Dark Star (41 page)

Yen-Wei Choong:
From Chinese medicine viewpoint, it was heart exhaustion. Heart
chi
. When I went there, he was really sick. I noticed he had a big sweat and that sweat was different from regular sweat. The sweat was like big drop and like oily sweat which was not healthy from Chinese medicine viewpoint. His pulse was extremely rapid. I did count. It was one hundred thirty per minute, very weak, very rapid. That meant the heart lung was collapsing. Not a good sign and actually that was very critical. He had swollen legs, swollen cold feet, cold hands. The lips very pale and purple. That was a very critical sign. And the tongue was very very white.

Very rare I see a case almost bad enough as emergency and it was my honor to be the first practitioner to be sent to work on him. I called my office immediately and asked my ex-wife to prepare herbs. I did some acupuncture. I burned some
moxa
stick. Chinese incense. Long, shaped like a cigar. I burned that around his belly, a
chakra
point, to enhance, to tonify the
chi
, to avoid the
chi
collapse. When Dave, the chauffeur, came back with herbs from my office about a half an hour later, I rushed in the kitchen to cook the tea for him. He drank the tea. Since the sweat was reduced a little bit, he was a little bit better. I came back the same night.

Vince Dibiase:
Manasha called us and said she was calling Yen-Wei back up because Jerry was not doing too well and that Randy Baker was coming up later on in the evening. Even though it was the second time in the day he was there, we brought Yen-Wei up and then we stayed. Jerry was out. He was comatose. I don't know if I said we should call an ambulance but I was certainly alarmed because I could see the man was suffering. I was not a medical doctor. I didn't know how to determine what he was going through.

Dr. Randy Baker:
I got a call from Manasha saying that Jerry was sick but he didn't want to go to the hospital. I lived in Santa Cruz, a couple hours away. I told her I would arrive as soon as I could. I drove up and did a house call and Jerry was definitely sick enough to deserve hospitalization but he didn't want to go into the hospital so we did very intensive treatment based in his home over the next several weeks. I semi-lived in his house for a period of a few weeks closely supervising his treatment.

Yen-Wei Choong:
The second time I went to his house, I did something similar. The needle,
moxa
, and I cooked some herbs. He was a little bit better, sweat less. Both feet were swollen and Manasha was saying Randy was on the way there. Randy give him some shots which also I believed would be helpful. Maybe two days later, Manasha called me and I was there again but the situation was a little more controllable. More stable, sweat less. The face was not so pale, the lips looked better. He was slowly getting better. One week later, the swollen legs were better. Randy give him some drugs, maybe vitamins, I don't know. So Randy and I both work on him. A few days later he feel much, much better. Maybe two weeks later, the swollen legs were completely gone and there was no sweat.

Vince Dibiase:
Randy didn't get there until later but Yen-Wei had already revived him with his acupuncture. Yen-Wei was the one who revived him.

Dr. Randy Baker:
This collapse was primarily due to congestive heart failure. In left-sided congestive heart failure, the lungs fill with water. But he had right-sided congestive heart failure. With right-sided congestive heart failure, the backup of fluid is more in the extremities and in the abdomen, which was fortunate for him because he had emphysema and his lungs couldn't have tolerated filling up with very much water. His right-sided congestive heart failure was primarily caused by his significant emphysema related to years and years of smoking. The right side of the heart pumps blood to the lungs and it met with increased resistance because of his lung disease. So the right side of the heart enlarged because it was having difficulty pumping blood through his lungs and this eventually led to his congestive heart failure.

Vince Dibiase:
Everybody around the Dead was starting to freak out because nobody knew what was going on and they didn't trust Manasha. They were very nervous but at the same time they couldn't do anything about it. They felt comfortable with Gloria and me because we would report to them daily about what was going on with Jerry. As long as they knew he was okay, they didn't want to call up there and bother him. They were uneasy but they were okay with it. What could they do?

