It’s so good to be cured. No time now. Will update later.
I’m going to live to be 116!
The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 5
[To catch up on the last installment of this journey, see https://whathappenstous.wordpress.com/2025/10/12/the-zebra-sleeps-tonight-part-4/]
It’s been over four months since I’ve updated my journey. The reason is that there have been no easy answers, no significant improvement. I have consulted 16 different practitioners, and none of them have cured me. I’ve seen:
five dentists
my general practitioner
my GP’s physician’s assistant
a speech therapist
three physical therapists
two neurologists
two chiropractors
a urologist
an acupuncturist
They’re all fine experts, they just don’t know what’s wrong. I’m a zebra, not a horse. I don’t fit into the neat categories.
Well, they’ve all been fine experts until now. I just visited a quack and paid her $300.
Bethanne (not her real name) was recommended by a student at the acupuncture clinic where I have been treated for 15 years.
“Bethanne knows all about the jaw and the area where your problem is centered,” the student said. “She works with dentists. But she doesn’t take insurance. It’s cash-only.”
I looked her up on the Internet. Her credentials looked impressive.
Dr. Bethanne, according to her Web page, received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering (Pre-Med) at UC Irvine in 2007, then earned her doctorate in Physical Therapy from Loma Linda University in 2013. She is certified as a Neurologic Certified Specialist. She was drawn to the field of physical therapy, she writes, after a series of injuries from Chinese lion dancing and snowboarding. There were three more paragraphs of credentials, which got quite technical.
I made an appointment. I put three Benjamins in my wallet for the first visit.
I drove out to Tustin to a nice industrial park. I walked in. They gave me an expensive bottle of water while I waited.
Dr. Bethanne was a short, fit Chinese woman. I explained my problem, and she listened intently. She seemed to understand the territory. She gave me neurological tests. Touch my finger, touch your nose, walk a straight line. I didn’t perform badly, but I didn’t perform perfectly, either. She recommended that I change from my normal aerobic cycling on a stationary bike to interval training. She recommended that I hold my breath three times every morning. She gave me four neurological exercises to do every day, see below.
Then Dr. Bethanne said something that changed everything.
“Did you get COVID?” she asked.
“Yes, twice,” I said.
“Did you take the vaccine?”
“Yes, every single one.”
Dr. Bethanne frowned and made a face. Then she moved on in her examination. But I went back to it.
“Are you saying that the vaccine may have caused what I’m experiencing?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dr. Bethanne said. “If you look it up, you’ll find that the vaccines have had no positive effect on the virus, and have had some severe medical side effects, too. Look it up.”
I took a deep breath. I’ve been following the medical aspects of COVID pretty closely. I was pretty sure she was wrong. Moreover, I see the people who are anti-vax as naked opportunists.
I went home and looked it up on Google. I discovered that the studies that had been conducted on the vaccines have concluded that the vaccines have been a great success. Furthermore, taking the vaccine far outweighs the dangers of side effects. Moreover, it was personal for me. In 2024, my mother died from COVID. I was there when she took in her last breath.
I thought about where Dr. Bethanne’s office was–South Orange County. Lots of rich right-wingers lived down there. People who gullibly watched Fox News and marched to get Judy Blume out of their local libraries. I imagined the rich patients with deep pockets who were told that their hard-to-diagnose malady was caused by the evil vaccine monster. I imagined that it was an easy lie to tell, that it would pay handsomely, and that it would play into their worst gullibilities.
I’m always shocked when people lie. Dr. Bethanne had said it with such conviction! So I asked around. The doctors that I talked to confirmed that the COVID vaccines had been a great success.
My wife had a wise comment.
“If Dr. Bethanne were right,” Claire said, “you should have experienced an increase in slurring immediately after taking the vaccine. And I haven’t noticed that.”
Then I realized that she had my credit card. Before I made an appointment, she had required that information.
I called my credit-card company and took precautions against unauthorized charges. I canceled my next appointment with her. I wanted to go on an eloquent rant about what a quack she was, but I exercised self-restraint. Rage can have unintended consequences, I’ve discovered from experience.
Two weeks later, while I was exercising on my stationary bike, Dr. Bethanne called me. She asked what the problem was. I didn’t go on a rant, but I didn’t pull any punches, either. I said that her anti-vax stance was an intelligence test. I told her about other red flags that had gone up, too. The treatment was too expensive, I said, at $200 cash per visit.
There were lots of insults that I could have hurled at her. But hey, she had my credit-card number.
A week later, a call came in with her name on it. I screened it and a voicemail was left. It turned out to be a spam caller. They wanted me to spend hundreds of dollars to publicize my book at a book fair in England. They called my writing style highly readable and my narrative masterful. They were crooks.
They beat it out of us
by Claire Koehler and David Groves
“Koehler,” I say over and over.
“It means coalminer in German.”
I know nothing else about the language.
Nothing beyond Guten Nacht,
Which I’m not even sure that I pronounce right.
None of my six siblings know anything either.
None of us have ever visited Germany.
In 1905, Thomas Phlieger was a child of 6,
And he spoke fluent German.
Thomas ate knackwurst and sauerkraut and galuskies.
He had German thoughts,
Which were more meticulous and severe,
And German habits,
Like breaking up his bread,
Dropping it in his milk,
And drinking it down in one gulp.
But in 1916, when Plainville, Kansas’s sons
Were sent to die and fight against Germany’s sons,
Thomas became the enemy.
His teachers were enforcers.
His classmates, as well.
If Thomas spoke German, he was beaten.
If he behaved German, he was beaten.
If he thought German, it would show on his face.
The German was beaten deep down within him.
For the rest of his life, he spoke only English.
Taught his children only English.
I guess the beatings worked.
No Kings Is Growing
On October 17, while sitting in a dental chair, my dentist asked me what I was doing this weekend. He didn’t really care, but it’s what marketing consultants teach them to do in order to increase return business.
“No Kings!” I said.
