An Autistic Man's Struggle to Survive, Despite the Pharmaceutical Companies' Drugs

Do you know anyone who suffers from severe allergies? If so, they probably suffer from the typical hay fever, and allergies to pollen. For Mark Moyers, those allergies would be a welcome problem. Mark not only suffers from the typical hay fever, and pollen allergies, he also suffers from severe allergies to drugs! Mark literally is in a fight for life!

Mark Moyers is a 20 year old autistic man, and my son. Mark suffers from barrette's esophagus, which makes Mark susceptible to cancer of the esauphagus. He also suffers from epilepsy, sleep disorders, and he is severely autistic! Unfortunately, Mark is allergic to just about all medications, and is now becoming sensitive to meds he has taken for years.

Mark sleeps every other day, and hallucinates on the days he does not sleep. His doctors give him Klonapin to help him sleep, but due to his reaction to the drug, we can only give him 1mg every other day, otherwise he cannot function at all. On nights that he does not take the Klonapin, he stays awake all night long, watching TV, and unable to sleep at all! No one knows why this is happening to Mark, or how to help him, dad and I feel as though our hands are tied behind our backs, and have no clue of what to do to help Mark.

Mark also is sick a lot with stomach trouble, (erosive esophagitus, and barrette's esophagus), the drugs that are given to treat this make Mark so ill that we nearly lost him last month! He became so ill that he could not eat, drink, sleep, or use the bathroom for almost a week! We took Mark off the drug, and he began improving immediately. However the doctor has three more drugs to try! Now mind you, we have been using an herbal tea with honey that has almost healed everything entirely, but the doctor feels drugs are the cure, and although Marks family doctor feels that the drugs will kill Mark long before any cancer, we still must experiment with every drug on the market that has been used to treat this problem in order to satisfy any legalities should Mark take a turn for the worst. It's all truly a fight for life, and a hard one too!

Is this what things have come to in the drug industry? "It may kill you before your disease, but you have to try every drug on the market just to be sure we kill you with the most pain possible"? I am appaulled at what I have to watch my son, who cannot even talk, go through! He fights for his life every single day, as does his entire family.

We don't know what to do any more. How can anyone say that you have to put someone through this? It's hard to be a caregiver for someone so severely disabled, but it is even harder when you are told that you have to give that person something that is slowly killing them, all because someone in our Judicial system says all drugs must be tried? Sad, very, very sad!