH to promote the manufacture of healthy T cells. I called the people at Dreamous and asked what they thought about me taking their HGH. They said they couldn't really tell me because they hadn't treated a lupus patient with their product, but that it had helped people with other health needs.

My hair had fallen out shortly after my blood sugar had hit 500, so I decided to test whether the HGH was working by seeing if it stimulated any hair growth. My doctor read the information that came with my first bottle of HGH and told me to take as much as I could of it each day. The amount suggested was very small in comparison to the amounts of growth hormone used for children's growth and for AIDS patients. So I started guzzling the Dreamous HGH in huge amounts. The company had told me not to expect any noticeable changes for about six months. After about four months, however, I noticed the growth of hair under my arms. I rushed to my hairdresser, who went over my scalp with a fine toothcomb and declared that she could see new growth. It took more than a year to get my hair back. It had taken almost that long to get the Prednisone completely out of my system.

Over the last several years I have remained on a steady course of HGH, streamlined my diet, and followed my vanilla, cod liver oil and bell regimen at least two times a day. I wear vanilla perfume all the time. Last year I found that I was allergic to wheat, so I have stopped eating any wheat or gluten products. That is no sugar and no flour, plus what my son refers to as the "caveman diet," of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and roots. Occasionally I hunt down a wild boar and eat some meat.

I still have systemic lupus erythematousis. I cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound, and, in fact, have trouble doing stairs, either up or down. I have to keep my blood sugar regulated and I take huge "over doses" of vitamins B complex and C every day. The big thing is--I am alive. When I have any symptoms of respiratory infection or flu, I take high doses of echinacea for about four days in a row. I take antibiotics as infrequently as possible because I can still get pneumonia, a disease that can finish off a lupus patient. My doctor encourages me to save the use of antibiotics for such serious infections.

For many years I have been a certified medical assistant and teaching medical assistance. Now I have completed a certificate program in clinical guided image therapy and am using everything I know--guided imagery, HGH, diet and supplements--to help other people get well.

Since I originally wrote this article, I have been working with people using guided image therapy as a complement to their medical care. I do not work with people who are not also following their physician's treatment plan. I am sometimes a little impatient with people and I told Dr. Leviton the following story.

My car was broadsided one day by an SUV and was totaled. I got out of the car and sat down in the road in a lotus position. As I started doing yoga breathing, I scanned my body systems, correcting them as I went along. When I got through I was ready to go get a four-inch gouge in my right arm sutured. The gouge was caused by an airbag. (I am less than five feet tall.)

When the paramedics forced me to go to the hospital in an ambulance, they were very surprised to find my pulse, respiration, and blood pressure all within the lower limits of normal. The doctor insisted on x-rays, which were also normal. He asked me if I needed pain medication and of course I declined.

So when I complained to Dr. Leviton about how slowly one of my patients was trusting herself to control her own body, he told me I was an exceptional person. I liked that.

I call my program Staying Alive.