Cancer Journal

 I mentioned in the prior blog entry about Vitamin C infuser, A, that we were joined by a loud, exuberant woman (her name is Jan) just starting out on Vitamin C.  She joins my good friend, Maria and me and Oh My, we have such fun!  Noisy;  they probably hear us way down the hall but unlike A, Maria isn't chased away by the decibels.  She may turn up her own volume nob as do I.   Hearing things and telling things never uttered to another human being.  Maria referred to her time with Jan after I leave as "Wellness Happiness Hour."  Jan said the three of us together is The Breakfast Club which causes me a clang of recognition and agreement*.  Breakfast Club for old folks!  Cancer, I suppose, stands in for the bad/stupid principal.  Jan thinks it's a pity that kids don't have a chance for the life enhancing closeness that was in the Breakfast Club and with the three of us.  But then she doesn't see it happening because the kid...

 The cancer stories I'm used to involve people who follow a plant based diet plus some other good practices and then have their tumors shrink or maybe disappear in a way at odds with what their medical doctor had anticipated.  That's kind of what's been going on with me.  Last week as I was getting my Vitamin C infusion, I shared the treatment room with a woman who does not have that story.  The cancer has metastasized from her breast to her bones.  She has to wear a neck brace about all the time because of a broken vertebrae in her neck.  She gets weekly chemo treatments which she understands she will get for the rest of her life.  The treatments no doubt account for the tight fitting cap on her head. She (I will call her A.  I haven't gotten her permission to write about her yet.  I will ask her how she feels about that next time I see her) had a story of failure to make timely diagnosis (if they had looked closely at the Pet scan they shou...

 If you read the comments to my most recent blog, you read that Jan Carroll and Anastasia both expressed approval for my scheduling acupuncture and thanks for the wide range of various health care providers in our area.  And they are right.  I'm fortunate to be able to get all the various kinds of high quality treatment that I do.  But there's something that makes me a little uneasy about it too. Let me tell you a story.  There was a liberal antiwar Republican Congressman from California 50+ years ago named Pete McCloskey.  Back then liberal Republicans were rare but not the impossibility they are today.  He ran as an antiwar Presidential primary candidate in 1972 against incumbent Richard Nixon, getting nearly 20% of the vote in the New Hampshire Primary.  Things went downhill from there.  Politicians who get the presidential candidate disease never ever get over it.  His interest continued through 1988 when the TV evangelist, Pat Rober...

 Unlike some recent entries, this one will be kind of cancery.   One of the things I have had at Spero Wellness is testing done on my biochemistry.  There is one test I've had done called NutrEval which is paid for by Medicare.  You can do it once every six months which Medicare will cover.  Suggests legitimacy to the testing, at least to my uninformed opinion.  Anyway, I had it done in March 2021 and then again in late December, 2021.  It measures various forms of toxicity residing in the body.   For all the things I do that should reduce the toxins in the body;  infrared sauna, supplements of various sorts, a mostly plant based diet and a semi-rigorous exercise program,  my toxin levels are not better.  Indeed, three out of five are worse, one has improved and one has stayed the same.  The worst one is oxidative stress, which on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being worst, is a 9.   Who knows what's going on there....

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with Jan Carroll, Eau Claire based poet who considers it part of her job as a writer to encourage others to write. Writing reluctance is her enemy that she does battle with whenever she confronts it. I have reported before that when I expressed vague writing aspirations in response to her questioning, she didn't let the matter drop as you would ordinarily expect. Duty done in showing interest in the other person is how it generally goes. But Jan pressed me in a way that caused a little discomfort which really is not in her character. Unless I did something more than express vague aspirations I felt I wasn't going to measure up. She no doubt felt it was a pity if someone wanted to write for them not to be doing it. If it called for a little shove, so be it. It was shortly after that that I joined the writing group I'm now a part of and as one thing leads to another, it surely accounts for blog.  Anyway, Jan has continued to t...

                                                                      Delilah cut my Hair.                                                 It happened just the other day.                                                                                            ...

 I had my PSA number checked again this week.  It is again too low to be detectable.  Pretty unexciting but on this one, I prefer that to exciting. I asked the physician's assistant that I've been seeing now about sex.  What that did was prompt a referral to Urology.  Don't quite know what they can do.  Fact is, I get an injection of something that is called a "castration agent."  I'm thinking it will be a case of "You ask a dumb question, you get a dumb answer." Maybe there's something but I don't know what.   As I was getting my castration agent injection, I was in a room with a computer monitor screen saver that had wise advice messages.  One was to eliminate from your concerns today, one thing that you have no control over.  It was put a little pithier but good advice.  Another was to Amplify Curiosity and it said to ask someone to tell you one thing you wouldn't have known about them.  I asked the lady administering t...