Health: Lively young woman seeks normal life: Elaine Heath, who is severely paralysed, tells Cherrill Hicks of the daily constraints she faces
By CHERRILL HICKS
ELAINE HEATH likes pink eye glitter and a vodka and orange before lunch.
She reads Lenin, Lawrence and supports CND.
Elaine is also severely disabled by cerebral palsy: she can use neither her arms nor legs, and she can only communicate by making noises, or by operating an electric typewriter with her nose.
In spite of her disability, Elaine has in the past led a remarkably active and normal life.
She has been through a marriage, a divorce, and a serious love affair; learnt Russian, written regularly for a local paper and taught a young child disabled by a stroke to read again.
But Elaine no longer has a close relationship to give her the support she needs.
Without it, she has become a virtual prisoner in her own home; she is ruled by the clock and the hours worked by her local authority helpers.
Unable to go away for weekends or holidays, she never goes out at night to dinner parties, discos or evening classes.
Her life has become intolerable, she says, ever since she became a social services' project '.
In the mornings Elaine can not get up before 9am  which is when her care assistant starts work.
In the afternoons, she must always be home at 4.30  so that the carer can take her to the lavatory before leaving for the day.
(Even her bladder has to be regulated, she points out.)
In the early evening, almost as soon as she finishes her meal, it is time to have her make-up taken off and her nightdress put on  before the nurse leaves.
Elaine is excited that a reporter from The Independent is visiting.
She laughs, shouts, refuses to give her age and is impatient to explain her problems.
It takes time and effort for her to do this: constantly tapping her nose on the typewriter is exhausting, but then so is making her noises understood.
We manage, with the help of Sylvia, her care assistant.
Elaine gets a lot more help than many disabled people, and some would say she is lucky not to be in residential care.
She lives in a large, sunny and specially adapted local authority bungalow in Northampton: the walls of the living room are decorated with her paintings (done when she still had some use of her right hand) and her kitchen cupboard is covered with postcards, love letters from old boyfriends and local newspaper articles.
Sylvia comes from nine to five each weekday, and nurses are on duty between six and 10 every evening and for a few hours at the weekend.
But Elaine says that despite this help, she might as well be in an institution.
Her life is a monotonous routine.
As long as she is' fed and watered ', she writes, the local authority is satisfied: ' It has forgotten about the quality of my life. '
Unlike other single women, Elaine can not stay out late at night: she has to be home in time to be put to bed by a nurse.
She can never go out and meet men; and, after two close relationships, the prospect of staying single depresses her.
' I desperately want to love and be loved, ' she types with her nose.
' I 'm terrified of growing old alone.
Life is for sharing. '
Sylvia is one of the few people who has learnt to interpret Elaine's noises.
She has never cared for a disabled person before, but there is a natural love and empathy between them: she hugs Elaine a lot and they are very close.
' My old mum, ' Elaine calls her.
' I would describe Elaine as beautiful with sexy legs, ' jokes Sylvia.
And, more seriously: ' I try to do things the way she wants.
Staff who have worked in the homes become institutionalised; they say this is the way we've always done it.
But if you employ someone in your house, you want them to do it your way, not theirs. '
The nurses who come in the evenings and at weekends are from an agency - which can mean, for Elaine, a new face every night of the week.
Every new nurse needs detailed instructions about how to care for her  down to details such as pulling her bra on properly and making sure she is dry before getting her dressed.
' Please treat me normally.
I 'm not daft.
My brain is perfectly unimpaired, ' writes Elaine at the end of her list.
The nurses are nice, well-intentioned young girls who do their best.
But because they have to leave by 10pm, all they have time for are the basic tasks, such as cooking dinner, feeding Elaine, taking off her make-up and getting her ready for bed.
Many of them are not used to disabled people, and, being temporary, they rarely get to know her anyway.
' Elaine can't talk and that can be very disconcerting for the nurses, ' says Sylvia.
Elaine interrupts.
She does not need nurses in uniform, she almost shouts: just because she is disabled, it does not mean she is medically ill.
There is no conversation with the nurses, she says.
' My day ends at five.
The shutters come down. '
When they leave, Elaine has no professional support until Sylvia comes in the morning.
But for the help of a friend who sleeps in the bungalow at night, and who can help her go to the toilet if she needs to, she says she would have to go into a home.
Elaine went into a home last week when Sylvia was on holiday.
She says she would rather die than do that again.
She may not have any speech, but she has no problems in making her feelings clear: she wails at the memory.
Sylvia translates her noises: ' It was hell on earth. '
The home had set times for the toilet: 9am, 3pm, and 9pm.
' They had their own routine, ' says Sylvia.
Life hasn't always been so dull for Elaine: she has managed, in the past, to survive the same upheavals as many able-bodied people.
Sent away to boarding school when she was six (she rarely sees her family now), she got three A- levels at college and shortly after got married: a mistake, she now realises, but she was pregnant at the time.
She lost the baby and she and her husband divorced three years later.
It was then that she met ' the love of my life ': he answered an ad she placed in the local paper for someone to read to her.