Dr. Noth (not his real name) was adjusting my mouth guard with a kind of file, and for a moment, was surprised for a moment and pulled back. He was shocked that I had brought up politics in polite conversation. But hey, he asked. Then he laughed. Then he went into a soliloquy.
Yes, it’s appalling what that guy is trying to do to our country. How can anyone support that?
“I’m normally right of center,” Dr. Noth said, “but it’s obvious what he’s trying to do to our country.”
What’s obvious, he said, is that he’s trying to fix the next election. The dentist said that normally, he would vote against something like Proposition 50, but that now, it’s clear that this new proposition is what’s needed for fair elections. And no, there shouldn’t be any kings in this country. He said it all in low, polite tones.
I was heartened that someone who was normally right of center was signing on to a clearly left-wing proposition. In addition, we had convinced him to abandon the clearly insane policies of the right. He was a smart guy–at least smart enough to make it through dental school–and wasn’t okay with the craziness that was now plaguing our country.
When Dr. Noth had finished adjusting my mouth guard, he wanted to say, “Have a good time at No Kings.” The marketing consultant had told him that was the correct thing to say. He tried, but he just kept laughing. Little laughs, and every time, the laughs stopped him from saying it. The laughs were a defense mechanism.
I wanted to tell him that our democracy depended on people like him coming out to No Kings. I wanted to tell him that we had to hold on tightly to our democracy, because there are people trying to wrest it away from us. I wanted to tell him that we were fighting against our own Hitler, and that we needed him at No Kings. But in the end, I felt like what I said was enough.
When someone talks about The Silent Majority, they’re talking about people like Dr. Noth. It’s important to know where their cowardly hearts will lean. This election, it looks like it will lean left.
Dr. Noth kept laughing. And I walked out of his office with my mouth guard.
That afternoon at 4, we gathered at the Whittier, California, City Hall and marched. There were 1,000 or more or us, and 7 million us around the country. It was the largest American protest since the Vietnam War. Take a look at our protest, in a video taken by me.
That night, the president posted an AI video on X showing him with a crown on his head and flying a jet, dumping excrement on all of us declaring that there are no kings in America. Truly, it’s a fight.
The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 4
[To catch up on the history of this medical problem, see “The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 1,” or “The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 2, or “The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 3.”]
I had seen nine experts. I was in search of a cure for my unexplained vocal slurring, but none of them had provided a full cure. In February, a speech therapist had agreed with my longtime dentist that my mouth and jaw were incredibly tense. In May, a chiropractor had discovered that massaging the jaw helped temporarily, as it does with TMJ patients. In the summer, my acupuncturist helped somewhat. But the improvements were all temporary and not full cures.
And the question remained: What was causing the slurring? The chiropractor was alleviating the tension, but why did the tension return?
I was fighting the battle on several fronts.
In July, I visited a neurologist. She couldn’t classify the problem into any of the neurological categories. It wasn’t ALS, myasthenia gravis, or any other scary-sounding neurological disorder. Still, because I had googled those maladies, the Internet endlessly advertised myasthenia gravis drugs to me. The neurologist, in the meantime, was befuddled.
At the same time, I was getting treated by my longtime acupuncturist, who thought that the problem was, weirdly, an imbalance between my spleen channel and my liver channel. Dr. Lee, my yoda, understood the complex system of chi and flow. To remedy my imbalance, Dr. Lee recommended that I follow a special diet, which I did. No milk. No red meat. That alone was a sacrifice. That meant no cheese on my burritos. But he also specified more severe sacrifice, that I eat more papayas, oranges, and apples. And these weird lotus seeds from China that tasted like nothing.
In September, I began to wonder if the problem was psychosomatic. i wondered if the trauma over the past two years, including my mother’s death just a month prior to the onset of the slurring, had caused the problem. So I called my friend Tina, who has spent 40 years treating psychological issues, and has published 15 books on psychological subjects. She offered to act as a sounding board on a psychological cause. (Buy Tina’s book here: https://a.co/d/j036Gnt)
The idea was also that I had had two teeth pulled in June, 2024, and by two weeks later, the slurring had appeared. It reminded me of an incident that had occurred in the caverns of my personal history, when I was 12, when I had had four teeth pulled for orthodontia. I awoke from anesthesia in the family Plymouth station wagon, my mouth filled with blood and gauze. When my mother and I returned home, I discovered that during anesthesia, I had been chewing nervously on the inside of my mouth, and had gnawed holes there, in both sides. I just didn’t feel it. When I told my mother, she told me to stop. I did. Still, it left two holes that remain in the inside of my mouth to this day.
Thinking back on it years later, I wondered if the two tooth pullings were related. Tina said that in her therapeutic experience, the two incidents could very well be related. Another therapist friend, Stephanie, considered it plausible, too.
“I’ve seen things like that before as a trauma therapist,” she said.
It was a lot to think about. My past and present swam around in my brain. Throughout the day and evening, I would make psychological connections. Concepts and debilities. And a couple times a day, I would stop at my computer and write down my thoughts. I would email them to Tina, and she would respond. It was somewhat like therapy. I wrote email after email.
For example, I wrote to Tina:
“It’s clear to me that my clenching of the jaw is the way I address the world. I’ve always considered my clenching to be my judgment and intelligence, my rumination and consideration.
“I was never an expressive teenager. I was always a nerd, made palatable because I was so athletic. Lack of expression shows itself in the mouth, the little smirks, semi-smiles, and judgments that are there instead of full expression. I was never a celebrator, a gasper, or an expostulator. I didn’t express my surface emotions. I was never fully expressive. It was all in the mouth, like Steven Wright or Ken Burns. I had a double mind, in the way that magic is the result of double thinking–the way things seem to be, and the way they really are. Thinking about both things at once, because there’s enough mind left over to do that doublethink.”
Perhaps the 2024 tooth pulling had been traumatic enough to trigger memories of my childhood traumatic tooth pulling. Perhaps that tensed up the mouth so much that I could hardly talk.