Dr. Randy Baker:
During this time, he demonstrated truly amazing healing abilities. Seeing the extreme need, he totally stopped drug use and cut down on cigarette smoking. He went on a strict low-fat vegan diet and over the next three months, he lost over sixty pounds. He started a program of exercise and made a remarkable recovery. He also had developed a recurrence of his diabetes.

What was interesting about his diabetes was that he'd had this diabetic coma in 1986 but when he left the hospital, he had virtually no signs of being diabetic, which was fairly unheard of. His diabetes was highly related to his weight. When he weighed in excess of two hundred and eighty pounds, he was diabetic. When his weight came down to two hundred and twenty pounds, he no longer was diabetic. I did treatments on him with Western medicine but I also worked with nutritional supplements and herbs and he received a lot of acupuncture as well as homeopathic medications.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
Jerry was very frightened and now he was finally real receptive to changes in his diet. He got the message. He didn't stop smoking. But he lost seventy pounds and looked very healthy. Caring for him became a full-time job. I was like a nurse. I set the stage for all the health practitioners. I made sure people came and went and made sure he kept his appointments. He would often say to me, “I need you to stay alive.” He wanted me to watch his health.

Yen-Wei Choong:
Manasha concerned about his health so much, she asked me to treat him very regularly, intense like three times a week. So I did. Went to the house, back and forth. I always brought some herbs and at that time, he was very good. He completely accept acupuncture nerve stick all the time. Three times a week until the end of '92.

Gloria Dibiase:
Manasha took charge of Jerry's alternative healing program. A lot of people didn't understand what she was trying to do. She was only trying to help Jerry in the way she believed was right. And the program worked beautifully. Jerry lost sixty pounds. They had to readjust the mike on stage because he was standing up taller. He looked so handsome. He had a wonderful glow about him. He was recovering his health through alternative natural methods.

Dr. Randy Baker:
During this time, I took him to the best cardiologist I could find. You don't have to be a genius to see that someone who was an overweight smoker with a history of diabetes who ate a lot of meat was at risk for heart disease. I had tried to arrange for that in the summer of 1991 but jerry hadn't followed through. But in the summer of '92, we did do some cardiac testing. He did a treadmill stress test including a stress echo cardiogram, which confirmed his right-sided heart failure but showed absolutely no evidence of blockage of his arteries which totally amazed me.

No medical test is foolproof but this test will detect significant coronary artery disease about ninety percent of the time. The very best test would have been a scan where you inject a radioactive dye and then put someone on the treadmill but Jerry chose not to do this test. I spent a lot of time trying to explain that the risk of getting harmed from this small amount of radioactivity was minuscule to the risk of his dropping dead tomorrow from a heart attack but that was all to no avail.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
We went to the hospital and did a bunch of tests. Jerry didn't want to do the test with radioactive dye. He told me he didn't really care to.

Dr. Randy Baker:
So we did the next best test and it was a pretty good test. But once more, no test is perfect. The thing was that you could have fifty or sixty percent blockage and it might not show up on that test. That test was going to show more extreme blockage. I'm sure that he had some blockage at that time but it wasn't enough to significantly interfere with blood flow to his heart. From that point on, he was following a really excellent diet and losing a lot of weight, cutting back significantly on his smoking, and starting an exercise program, all of which should have lowered his risk of heart disease.

Vince Dibiase:
For a month, no one would even come up to see him. Cameron Sears, who was managing the Dead, called and I talked to Phil a lot. I talked to a lot of people from the Grateful Dead family. Randy wasn't talking to anyone at the time and I had to take Randy aside and say, “Randy, you've got credentials, okay? You are his doctor. You are his primary physician. You've got to let these guys know that. You need to meet with the band and all these guys and let them know you went to the University of Michigan and Stanford Medical School, okay?” So he had a meeting with them, which reassured them about his capabilities.