' He was a middle-aged guy who thought he was coming to read to a sweet old lady, ' she writes.
They fell in love; eventually he moved in.
' My life was a dream. '
The relationship ended after five years: her lover grew too tired to cope with caring for her.
He lives in the same town and it still hurts her to see him.
For a while Elaine was cared for by young volunteers who used to come and stay with her for a few months at a time.
But the volunteers moved on  to college or jobs  and she found the change unsettling.
In 1986 she contacted her local authority for help; it was then, she says, that her life changed for the worse.
Northampton social services department says the problem is one of finding and hiring the right quality people.
' Northampton is an expanding area and wages for care assistants can not match those to be found in industry, ' says Bill Aitken, the department's operations manager.
He is clearly doing his best to make Elaine's life more bearable, to create the schemes and find the care assistants with the commitment needed to befriend her, on the funds available.
Elaine desperately wants to be free: free to fall in love, work hard and have fun.
All she is asking for, she says, is to live the same kind of life as everyone else.
This would only be possible if she had intensive 24-hour cover: if she could employ carers both night and day who could be flexible enough to adapt to her needs rather than vice versa.
' Perhaps I am being selfish, ' she writes.
' But my life as it is now isn't worth living.
It's a living death.
I've already experienced a full life and now it's been taken away. '
Elaine is an extraordinary woman: clever, lively and capable of leading a full life.
But she is rapidly growing demoralised by her situation and is increasingly disinclined to do very much.
She has even given up her beloved Russian, learnt painstakingly with the help of an old Cyrillic typewriter.
' She laughs a lot.
She seems like a very happy person, ' says Sylvia.
' But it's false  it hides a lot of sadness. '
Health: Faith, courage, will  and a cancer therapy: The Gerson technique ended her marriage and took over her life, but Renee Henry believes it works.
Liz Hunt reports
By LIZ HUNT
RENEE HENRY remembers quite clearly when she decided that she was going to live.
It was a warm, sunny afternoon four years ago, and she was lying on her back in the park feeling too weak to move.
She could hear her three- year-old son Rufus laughing as he played on the swings nearby.
Her other son, Barnes, just six months old, was asleep in the pram beside her.
' The thought of not being there for them as they grew up was too much to bear, ' she said.
' I had to get well. '
Renee Henry was a ' rare bird ', according to her surgeon.
At the age of 33 she had breast cancer.
But in the months following the diagnosis, Mrs Henry found that it was not only a life-threatening disease that she had to contend with.
Her decision to refuse orthodox medical treatment and follow an ' alternative ' regime  the Gerson therapy  provoked outrage and hostility from her husband, her family and her friends.
' At a time when I needed all possible support, I was left alone, ' said Mrs Henry.
Like most people who are told they have cancer, Renee Henry was, at first, in shock.
She didn't think to question the treatment her doctors advocated - as a research biochemist who had worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 10 years, the benefits of modern medicine had been instilled in her.
She underwent a lumpectomy and then a course of radiotherapy, and was due to start drug treatment when she met another cancer patient.
This woman was 37 years old, and she too had had a lumpectomy and radiotherapy four years earlier.
She had taken drugs ever since, but the cancer had returned.
' When I heard that I went straight into the toilet and threw up.
She was just like me, she had been told that her prognosis was good and yet here she was four years later.
I didn't want to live with cancer hanging over me.
I walked out of the hospital and didn't go back. '
Mrs Henry found out all she could about alternative cancer treatments and dabbled in some of them.
' At this time, I was living in a sort of Walter Mitty world.
I had a husband who was pretending that I did not have cancer, and a mother who tried to inspire me by showing me pictures of Page Three girls under banner headlines of ' How I conquered cancer '.
They were both trying to persuade me to continue with the radiotherapy and drugs. '
Mrs Henry embarked on a course in herbal medicine and it was during this that she heard about the Gerson therapy.
She learnt that it had been developed in the 1920s by a German physician, Dr Max Gerson.
He had suffered severe migraine which did not respond to conventional treatment.
He had experimented with various foods and found that by restricting his diet to one of fresh fruits and vegetables he could control his migraine.
Some of Dr Gerson's patients  including those with TB  tried the diet.
Their health improved and a cure was claimed in many cases.
More patients with various illnesses were put on the diet, and good results were reported.
Dr Gerson became convinced that the treatment helped the body to heal itself, regardless of the nature of the disease.
This diet now forms the basis of the Gerson Cancer Therapy.
It claims to eliminate toxins from the body, to restore a normal potassium and sodium balance in cells (which is thought to be disturbed in cancer patients), to boost liver function (also affected by the disease) and to reactivate certain enzymes.
The more Renee Henry learnt about the therapy, the more she became convinced that it was right for her.
The therapy is a full-time occupation.
It involves taking 13 juices every hour.
They are freshly prepared from organic fruit and vegetables and consist of four carrot and apple juices, four green leaf juices, four juices extracted from calves' liver and one orange juice.
Oats, salads and baked potatoes form the basis of three daily meals.