I had long had a very tense mouth, my dentist of over 30 years had always told me. Over the years, he had constantly placed his hands in my mouth, in the maw of danger. Tooth grinding had caused great damage to my teeth over the years. Perhaps, I mused, that childhood tooth pulling had triggered massive tension in the mouth that had lasted for decades.
The 2024 tooth pulling happened with a shot of novocaine, but without anesthesia. They didn’t put me under. As I sat in the chair, the dentist pulled and pulled. At a certain point, the dentist stopped to chastise me.
“Listen, if you’re going to tense up so much, it’s not going to be good for you,” he said. “We’re going to have to go another way.”
In the end, the dentist extracted the two teeth without going “another way,” whatever that meant. It was quite distressing.
As time went on, I became strangely depressed. I was pursuing cures in a valiant manner, but the months kept passing without a cure. I soldiered on bravely, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I was slurring all the time. Suddenly, I didn’t expect to find a cure. I looked at the malady as the beginning of old age. I had lots of things that I still wanted to accomplish, but suddenly, it seemed like there might be a final punctuation on the sentence that was my life. This, I feared, might be the end.
Being a magician, clear speech is essential to my profession. You have to deliver jokes with clarity. You have to deliver instructions. You have to specify conditions. You have to have timing. However, every show I put on was a question mark. I wondered if I would be able to communicate. I wondered if they would think I was drunk. I wondered if they would think that I didn’t deliver on the contract to give them a good time.
But strangely, it didn’t happen that way. People understood me, even though they had to strain. They heard my slurring and they cut me some slack. It was like I was a person with a heavy accent, but everything else was excellent. [See a magic performance while slurring here: https://youtu.be/Ve-nT_zFfgE]
“You crushed it,” one client said.
“Wow, that was fantastic,” another said.
“You are very skilled,” another said.
Over the months, I kept searching for a cure. Every day, I called an expert. Sometimes, I would make a doctor’s appointment. Sometimes, I would go to an appointment. Sometimes, a friend would give me advice. Sometimes, I would explore another option.
Finally, something happened. On October 1, a day before my birthday, at an appointment, my chiropractor said that my speech had improved. Another chiropractor was called in, and she agreed. Later in the day, my acupuncturist agreed. That night, I went home to my wife and wondered if they were just trying to justify their therapies by saying positive things.
“No, I agree with them,” Claire said.
The next week, the chiropractors and acupuncturist said the same thing. Amazingly, my wife said the same thing, too. Finally, there was improvement!
But the cause of the improvement was hard to pin down. I had been fighting the battle on many fronts, and there were four plausible reasons for the improvement:
Acupuncture
Psychological therapy
Chiropractic
Or the fact that I had started wearing the partial that my dentist had made for me months ago
The following week, in mid-October, the news was good, too. The chiropractor felt the muscles of my jaw.
“Open, close,” he said. “Open, close. Wow, there’s no longer any deviation.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes.”
Clearly, I had found the mechanism of the slurring. Jaw tension was the how. Clearly, relaxing the jaw showed results. I began to apply heat to my mouth, hot water on a washcloth, and amazingly, it worked! It was a strange habit to adopt, but I began to shave every day. Shaving! It helped me to speak more clearly.
The next week, the chiropractor declared that the jaw was even less tense. And the week after that, even less tense.
Still, it wasn’t a 100% cure yet. I was afraid to be fully hopeful. I was afraid of being a fool.
But unmistakenly, I had taken more steps on the road to healing,. I was stoked.
A massive dose of stupid
There are so many stupid people in the world. That’s what the past decade has taught me.
And the corollary to that is a positive one: There’s a lot less competition in life, a lot less sound thinking, and your chances for personal success, in whatever realm you compete, are much greater than you ever realized. Provided, of course, that you’re one of the smart ones.
Take my neighbor Javier, for example. On the surface, Javier looks like he might have a good head on his shoulders. He stops in front of my garage and smiles a million-dollar smile. He’s very friendly, and his face can light up your day. His children are a delight, 11 and 14. But the other day, I had a conversation with him that made me doubt his very cognitive abilities.
The beginning of our conversation was simple: I asked Javier if he had had any experiences with ICE. We live in La Habra, a Southern California town that has a large Hispanic population, and I have even witnessed an ICE confrontation on the streets of our town. In fact, the entire Southern California area has seen an invasion of federal ICE agents, and it is a special concern for Hispanic populations, to which Javier belongs. Turn on the news. It’s filled with terrifying accounts of Hispanics being snatched off the street and not able to be found by their relatives. The new administration is taking away one of our core democratic rights, due process. They have even built a prison surrounded by an alligator-infested swamp called Alligator Alcatraz, the creeps.
“No, I haven’t heard anything,” Javier said, seemingly a bit puzzled.
I was confused by his response. Given his ethnicity, which is second-generation Mexican-American, and his place of residence, and the fact that his immigrant mother lives in the middle of the Hispanic barrio of East Los Angeles, I would have thought that Javier would be more up to date on the matter.
So standing in front of our garage, my wife and I decided to update Javier. A few days earlier, my wife had attended a city council meeting, and had heard alarming first-person testimonies of ICE raids from alarmed citizens. Javier listened to us intently, and the facts seemed to register on his face. I was encouraged. Javier was hearing the truth.
“Wow, I guess I now know why they created those FEMA camps,” Javier said.
“What FEMA camps?”
And Javier began to describe an online rumor that he had heard, as if it were fact, that over the past four years, the government has been establishing “FEMA camps.” Apparently, Javier said, these were concentration camps for the Hispanics that ICE had caught.
My mind boggled. Surely Javier knew that the Trump administration was not working in concert with the Biden administration. If he didn’t, it would constitute a massive dose of stupid. I stared at Javier as he continued to rattle on about those horrible FEMA camps. Later, I googled FEMA camps, and discovered that it was a conspiracy theory that had been debunked countless times. AI gave me a summary:
“The phrase ‘FEMA camps’ refers to a persistent, debunked conspiracy theory that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is building internment camps to imprison U.S. citizens. There is no evidence to support this claim.”
