After about two weeks of water fasting, John counted up the total of his sores. There were forty three. Seven or eight of them were enormous, two or three inches in diameter and well into the flesh, but the last ones to appear were shallow, small and stayed small. After that point no more new ones showed up and the body began to make visible headway against the infection. Very slowly and then more and more rapidly, the sores began to close up and heal from the edges. John's fever began to drop. And he had less pain. I should mention that John brought an extremely virulent and aggressive pathogenic organism into our house to which we Americans had no resistance. Both my husband and I were attacked where the skin had been broken. However, unlike John, in our cases, our healthy bodies immediately walled-off the organism and the small, reddened pustules, though painful, did not grow and within a week, had been conquered by our immune systems. And after that we had an immunity. After about three weeks of his fasting we were thoroughly tired of hearing John's cathartic howls, tired of nursing a sick person. We needed a break. John at this point could walk a bit and was feeling a lot better. John had previously water fasted for 30 days and knew the drill very well. So we stocked up the vitamin C bottle by his bed and went to town for the weekend to stay in a motel and see a movie. As they say in the Canadian backwoods, we were bushed. John had promised to be good. But as soon as we left he decided that since he felt so very much better, he could break his fast. He knew how to do this and fortunately for him, (it was very much premature for John to eat) did it more or less correctly, only eating small quantities of raw fruits and vegetables. But by the time we got back home three days later, John had relapsed. The pain was rapidly getting much worse; the sores were growing again and a few small new ones appeared. Dr. Isabelle again took away his food and gave him another verbal spanking a little more severe than the one he'd had a few weeks earlier and put him to bed again without his supper. After two more weeks on water, John had gained a great deal on the sores. They were filling in and weren't oozing pus, looked clean and the new forming meat looked a healthy pink instead of purple-black. But John had been very slender to start with and by now he was getting near the end of his food reserves. He probably couldn't have fasted on water for more than one more week without starvation beginning. But this time, when he broke his fast, it was under close supervision. I gave him dilute juice only, introduced other sustenance very cautiously and made absolutely sure that reintroducing nourishment would not permit the organism to gain. This time it didn't. John's own immune system, beefed up by fasting, had conquered a virulent organism that could have easily killed him.