The Leaving Years

To begin, let me tell you about the year I ran away from home.

It was the late 1960s. My high school guidance counselor — the memorable Miss Elliott — had already delivered her verdict on my future. I was to be, she announced, an executive secretary or a nurse. In fact, not a doctor.  Additionally, this is from a woman watching me rotate top marks with two other students, serve as Vice-President of the student council, and sit on almost every committee the school had.

So naturally, I enrolled at the University of New Brunswick. In Secretarial Science.

I know!  But here is what I’ll say in that program’s defense: it taught me typing and shorthand. And I used both every single day in medical school. Every lecture, every word, was captured in shorthand at full speed while my classmates scrambled in longhand. Miss Elliott may have been wrong about where I was headed.  Although she was not entirely useless.

After one year, my boyfriend and I had had enough, we left. We ran away — and instead of spending our small budget the way a lot of young people in the 1960s spent theirs, we put it toward health. We ended up at alternative health conferences in Seattle and Los Angeles. The early pioneers were on those stages — Adelle Davis, Paavo Airola, Jonathan Wright, Dr. Bernard Jensen, Dr. Max Gerson.

These were the people asking the questions that conventional medicine wasn’t asking. They were looking at food, at the terrain of the body, at what happens when you actually nourish the whole system instead of chasing symptoms one by one. I was completely transformed.  Later on years later, I would meet Dr. Jonathan Wright and Charlotte Gerson in person. I sat on the board of the Gerson Institute in San Diego.

Somewhere in all of that, I started saying — out of nowhere, with no clear plan behind it — that I wanted to do The Great Work.

I didn’t have a definition yet, I just knew it was true.

The Story Behind the RnA Drops Origin Story

In 1969, in California, we met a man doing something quiet and remarkable.

He was making small water purifiers by fermenting grains. They were compact — roughly the size of ice cubes, cast in a kind of cement — and you placed them in your drinking water. We had read about his work back in Nova Scotia, and when we met him in person, we were already believers. In the time we used them, we felt we were healthier. That we were aging more slowly. That something this formula was producing was doing what we had never seen a supplement do.

I want to be precise: that was our experience, our personal observation. But the idea — that a mineral-based process could slow the aging process — stayed with me. It is the same thread I am still pulling on today. Fifty years later, it became the central question of the Maui ReSet Pilot Study.

When this man was dying, he gave me his formula.

With a little tweaking over the decades that followed, it became RnA Drops — the cornerstone of the RnA ReSet line. Every capsule we make contains an element of that original formula. The RnA Drops origin story doesn’t begin in a lab or a boardroom. It begins in a California room in 1969, with a dying man who trusted a young woman with something he had spent his life building.

I have never taken that lightly.

Back in Nova Scotia, I enrolled in Honors Biology. I thought ecology might be my path. To test that, I took a summer job with the Department of the Environment, traveling around the province with a mobile field unit testing water.

My coworkers trashed every place we were stationed. They had no concept of ecology whatsoever. It was both funny and completely disheartening.

The following summer, I did ocean sampling of Spirorbis — a cute little worm that lives in a tiny white shell. Not exactly a calling. But I loved being out in small boats along the Nova Scotia coastline, so I have no complaints about the worm.

I genuinely didn’t know what I was going to do with a biology degree. And then, one ordinary day in lecture, everything changed.

The Decision

I was sitting in a biology class when two classmates came up to me with a question.

“Have you been accepted?” one of them asked.

I gave them my cheeky answer. I felt pretty accepted in general — what were they talking about?

It turned out these two wet-behind-the-ears nineteen-year-olds had just been accepted into medical school.

I was livid.

You mutts are going to be doctors? That is crazy.

Because the whole time, I had been doing the work. Reading Adelle Davis. Baking my own bread. Choking down nutritional yeast. Absorbing every shred of natural medicine literature I could get my hands on. And these two had never thought about any of it.

I probably considered it for a day. Then I told my husband I thought I should apply to medicine. I went to the library and looked up the requirements. I had everything — except Physics 101 and Inorganic Chemistry. Nobody takes Inorganic Chemistry unless they are going into medicine.

I decided I was going into medicine.

The Miss Elliott Moment

Shortly after that, I walked into the Dean of Medicine’s office to pick up an application.

And I kid you not: seated in the Assistant Dean’s chair was Miss Diane Elliott.

My nemesis. The woman who had told me I should be an executive secretary.

In the spirit of Lucille Ball, I said: “Miss Elliott. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

I told her I wanted to go into medicine and had most of the required courses. She said she was on the acceptance committee. And then she told me something I have never forgotten. The school was raising its female applicant quota from under 20 to 30 out of every 100 students.

She thought I had a good shot.

Fate has a very specific sense of humor.

The Postcard with a P

Most students who want to become doctors have been planning it since childhood. From the age of ten, they chase top marks. By the time they sit for the Medical College Admission Test, they understand exactly what is at stake.

As for me, I had applied to medicine somewhat the way I stumbled into everything else—sideways, quickly, and without fully grasping the weight of it until afterward.

Fortunately, the test itself was fine. What I remember most, however, is how I found out I had passed.

Instead of a formal letter, they sent a postcard. A tiny postcard with my name on it and a small box in the top right corner. Inside the box: one letter. P.

Naturally, I had to assume it meant I passed.

Once my P was confirmed, I was accepted on one condition: I had to earn passing grades in both Inorganic Chemistry and Physics 101 that semester. Meanwhile, to balance out the academic rigor, I audited a Science Fiction course at the same time.

Personally, I thought it was perfectly appropriate.

What Came Next

Finally, I had arrived, officially.  Even so, against Miss Elliott’s original verdict, across a winding road of health conferences and ecology boats and a California deathbed and two nineteen-year-olds who had no idea what they had set in motion.

Then, I walked into medical school in the mid-1970s as one of thirty women in a class of a hundred. In fact,  it was the most I had ever felt in the right place and the wrong place at exactly the same time.

Although the RnA Drops origin story was already in my pocket. The Great Work was still ahead.

Next week in the Dr. Dean Diaries: what happened on Day 2 of medical school — and why every nude photograph in the building was gone by morning.

This content is for educational purposes only and discusses nutritional and lifestyle support for normal structure and function of the body. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure disease. Consult a qualified healthcare professional for personal medical guidance.

👉 More About The Maui Reset Pilot Study

👉 Learn more and become a member here:
https://drcarolyndean.com/wellness-courses/