Still, Javier believed in FEMA camps.
When I’d had time to think about it, it was a huge insult to my personal experience of FEMA. In 1994, I lived in one of the worst-hit buildings of the Northridge earthquake, and FEMA helped me immensely. I was living in a 1925 Santa Monica building on the beach that had been built on sand. At 4:31 in the morning, after feeling a terrifying and violent tremor of concrete and wood, I had thrown on my robe and scurried down the staircase. Reaching safety, I had stood in the dark in front of our building with the other residents, afraid that another tremor would collapse the whole building. Standing there, we saw electrical lines sparking down the block and heard people screaming. Over 50 people in Santa Monica died that day.
At the moment of the quake, my neighbor Matt had jumped out of his bed, feeling the tremor, and had grabbed his baby and tried to cross his living room to safety. But unbeknownst to him, Matt’s living room had eight feet of fallen brick piled high in it. The brick elevator shaft had fallen into his living room. The lights were out. He, his wife were stranded in the dark, holding their baby, unable to exit their apartment. They had to be rescued by the fire department by ladder–the evil government, in Javier’s mind.
A week later, the building was red-tagged–legally declared unfit for habitation–and we had to find other places to live. We didn’t even have time to move our furniture out. Eventually, it was all plowed under. We were left with nearly nothing.
FEMA, bless their hearts, was there for us. The big, bad government that the shameful parts of the Internet hates had rescued us. They set up shop in a big building just a mile away, and I received vouchers for furniture, groceries, rent, and other stopgap measures. When we were down on our knees, FEMA was there to help us. But here was Javier, denigrating our good-government saviour. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
After a shocking conversation with Javier in the driveway, my wife and I walked away from that conversation with an expanded idea of how stupid the American population can be, and why people can still vote for obviously execrable candidates. I’m talking, of course, of anybody who still calls themselves an R. Anybody who still believes right-wing lies at this point has, to put it frankly, a cognitive disorder.
After so many of these encounters, the stupidity of our time is no longer a puzzle to me. Javier and his kind, of which I have met far more than I would ever have believed existed, are more than just low-information voters. Javier is the poster boy for a significant part of the electorate that have faulty brains.
People like Javier may make me feel depressed, but they also make me feel better about myself. They make me feel smarter.
The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 3
What an interesting journey this is, this path to reclaiming my voice.
[To read part 2, click here. To read part 1, click here.]
In May, I was doing a show in a ballroom at a country club. After the show, I tripped over two toddlers on the dancefloor. I tweaked my back badly, so I visited the chiropractor. The first chiropractors that I saw–chiropractic students, actually–were focusing on the most immediate problem, which was that tweaked back. A couple of weeks later, they X-rayed me, and we discovered that I had three fractures of the ribs—the seventh, eighth, and ninth ribs, right in the middle of the belly.
By my third chiropractic visit, I was greeted by a student whom I hadn’t met, Gaby. Because I was slurring, I felt the need at the outset to explain why I was slurring, but wasn’t exactly asking for chiropractic treatment for it.
“This isn’t why I’ve come in today,” I said.
But Gaby had a bright idea.
“Let me try something,” Gaby said, and leapt into action.
Gaby started massaging my jaw, and immediately felt great tension there.
“This is very, very, very tense,” she said.
I said: “My longtime dentist, like he’s been my dentist for the last 30 years, says that he’s never had a patient with as tense of a mouth as me.”
“I can’t believe how tight the muscles are,” Gaby kept saying, still massaging.
“That’s painful,” I said. “But I don’t object to pain, if it’s going to clear this up.”
It was worth the pain. By the end of my session with Gaby, I was pronouncing words that I hadn’t pronounced correctly in a year.
Obviously, Gaby was talented and educated in this area. But, as her supervising professor Dr. Russell said, there were other factors, too.
“When you go to a GP, or to anybody in the M.D. area, they move further and further from the patient. They ask questions, take notes, and refer you, but they do this often without even touching you. With chiropractic, however, it’s immediately hands-on.”
That coincided with my own experience with mainstream doctors. In previous decades, I remember more eye contact and intense listening. Recently, however, my doctors usually sat a stool and typed into their computer. In the 1980s, when I was a freelance journalist writing mostly about health and fitness, I saw a research study that concluded that mainstream doctors listened for about 17 seconds before they made up their minds. It was based on eye studies. It was mainly the pressure of meeting their corporate quota of patients and moving on with their caseload, I assumed.
In my own slurring journey over the last year, I mostly remember doctors sitting on that stool, supposedly listening, and typing into the computer. They never saw the information contained in my eyes, my inflections, and my facial expressions. All that human information was lost. Emotion was lost. It was simply a profound scientific puzzle, and they were good at puzzle solving.
Dr. Russell, the chiropractic professor, is a man of about 60, grey-haired but slender. He speaks with a gentle voice, and has a type of 30,000-foot-high perspective, always keeping in mind the big picture.
“Obviously, Gaby is a talented and smart chiropractic student. But there were other elements in this puzzle, too,” Dr. Russell said.
“Mainstream doctors take steps that move them further and further from the patient—tests, numbers, bloodwork—while chiropractors immediately go hands-on. And your slurring problem is obviously responding to hands-on treatment.”
That made sense to me. With my first eight experts, there was a minimum of touching. Most didn’t touch my face at all. Although I had long had nerves about chiropractors—the AMA frequently shares scary stories with the media—I had also had worries about mainstream doctors.
For example, when my mother was on her 2024 deathbed, I left a phone message for her GP, who is my GP, too, if I could have access to my mother’s medical portal; my sister wasn’t allowing me access. I didn’t just receive a no; he never called back at all. To make things worse, he was also among the worst examples of no-eye-contact that I’ve ever run into. Still, my mother had said that he was the best doctor in our area, and she had much more experience with him than I.
