Juliet Sullivan

Big Gary is big. He is a man with presence, an awe-inspiring energy, and a story to tell. He is tall, strong, and healthy. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, just three years ago, Big Gary was not so big, and certainly not so healthy. He had undergone a series of operations, had lost 70 pounds, and was lying in a hospital bed, close to death.

When I met 70-year-old Gary Derrett in his South Surrey home three weeks ago, I was amazed at his vigour, his enthusiasm for life, and his touching story; one of remarkable recovery and resilience.

Gary is a well known figure in South Surrey, Langley and Ladner. Up until 3 years ago, he owned and ran a chain of vacuum stores throughout the Lower Mainland: “Big Gary’s”. He did this for over 40 years. Anyone who knows Big Gary knows that he is a no-nonsense kind of guy.  The Derrett’s are a genuine, spiritual, no-nonsense kind of family. There is no agenda to this interview; it is just a story that needs to be told.

Gary was not a healthy man. He had suffered 20 years of colitis and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). He had learned to live with, and tolerate, the illnesses, as many people do. And then, three and a half years ago, something changed. His illness intensified, and he was rushed to Emergency with severe swelling to his stomach. (His colon weighed 15lbs and was 9” in diameter when doctors removed it). He was on the operating table for 6 hours, after his colon burst and he almost died.

After the operation, his stomach became infected, an infection so bad that he underwent five further surgeries over the course of 3 months.

“They used a vice and staples to keep me together,” says Gary. “And – ironically – a vacuum to clean me out. I don’t think it was one of mine though!” Vacuum store owner Gary can joke about it now, but at the time, the pain was so intense that he says he had never known what real pain was until that time. Nurses have since told him that they had never seen a patient administered so much morphine.

Before the fifth operation, the hospital staff advised that Gary’s family gather round him, with doctors suggesting it was unlikely he would come out of the surgery alive. Against all the odds, he did come out alive, but that was just the beginning. There was a long and painful road ahead. “Basically, they sent Gary home to die,” says wife Suzie.

Once home, Gary started to suffer depression, anxiety, headaches, chronic fatigue, major arthritis, sleep apnea, and lung congestion. He had to walk with the aide of a walker. Neighbours have told him that they gave him a nick-name in those days: “Dead Man Walking”.

“I lost a sense of wellbeing,” says Gary. “And with that, I lost the will to live.”

He tried to numb his suffering with prescription drugs (“Over the course of 2 years I took something like 2000 Ativan”) but he became so numb that he likens his state to that of “a zombie”. In November 2007, with the help of Suzie, he stopped taking the drugs. “I went cold turkey,” he says. “But it was really, really hard. I was listless, shaky, and for three months I could only sleep for one hour a night.”

It got worse. In April 2008, Gary was driving home one day and started to suffer heart palpitations. After tests, his doctor told him his heart was damaged and enlarged, and he had developed heart arrhythmia (irregular heart beat) – likely a result of the prolonged use of Ativan – and he would have it for the rest of his life.

“The arrhythmia was so bad,” says Gary, “that it sometimes felt like I was having a heart attack.”

Some time after that, Suzie received a newsletter from a wellness centre in Newport Beach, California. In it, they talked about heart arrhythmia and how they could cure it with magnesium.

“Suzie had me on a plane down there the very next day,” says Gary.

The wellness centre treated Gary with a series of natural remedies. Two weeks, and $25,000, later, Gary says the heart arrhythmia subsided and he felt “a little better”, even though the centre had diagnosed yet another problem: neuropathy (numbness) in his feet and legs.

“I was waiting for some kind of magic, but it never came.  I just couldn’t get that sense of wellbeing back. Basically, I felt like I was on my way out. I felt like it was the end. I even contacted my life insurance provider, just to make sure that everything was in order…”

And then, on the flight back home, Suzie read a book. The book was about balancing the PH in the body, and talked about how disease thrives in an acidic body; something most of us, unfortunately, possess. Due to bad eating habits, smoking, lifestyle and environmental toxins, the level of PH in most of our bodies is unbalanced. This is making us sick, fat and tired. It claimed that by increasing the alkalinity in the body, simply by drinking alkaline water, disease will no longer be able to flourish.

Suzie says, “I read this book and it made so much sense. I felt that it was the missing link in Gary’s health.” Suzie knew she had to find a way of making Gary’s body more alkaline. Unfortunately, alkaline water machines are not exactly common here. Widely used in Japan for decades, the technology has only recently come to North America, and there is still a certain scepticism surrounding their effectiveness. But when you are the proactive, forward-thinking wife of a depressed, dying man to whom you have been married for 43 years, you will ignore scepticism and employ your own judgement. Suzie was willing to try anything to help her beloved Gary.