Dr. Randy Baker:
In the summer of 1992, I met with the band and management several times regarding Jerry's health. We had a dilemma because I knew that touring was very stressful but at the same time that was also what Jerry lived for and that was his life. Which was another tricky area. I recommended that the tour schedule be made less rigorous. I wanted them to play more shows in the Bay Area and less shows traveling around the country. I also thought it would be an excellent idea if I traveled with the band on tour to supervise and to keep an eye on Jerry's health. There was also obviously some self-interest in this for me. Being paid to be on tour with the Grateful Dead. Jerry had told me that he would like to see me become the so-called tour doctor but said the band would have to approve it. I proposed this but my proposal was turned down. I wasn't given any reasons.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
There was an upcoming Grateful Dead tour. He was very ill in August and the tour was scheduled to begin in September and people in the Grateful Dead establishment were pushing this other doctor on us who Jerry didn't care for. She wanted to do a quick patch-up repair job so Jerry would get back on the road again and I said absolutely not. Jerry didn't want this. He wanted to get well. He wanted to focus in on his health. He told me he wanted to take the time off and I supported him in that. It wasn't that he was never going to play music again. He wanted to get back on the road in December but in September, he wanted to take some time off. He wanted the tour to be canceled and I think I became out of favor at that point with the organization because they believed that I canceled the tour.

Dr. Randy Baker:
Certainly, Jerry himself could have hired me to go out on the road with him but he did not do this. Jerry definitely ran his own life and he didn't like people telling him what to do. In terms of falling into old habits on the road, Jerry had stage fright. He was very frank about the fact that he felt very nervous before he'd go on stage. Once they'd start playing, he was okay but I think that his stage fright was one of the reasons why he would turn to both cigarettes and drugs, to try to cope with that. I think the rigor of the road for him was having to go out and perform in front of fifteen to fifty thousand people who were expecting to have the time of their life. He might feel bad but he had to go out there. Basically, his health remained in pretty good shape in 1993.

Mannasha Matheson Garcia:
Actually, Randy did come with us when the Dead were on tour in December in Denver. So they did bring him there. But then something odd happened. Jerry and I were planning to go to Hawaii with Keelin in January. Other people, I'm not going to mention anyone's name, organizational people, organized Barbara to come in. She came in and Jerry thought he was going to rekindle his first romance and he left. The day he left, he told me he loved me.

 

Barbara Meier:
We danced around the edges for another nine months. The Dead came to Denver again in December of '92 and I went to see him and I said, “You tell me what's going to happen. Are we going to do this or not? Because if we're not, I'm going to leave the country. I want you or I'm going to Latin America.” And he said, “Let's go for it.” We threw the I Ching and came up with the “Joyous” hexagram with no changing lines. It was December and he said, “I can't do this. I can't leave before Christmas.” He just went into a panic. But the entire scene mobilized like a military operation and for a month, all these people called me every day and said, “It's going to happen. Come out here.”

I flew out to San Francisco the day before New Year's Eve. Jerry came over to Hunter's house. He literally went out for a pack of cigarettes and didn't go back. We were at Hunter's and Jerry was freaking out. “I can't do this to Keelin and I can't do this to Manasha. I have to do it. Oh, God.” He was looking at me and saying, “I can't do this to her. It will kill her. Not only that, she'll kill me. I'm afraid that she's going to kill me.” I said, “Jerry, you say, ‘Manasha, I'm in love with another woman.'” He said, “Oh, I can't do that.” So he just left. He didn't say anything to her. That should have been a red flag for me but of course I ignored it.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
Jerry said he was going out to do some work and he just never came back. The month before, I had given him an ultimatum because I saw that he was going downhill. I didn't mean to but I had a five-year-old and I wasn't taking any drugs and I saw that something was changing with him and I was beginning to wonder if he was doing drugs again. So I said, “Look, you either get help and stay with us or else you're going to have to pursue the drugs.” I got emphatic about it. About a week to ten days later, he was gone. I never saw him again. That was it. Then I heard that he was on the road with Barbara and that they had gone to Hawaii with these other people. I was real hurt because all these other people had come to our Christmas party and they were well aware then of what was going on.