His nurse practitioner, Kelli, who sometimes fills in for him, is the one who gave me the worst medical advice I have ever received. Back in May, I sat in the examination room and explained my zebra slurring journey, and she retorted that perhaps I should consider slurring “the new normal.”
The new normal! Like dump all hope. Ugh.
Last Monday, my acupuncturist, Dr. Clifford Lee, said the slurring was, in his opinion, caused by the mouth tension. But the mouth tension, he believes, is caused by a Qi imbalance between the liver and spleen. If I don’t address that imbalance, he said, the chiropractic massage will work intermittently, but the slurring will recede and then return, recede and then return.
Dr. Lee is a kind man of about 55 and reminds me of friends that I went to school with—not striving to be in the in crowd, just studious, no airs, no insincerity, with a natural laugh. He grew up to.be this masterpiece. A change in diet, Dr. Lee recommended, would correct the imbalance.
Avoid milk products, except kefir.
Avoid iced drinks.
Avoid fatty meats, and eat more chicken, fish, lean lamb, eggs, black beans, and baked tofu.
As for fruit, tend towards papayas, apples, and oranges.
As for vegetables, eat more scallions, ginger, soybeans, lentils, and dark green leafies.
Eat sesame seeds, walnuts, and even lotus seeds, which I found on Amazon for $25 a bag.
Drink warm and hot liquids with your meal.
Drink cinnamon bark tea.
Have a little wine.
Coming back from the appointment, I stopped at Sprouts grocery store and filled up. No more milk for me. No more hamburgers. I bought a payaya and stared at it, wondering what to do with it. Eventually, I came up with a papaya/fruit juice/kefir shake recipe.
Four days later, the diet took effect.
“Did you notice that I’m hardly slurring at all?” I asked my wife Claire at the lunchtable.
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m very clear.”
“Yes, I haven’t noticed the slurring at all.”
Dr. Clifford Lee
So maybe the Qi theory worked. Or maybe it was something that happened in the hospital, because the day before, I had gone in for prostate surgery, and had eaten only liquid meals and Jell-O. Or maybe the enlarged prostate was the cause, and shaving it down in size helped. Or maybe it was the frigid temperatures in my hospital room.
Whichever solution you choose will tell you a lot about your medical prejudices, because there is very little way for an individual to prove causation in medicine. Who knows who you caught a cold from? Who knows what exactly killed grandma? Who knows if the cancer came from your unhealthy ceiling or breathing in the city? Who knows? Nobody, in the end.
But it was probably Dr. Lee’s diet. After all, he’s assiduously studied the 3,000-year-old Wisdom of the Ages all of his life. He has the scrutable look of a postmodern, slender Buddha (see above).
Last night, Claire and I watched “Downton Abbey” for an hour in bed. It’s our fifth time watching it all the way through. Afterwards, I shut off the light and we closed our eyes. It was dark and quiet. But as the thoughts were settling, I realized something, and reached over in the dark for my phone.
“I forgot to silence my phone,” I muttered to Claire, who had not yet caught the Sleep Express.
Listening to my words, though, I surprised myself.
“Wow, I can pronounce silence again.”
It was a lovely feeling, pronouncing a word that used to be unattainable. Silence. Such a lovely word. And then I went to sleep, smiling.
For the next episode of “The Zebra Sleeps Tonight,” click here.
Anything resembling beautiful
At age 10, I fell in love with Lynetta. She was so beautiful, and there was a bubbly excitement in every word that proceeded from her mouth. She was so happy to be alive! Her voice was like bubbly music.
As an adult, Lynetta was just as beautiful, but had lost her way. She spent her early adulthood chasing the corporate dream. Starting in 2015, I became surprised at who she had become. Most importantly, I was disgusted at the garbage spewing out of her mouth. It was the same bubbly voice, but the content was garbage.
We began to talk on the phone about the specifics. Lynetta confided that as a child, her uncle had told her about the Bilderburgs and how they conspired to control the world. It was then that I realized that she had been ruined at an early age.
I’ve since become fascinated by delusions, which are a diagnosed phenomenon. Incorrect beliefs based on no evidence.
Lynetta had many wacky ideas, many of them conspiracy theories with no factual basis, but one had to do with me. She was disappointed that I admitted to being part Mexican.
“Disappointed?” I asked incredulously.
“Why do you have to identify with that part of yourself?” she said.
I was gobsmacked. Like Popeye, I am who I am. That’s all that I am.
For several years, Lynetta was lost in the bowels of a chronic illness. Around 2019, Lynetta died of it.
How very cold I felt about it. It had been a long road, but the way that I got there was that Lynetta had grown into a lie. We all grow into something. At the end, she was a lie. She was no longer anything resembling beautiful.
I couldn’t go to the funeral. My allegiance had been betrayed by ugliness. I couldn’t. I didn’t.
The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 2
If you’ve read part 1, you know that my current health journey has been long and arduous, but fascinating. And at the end of that post, there was a fascinating wrap-up, with a medical treatment that actually worked, after a year of nothing working.
Unfortunately, this next part of the story is marked primarily by confusion and chaos. The experts are disagreeing with each other. Some experts suspect that my congenital slurring of words has a dental cause, some suspect that it has a neurological cause, and still others look at it through alternative-medicine lenses.
Remember that the clever chiropractic student Gaby made progress on my slurring by performing deep, painful massage on my jaw, face, and neck muscles. Suddenly, I could pronounce words that I hadn’t been able to pronounce in months. Suddenly, someone had made progress. I honored her, publicly and verbally, because I honor results.
I texted my longtime acupuncturist, Dr. Clifford Lee. He was glad, and believed that the cause of the slurring was tension in the jaw. However, he suspected that the tensions itself was caused by something else, and that the slurring couldn’t be fully cured via massage alone.