And here is where fate stepped in. As Suzie and Gary were flying back from Newport Beach, Suzie’s brother Michael was on a plane flying back from Calgary. He sat next to a man on the flight, with whom he didn’t speak until they landed in Vancouver. At that point, Michael’s fellow passenger handed Michael a business card. His business was alkaline water machines.

Suzie says, “I knew, as soon as I heard Michael tell me this, that I was getting a water machine.” Gary had given up at this point. He did not want to spend any more money; he did not want to buy into any more claims. He was in fact very angry. “I could have shot Suzie at the time! I did not want to buy a machine,” he says now. They bought a machine.

And so, Gary started to drink alkaline water. Six glasses a day at first, gradually building up until Gary says his body was craving it.

Fast forward three and a half weeks. Father’s Day 2008.  Gary’s four daughters – Laurie, Tamie, Dayna and Shannon – wanted to take a family portrait on the beach, complete with 11 grand-children. “My girls thought it was my last Father’s Day,” says Gary, tearfully. “On the day before the photo shoot, Suzie had asked me to make sure it was a good day; in other words that I fake it. I still didn’t have that sense of wellbeing and she knew I could be difficult sometimes.

“But that morning, I noticed when I woke up that I didn’t have the usual nausea, or aches. Instead of taking an hour to get out of bed, get dressed and go downstairs, as I had done for the past 3 years, it took me 5 minutes. I felt good, but I kept thinking that the walls would come crashing down.

“Later that day, after lunch, I got up from the table and went to each of my daughters and each of my grand-children and told them I loved them. It was like I was re-born. I had that sense of wellbeing back that was robbed from me for over three years.

“Later, back home, Suzie said to me, ‘Thank you for making an effort today’. And I looked at her and said “I got news for you – I feel good!’ All day I had been expecting the walls to come crashing down, but they never did.”

And they still haven’t. Ten months later, Gary feels more alive, more energised, and more healthy than ever. He is back playing golf. He walks. (“I walk like I’m on a marathon!” he says). He is full of life. His energy is contagious. His neuropathy has totally vanished, as has his hearth arrhythmia. Doctors had told him that he would have both these conditions for the rest of his life.

And there is something else. Suzie says, “He didn’t really talk for 3 years. Now he won’t shut up!” He is a man with a mission, and a story to tell.

I can’t explain it medically. I can’t explain it at all. All I can do is look at the beaming, glowing Big Gary, with his clever, strong, supportive wife Suzie, and their new lease on life, and feel like they do: I want to tell the world.

My two passions in life are real estate and writing. Long before I became a Realtor, I was a writer. Nowadays, I am so busy as a Realtor that it is sometimes difficult to find time to write. However, I have made a decision to incorporate my love of writing into my career and into this web site. I like to say that real estate feeds my children, and writing feeds my soul!

It wasn't always that way. There was a time when I was paid to write, though it was never enough to feed my cat, let alone my children. After training to be a journalist in London in 1989, I went on to write freelance for a few British publications, including my local paper, a national, though struggling, music magazine, and the much-read women's mag, She (after which I also became a short-lived radio interviewee.)

I also dabbled a little in television, working for a while on the then-hugely popular TV show The Big Breakfast (produced by Bob Geldof's TV production company Planet 24). It was a half-hearted attempt by me to use my creative flair in the field of the media. I was never as committed as I should have been. I lived 50 miles outside of London, was a single mother and had a toddler at the time...it was never really a viable option for me to immerse myself into the constant travelling, long hours at the office and even longer hours at the pub (necessary if you work in any kind of media in London) that were required to succeed.

When I moved to Canada in 2003, I had already lined up work with The Province newspaper, in which I wrote a series of articles based on my experiences as a new immigrant. The paper published 6 double page Sunday spreads of "Diary of an Immigrant" and I enjoyed a certain amount of literary success before my editor decided that the series had run its course.

Writing is a hard career to choose. Whilst there is a certain satisfaction in the process itself, and certainly in the publication of your work, there is little financial gain as a freelance, and it is a constant struggle to come up with new ideas, then convince editors to use them. Often throughout my many years as a writer, my ideas were stolen (there is no copyright in ideas), and this became a huge moral issue for me, until finally I decided that I didn't want to be part of that world any more.

My last paid published piece appeared in The Province in 2006 - it was an account of the soccer World Cup in Berlin, and since then I have stuck to writing for my local newsletter as an outlet for my inner scribe. To see recent entries, please go to:

www.claytonvoice.com