Caffeine enemas are given four hourly, as well as castor oil  orally or by enema  to aid detoxification.
At this point, the strain on Renee Henry's marriage became too much, and what had been a troubled relationship crumbled.
' The day my husband left was the day I started Gerson in earnest.
I went to a shop that sold organic food and bought everything. '
That was the start of the two most demanding years of her life.
She had to commit herself totally to the therapy, while looking after two young children.
Large quantities of organic food were not easy to come by in Surrey.
' At night I would wrap the children in blankets, put them in the car, and drive down to New Covent Garden to collect the fruit and vegetables. '
She suffered chronic diarrhoea and vomiting as, she says, her body started to detoxify itself.
' It was like having a severe bout of food poisoning that never got better, ' she recalled.
' I developed chronic asthma and eczema and cold sores.
And all the time, I was working away until midnight preparing the juices. '
Three months into the therapy she began to suffer severe psychological traumas  she says she was in a state of constant terror.
This is the point at which many patients give up the therapy, said Mrs Henry.
But she underwent counselling, and also received support from Sheila McLean, a Gerson therapist and former nurse.
Today, Renee Henry is convinced that she is cured and that the Gerson therapy is responsible.
She acknowledges that such a claim can not be substantiated because she also received orthodox medical treatment.
She refuses to undergo any medical checks because she ' has no need of further proof '.
Mrs Henry's encounter with cancer has, not surprisingly, changed her life.
Next week is Europe Against Cancer Week, and she and Sheila Mclean are launching a charity called the Karnak Charitable Trust.
It aims to make more information about Gerson available, fund research projects, and eventually it hopes to set up a centre for people who want to try it, in combination with psychological counselling, according to Renee Henry.
' In fighting cancer, the most critical point is when you decide that you are going to survive.
You need a focus for that desire to live, so you pick a therapy, orthodox or alternative, and you use it.
But the most important thing is to believe that you will survive. '
Health Update: Crack connection with Aids
By OLIVIA TIMBS
THERE is much concern in the US about the addiction to ' crack ' (purified cocaine) within inner-city communities.
Doctors are worried that women turning to prostitution to finance the habit are at risk of contracting Aids.
This problem has spread to the UK.
In the past two months, doctors at the Regional Addiction Treatment Unit in Birmingham have come across five patients addicted to crack.
Three are prostitutes introduced to the drug by pimps.
According to them, crack is widely available in Birmingham and most prostitutes they know use it daily.
The doctors point out in the British Medical Journal that, though crack dependency is not a direct risk factor for Aids, prostitutes' trying to maintain expensive crack habits may be tempted into unsafe sex practices... which in turn may lead to an increase in the spread of Aids'.
Health Update: Zinc deficiency in pregnancy
By OLIVIA TIMBS
FADS for vitamin supplements have been overtaken by a vogue for minerals and trace elements.
Zinc is the latest: lack of it supposedly causes a range of problems, although little scientific evidence supports the link.
But some reports have suggested that low zinc levels may lead to problems in pregnancy, from difficult labour to congenital malformations in children.
There is stronger evidence that a zinc deficiency may cause the foetus to grow slowly in the womb.
Doctors in Bristol decided to test the theory.
In a study of nearly 500 women, they found that zinc supplements did not improve either foetal health or reduce the number of pre-term labours.
The doctors conclude in the British Medical Journal that there would be little benefit if all women in the UK were given zinc supplements during pregnancy.
They recognise, however, that the women in their study were largely middle-class, who might well have sufficiently large zinc stores because they were well nourished.
Further studies, the researchers believe, should concentrate on pregnant women known to have a zinc deficiency or to be at risk from problems during labour.
Health: Alternative cures' not proven '
By OLIVIA TIMBS
RENEE HENRY underwent a lumpectomy and radiotherapy for her breast cancer.
Dr Maurice Slevin, a consultant physician at the department of medical oncology at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, said the chances of a woman being alive and well four years after such treatment were at least 75 per cent.
Mrs Henry refused the drug treatment given to reduce the chances of a relapse, but there are many who would remain well without it, Dr Slevin said.
Part of the attraction of alternative cancer treatments such as the Gerson therapy is that they allow a patient to feel more in control of the treatment.
Dr Slevin agreed that this is often beneficial, but is concerned about other aspects of such therapies.
Very few have been evaluated, and the evidence is largely anecdotal, he said.
Some of the treatments have dramatic side-effects.
' If they do work, that is wonderful  but we have no way of knowing for sure.
There have been no controlled trials of the Gerson therapy.
' If one of my patients wants to give up a potentially curative treatment in favour of an alternative therapy, then I will try to dissuade them.
But it is essentially up to the patient. '
He said the NHS should address itself more to the needs of cancer patients so that they do not feel they have to go outside the system.
They should be offered relaxation therapy and stress management, and advice on diet and exercise, he said.
The Imperial Cancer Research Fund and the Cancer Research Campaign are conducting a joint study of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, which offers a holistic programme  dietary advice and emotional counselling  to complement medical treatment.