“In Chinese medicine, there is a relationship between the liver and the spleen,” Dr. Lee texted. “The liver in this case is related directly with the tendons and also emotions. The spleen in this case is related to the muscles and also nutrition. If the liver and spleen are not working well with each other, then the liver can (so to speak) zap the nutritional work of the spleen and also affect the tendons and muscles, in this case the jaw.
“So if we don’t address that relationship, then the jaw tension will keep returning….I would suggest to continue with the chiropractic treatments and also take…herbal medicine from our end as well as follow certain dietary guidelines….”
I have a long history with Dr. Lee, and trust him to have great expertise in this area. So I vowed to follow his advice, as well.
However, another expert had another opinion. Dr. M, the dentist who had originally pulled my two teeth last June, had a deep skepticism of all things alternative, including both chiropractic and acupuncture. Despite coming from Yemen, he seemed to have no allegiance whatsoever to the ancient medicine that is still very much alive in his home country.
“Look, if you massage the mouth, you’re going to have better pronunciation,” he said over the phone while driving in his car. “It will naturally enervate the muscles. But somewhere along the way, there’s a nerve that isn’t communicating with the muscles. You’ve got to find that broken connection.”
Dr. M recommended that I visit the USC Orofacial Clinic or a TMJ doctor. Still, he had damaged his credibility in previous conversations. I could not forget his wholesale dismissal of alternative medicine, a cocksure attitude that rubs me the wrong way. I could not forget the moment when I described certain symptoms to him, and he dismissed them out of hand. Weeks ago, for example, I had told him that my pronunciation improved when I ate or chewed gum. My longtime dentist Ron had contended that that clue led him to believe that the cause wasn’t neurological, but dental. That didn’t matter in the least to Dr. M, however. To me, that seemed to indicate a tunnel vision.
Today, I went back to the chiropractor for my sixth treatment. There has been steady progress on the slurring, but no final resolution. When Dr. Russell, the supervising professor at the clinic, came into the room, I decided to share Dr. M’s skepticism for alternative medicine. I didn’t care about the conflict that it might arouse. Dr. Russell listened patiently to Dr. M’s belief that chiropractic was quackery. Then he explained that, indeed, the cause of the slurring may be neurological, but it also may be that the slurring is caused by a secondary cause. It doesn’t have to be neurological, he said. I listened intently, but my brain was getting full, and I dared not tilt my head for fear that all my thoughts would run out my ears. I know that Dr. Russell said some more smart things, but for the life of me, I can’t recall them. That’s how overwhelming this journey can be.
When Dr. Russell left, I was left with Gaby and another chiropractic student, Daniellee. This new student had another theory. She’s nearly a chiropractor, but had previous training as a physician’s assistant, which gave her a unique point of view. She spoke with a certain amount of authority and obvious knowledge.
“To my ear, it sounds like your tongue is getting in the way,” Danielee said. “When you visit your neurologist [my appointment is next week], you may have them look at blockages in the throat, or your uvula. You might want to look at that whole area.”
My longtime dentist, Ron, had originally opined about my tongue. He theorized that perhaps the gap made by the pulled teeth had caused the tongue to grow.
“Sometimes, organs will grow to fill an empty space,” he said. “You might have to cut your tongue in some way.”
Still, Ron admitted that he had never heard about such a problem.
During the chiropractic exam today, Danielee, who thought that the tongue might be involved, took our her flashlight and looked at that whole area, but at a cursory glance, couldn’t find anything. Still, she encouraged me to ask my neurologist about it.
Gaby and Daniellee also discussed another topic. A year ago, when my two molars were pulled, perhaps Dr. M had damaged my vagus nerve. If so, this could be serious. There might be a limited time to repair it. After a while, whatever damage had been done would be permanent.
To make matters more confusing, my neighbor Mario had a theory. One day, he stopped by my garage and let me have it.
“If you have a partial, like my father does, you should probably wear it,” Mario said. “If you don’t wear it, that could be causing the slurring.”
Spleen, liver, nerve damage, TMJ, dentures. It was all very confusing. However, I felt the need to keep it all in my head at the same time. It was a competition of ideas, and I didn’t want to short-change anyone. I’ve never been a superfan of chiropractic, but at the moment, they seemed to be getting the most results. And Ron had given me probably the best advice of all:
“Keep going in the direction that works,” he texted.
My next chiropractic appointment is next Wednesday.
The Zebra Sleeps Tonight, part 1
In June, 2024, I began slurring my words in a noticeable way. It was alarming, because I make my living by talking–specifically, as a professional magician. It was especially alarming because I’ve constructed my whole magic act around my deep, pleasant-sounding voice, taking advantage of that happy trait in various ways. I talk a lot. I’m friendly. People like me more because of my mellifluous tones.
My immediate thought was that the slurring was the result of a double tooth extraction—that month, I had had two problem teeth extracted. However, I didn’t go back to the dentist to fix the slurring, but instead, went to my acupuncturist. He needled my jaw a bit, but it didn’t help. I shared a strange clue with him—that the slurring seemed to lessen if I ate blueberry muffins. He dismissed the blueberry theory, just recommended that I rule out stroke by going to my general practitioner.
My GP ordered a series of tests, including an MRI to rule out stroke. He also ordered a series of blood tests.
The MRI came back negative. The blood tests showed several possible problems, including prediabetes and a high PSA (a test that measures the possibility of cancer of the prostate). The GP sent me to a urologist for the high PSA, and the urologist ordered a few more tests. Those tests came back negative. So after the first few results, there was a sense of relief.
While I was pursuing a medical solution to the slurring, I had an hourlong conversation with my longtime dentist, a guy named Ron with whom I had attended high school. He was puzzled by the slur, but was intrigued by the eating clue. By that time, I had realized that the slurring would improve if I ate anything at all, not just blueberry muffins. I began to pack power bars with me during crucial talking times, like during my shows. At that point, it seemed like the slurring might be a blood-sugar problem, something related to my prediabetes numbers, and power bars seemed like a possible solution.
