Maritoni Fernandez
A Testimony of Maritoni Fernandez (actress/businesswoman)
I, Maritoni Fernandez, was diagnosed with moderately differentiated infiltrating ductal carcinoma of the right breast, BREAST CANCER, stage 2 on April 4, 2001. I was 32 years old and a mother to a six year old girl. The lump removed was 1.8 cm in diameter and was found to be malignant.
I immediately went to war against this deathly disease. 15 lymph nodes were extracted from my right arm pit area and fortunately all were found negative for involvement of the said tumor which simply meant that the cancer had most likely not spread past the tumor area. Next a portacath was inserted into my left upper clavicle. This is a tube connecting directly to my heart. A form of short cut for all the chemo, blood tests, extractions that need to be done through what otherwise would be a painful process into my veins. Since chemotherapy has a nasty way of causing veins to collapse, this was deemed a safer easier path.
Next was the actual treatment which consisted of 4 cycles of Adriamycin/Cytoxan chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation therapy. After my first round of chemo, I felt like death. I realized that it was not going to be an easy fight. I ended up confined in the hospital for the next two weeks trying to recover from a viral infection I had caught as a result of my lowered immunity. One of the deathly side effects of chemotherapy is that all your white blood cells are wiped out and as a result, I got very very very sick.
It was during this time in the ICU while placed in reverse isolation that I began my search on the internet for a natural way to ‘help’ my body recover from all the beating it was receiving from all the drugs I needed to survive the cancer. This is when I first read about young barley grass and all its amazing benefits. I read how it naturally boosts your immunity and thought to myself, “This is exactly what my body needs!” I had my family buy me some at a local health food store and began to drink it daily. What took me close to three weeks to recover from my first round of chemo took me only 4 days on my succeeding rounds. It was working and I was feeling much stronger much faster.
During my radiation therapy I felt none of the side effects that are associated with it. No burns, no blistering, none of the many horror stories I had heard of from other patients. I breezed right through it. After all my treatments were done, my doctors told me that I would never be able to have children again. One of the horrible side effects of chemotherapy is that it prematurely puts you into menopause, which in my case happened as early as my second treatment along with losing all my hair, my monthly periods had stopped altogether. Despite this, I continued to take barley religiously everyday and have not stopped since.
It was three years after my treatments had ended that my menstrual cycle suddenly returned. All my doctors were confused but I believe it is the amazing properties in barley that was able to correct my system. Today I am a proud mom of a 4 year old boy and a 14 year old teenager. They too are both barley babies and are healthy and strong.
I believe that young barley powder has amazing benefits for all. It helps boost the immune system and repairs DNA down to the cellular level which simply means that it repairs whatever may be going wrong in our bodies even before we know it is going wrong. It is in my opinion, truly the best way to protect ourselves against all diseases and as the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure. If I could give one piece of advice it would be for everyone to take barley every day, I have and it really does work.