Whoa! 
That was quite a read. I appreciated how various doctors were consulted regarding their opinions of various aspects of his medical claims, and how the reporter laid everything out with a timeline.
A few of the medical related passages that were interesting…
“According to Jerome Morse, one of Aziz’s attorneys, Danson represented to the court that Lamaze was deathly ill. “You know, January 19, 20, he’s on his deathbed for brain cancer. And on January 31, he’s jumping in Wellington,” Morse recalls. “We put an investigator on him in Wellington. And sure enough, throughout March he competed, and competed rather well.”
Lamaze eventually sat for the deposition, though he stood by his health claims. In a 2020 interview, he asserted that the cancer treatment had decimated his organs. His kidney got seriously infected, putting him at risk of a heart attack or stroke, he said, adding that his doctors considered a transplant but didn’t feel he would survive the operation. Instead, he purportedly received an unapproved alternative, an artificial kidney controlled by a computer chip.
“I kind of immediately started to feel better, to be honest. My body just started to clean itself a little bit,” he told the interviewer.
This kind of implant would have placed Lamaze at the vanguard of medical technology. Pressed for more details, he tells The Daily Beast he worked with a doctor in either Australia or New Zealand, though he declines to name them. As for procuring the organ, he says, “They have access to things on the internet that nobody else has access to… Depending how many people need it, it’s a bidding war.”
“I do not believe that is possible,” F. Perry Wilson, an associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine specializing in nephrology, says of this kind of arrangement. Researchers are working to develop artificial kidneys, he says, but they are “still VERY much in the prototype stage.”
Jonathan Himmelfarb, professor of medicine at the University of Washington and founding director of the Kidney Research Institute, echoes that sentiment, “I suppose that the technology could exist (never say never) but I am unaware of its existence.”
It seems likely that Lamaze has experienced some health issues, though it is not clear what was treated. He sent The Daily Beast an undated photo of himself in a hospital bed, and a close-up image of a shaved head with a jagged scar on the side, saying it was from one of his brain cancer surgeries.
A neuro-oncologist who reviewed the image says that those operations tend to leave more “linear” scars, though it is “theoretically possible” that the healed wound was caused by a tumor surgery.
That said, the physician continues, “If a person were to fall and open up the head a little bit with a laceration, and then that gets sutured, it could also look like that.”
….
“ This summer, as his litigation in Canada was heating up, Lamaze’s face appeared seriously damaged. There was a large cavity near his nose and mouth, generating speculation about the source of his health problems, including whether he had relapsed. Lamaze maintained he was still suffering from cancer.
After reviewing images of Lamaze, Robert Kotler, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, told The Daily Beast his condition seemed like the result of an external injury, perhaps a major infection or tumor, though he couldn’t say for sure. Another plastic surgeon, Jay Calvert, had a different take, with the same caveat about certainty: “It’s fair to say that something’s going on with his nose and maxilla that would be consistent with cocaine use. There’s very few things that do this.”
According to Danson, Lamaze believed his facial injuries would be sufficient to delay the trial. When that proved untrue, Danson says, he pushed for more documentation. Once he received them, Danson says he took the documents at face value. “It would be unthinkable to think that these were anything but truthful and authentic.” And yet, they were fakes.
Lamaze has yet to explain the discrepancy beyond casting blame on his staff and on Danson, suggesting there was a conspiracy to ruin him. On Sept. 9, he also posted a 2,000-word screed to his personal Facebook page—which he later deleted—in an attempt to offer a portion of his story. The note was meandering and frequently unintelligible, stirring speculation about Lamaze’s mental state. (Danson says Lamaze may be using Siri for dictation, and English isn’t his first language.) He sent similarly inscrutable text messages to The Daily Beast but seemed far more cogent on the phone.“