Ron had been my dentist for 30 years, and had always complained about the tension in mouth.
“You have to stop grinding your teeth,” he kept saying.
Ron was always fixing this or that damage because of my grinding. I tried to analyze how to relax my mouth, especially at night, but it was a supreme puzzle: How do you stop doing something that you do while you’re asleep? I wrote out an analysis of my mouth tension, including how the tension feels at different times of the day, as well as my attempts at relaxing my mouth. However, I could never find an effective fix to the mouth tension.
After discussing it on the phone for an hour, Ron’s instinct on the relationship between slurring and chewing ended up being different from mine.
“I don’t think it’s a blood-sugar thing,” Ron said. “I think it’s a chewing thing. Try chewing gum and see if that improves the slurring.”
Sure enough, chewing gum did improve the slurring. Therefore, it seemed like the whole damn problem might very well be dental related.
A big step
By the fall, I returned to the GP, and he began burrowing down a different rabbit hole. He prescribed treatments with a speech therapist. This turned out not to be a search for a cause, but instead, a search for how to live with a disability. I ended up going to six weekly speech therapy sessions, and the speech therapist taught me how to overenunciate, which was fine, but created another kind of speech impediment—overenunciation, which made me sound mentally challenged. It was both a solution and another problem.
These sessions took me into the new year, which meant that I had been searching for a solution for a full six months. The speech therapist gave me exercises, which I faithfully executed, and towards the end of those sessions, the speech therapist said something that turned out to be a breakthrough of sorts.
“The way you mispronounce words,” she said, “is not the way that people with a lack of muscle tone in the mouth mispronounce words. It’s like there’s too much tension in the mouth.”
Too much tension in the mouth. A light bulb went off in my head. She worked with a lot of stroke patients who had lost muscle control in their mouth. But this didn’t look like her other patients, she said. And importantly, this coincided with Ron’s observations about my dental tension. They were saying the same thing. Coming at it from different perspectives, they had come to the same conclusion: that my slurring was the result of too much tension in the mouth.
Still, I had no theoretical framework to hang this theory on. Why would too much tension cause slurring?
Looking back, though, putting these two things together was a significant step.
At the time, however, everything was still a vague theory.
You are a zebra
In January, another medical problem cropped up. I developed a benign prostate problem, and my urologist put me on a medication, Flomax, that had bad side effects, including doubling the severity of the slurring. Continuing with my search for the source of my slurring, I made an appointment with the original dentist who had pulled my teeth, Dr. M. He was unhappy that I had not originally gone back to him, and that it had been nearly a year since he had pulled the teeth. Nonetheless, he was particularly fascinated by this problem, because he had never heard of it. Hell, nobody had heard of it! Nobody had ever heard of anything like this.
Dr. M told me a story that explained how unique it was.
“If you see an animal galloping towards you,” Dr. M said, “and it has a mane and a tail and four legs, it’s probably a horse. But it could be a zebra. Still, odds are that it’s probably a horse. You, my friend, are a zebra.”
I recalled a song that has been a hit several times, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” But this time, it was the zebra that was sleeping.
To Dr. M, I recounted my medical journey, which at that point had gone on for nearly a year. But he immediately dismissed that a tense mouth might be the cause. He even dismissed the firsthand observations that chewing made the slurring better. Instead, he went down a neurological rabbit hole. He suspected that I had a type of Bell’s Palsy, a kind of facial paralysis, even though I had no other signs of facial paralysis and no other symptoms of it. He said that he didn’t know that much about nerve issues involving the face, and so suggested that I visit a TMJ specialist in Torrance. He said that this TMJ guy was particularly expensive. Or if my insurance wouldn’t cover it, he suggested the USC Dental Clinic.
Two schools of thought
At this point, there seemed to be two schools of thought developing about the cause of my problem. There were the proponents of a dental cause, such as my dentist Ron. And there were the proponents of a neurological cause, such as Dr. M.
To find an honest cure, I felt that I had a responsibility to follow both theories.
Dr. M was right that the TMJ specialist was expensive, and indeed, my insurance didn’t cover it. I tried to make an appointment at the USC Dental Clinic, but it was an online impossibility. So one morning, on that dentist’s advice, I just drove down there.
First, I was admitted to Urgent Care. Dental students hovered over me while they consulted with their professor. After about an hour, they, too, admitted that my problem was, indeed, unique. They referred me to another department, the Oral Management department. I spent a little time there, and the supervising dentist admitted that it was something that he, too, had never seen before.
“I can’t help you,” he said. “But I’ll talk it over with my wife. She’s a speech therapist, and maybe she has some ideas.”
He tried to refer me to the neurology department, but they said that if I could open my mouth, they didn’t want to treat me. The next morning, while I was attending a funeral, I received the call that I had been promised. I stepped out and took it. The Oral Management dentist had indeed talked the problem over with his wife, and they had come up with nothing. They both agreed that the next step was to see a neurologist.
Over the next 24 hours, I began to think that the husband-wife team of a dentist and a speech therapist could be just the right expertise to attack my problem effectively. The next day, I texted him that I wanted to make an appointment with them both. I added some flattery—that they were my Dream Team. I didn’t mention price, because that wasn’t important to me at that point. I waited for a response, but none ever came.
A very modern doctor
I talked the problem over with a close friend who writes professionally about technology, and he recommended putting the symptoms into an AI search engine.
“It might not come up with the right solution,” Sam said, “but it might give you some ideas that you never thought of.”
That is how I came to employ a doctor of some renown, Dr. ChatGPT. And he came up with an alarming list of neurological possibilities. He was big on the possibility that it might be myasthenia gravis, a degenerative neurological disease that leads to chronic muscle weakness. He went into several pages of detail supporting his theory. He also wanted me to check out ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), a rare neurodegenerative disorder that is incurable.
To further follow the neurological rabbithole, I tried to schedule another appointment with my GP, but he didn’t have an available appointment for a couple of months. So instead, I scheduled an appointment with his nurse practitioner, Kelli.
The worst medical advice that I have ever received
During the appointment, Kelli sat at her medical computer and listened to my journey while typing notes. At that point, I had consulted about seven experts, not counting the students at the various schools who had worked on me, and detailed my findings.
“At this point,” she said, her eyes never wavering from the computer screen, “you might just consider this the new normal.”
My fury rose up within me immediately. I am not a person to accept some uninformed idiot telling me, a determined and educated problem solver, that life as I know it is over.
“This is not the new normal,” I responded calmly.
Despite her pessimism about discovering the cause of my slurring problem, she referred me to a neurologist. That appointment is scheduled for August.
Failures can be successes
On May 25, I performed an hourlong show at a country-club for a large Indian family. After the show, while shmoozing with my audience, I tripped over two toddlers on the dancefloor, and whacked out my back. I had trouble driving home from my show. (I also fractured three ribs, but I learned that only later. By now, it is virtually healed.)
Attempting to treat the back problem, I made an appointment at a chiropractic college clinic, Southern California University of Health Sciences (SCUHS). The first two treatments improved my back problem considerably, and I was happy. Dr. Robb Russell’s students were great. But it was the third treatment that was most memorable.
The student was a twentysomething woman named Gaby Zwoll. At first, I underestimated her. She had a lot of energy and was what people often refer to as irrepressible. I didn’t expect her to be brilliant.
We began to talk, and of course, when meeting with medical providers, I always first describe my slurring problem so that they will understand a situation that is obvious on first meeting but unexplained. Only after that was discussed did I describe my back problem. But to my surprise, Gaby showed an eagerness to treat my slurring in a chiropractic way. She began massaging the muscles of my jaw and neck, and began commenting on what she found.
“These muscles are really, really, really tight,” she said. “There are so many knots in here.”
My eyes are opened
By the end of the session, to my great surprise, I was speaking more clearly, which hadn’t happened for a year. I was suddenly able to make inflections with my mouth that I hadn’t made in months. It was the first time that any expert had made progress on my slurring. It was an eye opener. She was the eighth expert that I had consulted, and it turned out that eight was a charm.
I expressed shock to Gaby that a student had been able to make progress on my slurring when all of these other experts had come up short—people with experience, people in high positions. She was studying under the supervision of an excellent chiropractor, Dr. Russell, but nevertheless, a student?!
Gaby explained that she generally paid special attention to muscles, a topic that some other chiropractors ignored, but that in her view, muscles were essential to curing many things, because muscles and bones work together. Her opinion was also informed by a BA in human biology.
Another plus was that Gaby wasn’t just a student. She had gotten a lot of experience in chiropractic because of the convoluted journey of her schooling. After her first year at SCUHS, she had been forced to return to Indiana for a year. Then she resumed her studies at National University, but in time, she wanted to transfer back to SCUHS. Unfortunately, many of her credits didn’t transfer, so she had to take classes over again. In the process, Gaby had an opportunity to learn her profession more deeply and fully than the run-of-the-mill student. When she graduates later this year, she will become a full chiropractor, but her accumulated experience is greater than that of a raw graduate. Her education is more full and rounded, as well.
A hypothesis
Over the next couple of days, my wife Claire confirmed that I was talking a little more clearly.
At my next chiropractic treatment, Gaby treated me, as well, and another student named Alfonso sat in on that appointment. Apparently, Gaby was teaching Alfonso how to do what she had done, because he wasn’t quite as experienced as Gaby.
After that appointment, Claire listened to me at home. She confirmed that further progress was being made on the slurring.
By that time, I had developed a hypothesis about what had happened to me: I had always had an extraordinarily tense mouth, as reported by my dentist Ron, but when the other dentist had pulled two problem teeth, it was a tremendous physical trauma. I remember Dr. M, who had pulled the teeth, stopping during the process and say that unless I relaxed, he was going to have to put me under. He finally got the teeth out. However, it’s my theory that the trauma that sent my mouth into an extraordinary state of tension. The mouth was so tense that I was unable to correctly enunciate words. I was unable to make subtle inflections. Sometimes, my mouth descended into incomprehensible babble because of all the tension.
The cure, I hypothesized, was to gradually release the tension in my mouth. That’s what Gaby was doing: releasing the tension. It was going to take some time, because my mouth had been holding great tension for decades. Over the following weeks, the massages sometimes became extraordinarily painful. Gaby applied significant pressure on those tied-up muscles. I moaned. I squirmed. Still, it had to be done. It was a hypothesis that was supported by all the clues. It was also a hypothesis that was preferable to neurological possibilities, like myasthenia gravis.
A chiropractor had found the problem, I reasoned, because chiropractors treat bones and muscles. It’s not so directly what dentists treat, or what GPs treat. If you want to pound a nail, you have to find someone with the right hammer. To my surprise, nobody had the specific hammer that I needed–until I met Gaby.
At the next appointment, Gaby wasn’t available for an appointment, so I booked with Alfonso. He knew what to do, and he, too, felt how incredibly tense my jaw was. After his treatment, my speech was a little more clear, as well. It was hard to measure degree of slurring, so every week, we had begun to record certain parts of my magic show script, to compare the progress.
During this period, the clarity of my speech has always tended to vary throughout the day. Sometimes it was clear and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes, especially when I was laying in bed, it would almost disintegrate into incomprehensible babble. During shows, I would chew gum and enunciation would be at least passable. And always, it seemed like my own perception of how much I was slurring exceeded what other people perceived.
To my astonishment, I never received a complaint about my show. My clients still raved about my performances, paid my high fees, and tipped me generously. The psychology of that is something about which I intend to write an article for a magic audience, so that performers can ponder how audiences respond to verbal disability, and even to disability in general.
Now, it seems, I am well on my way to a cure. It seems clear that we’ve solved the zebra problem with which I’ve been afflicted. I so long to get my old voice back.
To read part 2, click here.
What Happens to Us 
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