Thrive to 105

WOW…well over a month since I posted to my blog! I guess another apology is in order…this time for human error rather than technical difficulties! It’s kind of like the cobbler’s kid having no shoes; a writer never gets time to write her own “stuff” when she’s busy writing everyone else’s!

For those of you who don’t communicate with me personally on a daily or weekly basis, an update is in order. I’m not sure I had shared in my blog what “therapy” I had been doing very soon after my diagnosis, aside from drastically changing my eating habits, resting more, and lowering my stress. I had been following a protocol researched and discovered by a German doctor way back when, Dr. Budwig, who actually was nominated for seven Nobel Prizes for her research. She found that a mixture of flax seed oil and cottage cheese taken daily had a certain effect on the outer “shell” of cancer cells, which left them vulnerable and able to be destroyed by a healthy immune system.

It seemed easy enough, although I did resort to making it into a smoothie with frozen berries and some almond milk each morning. While I did that, I continued to read and research and found something that I found more interesting and (hopefully) a little more promising. It is a product called Protocel, which was developed decades ago and thwarted by the FDA and others over the years. So now it is sold online as simply a health supplement. It’s taken five times a day (which can be a bit challenging), and more than six hours cannot lapse between doses. The great thing about this “treatment” is that I can be a little more lax on my diet, i.e. I can eat a little meat, such as chicken. I can also have honey and pure maple syrup, and a moderate amount of whole grain carbs. The other stipulations have to do with avoiding certain supplements (high doses of Vitamin C and E, as well as COQ10, which I had been taking) and other alternative treatments.

In addition, I’m taking ellagic acid (raspberry seed extract) twice a day. This is one of the alternative treatments that doesn’t interfere with the effectiveness of the Protocel.

Without getting into any long explanations, Protocel literally attacks the cells themselves and “kills” them; and your body eliminates the dead cells through a process called “lysing”. This elimination can happen in many ways…runny nose, “crusty” eyes, daily body “functions”, etc. Tiredness in the first few weeks is about the only side effect. I’ll take that over hair loss, nausea, and the decimation of my immune system any day!

Oh yes, I also went to see an oncologist finally. It wasn’t a horrible visit overall, and I did learn a couple good facts regarding my biopsy that I hadn’t been told before. I learned my cells are estrogen receptive, which means estrogen feeds them, so I won’t be doing any bio-identical hormone replacement anytime soon. I also learned that they measure the “proliferation rate” of the cells and found 67% of mine were not prone to “proliferate” and only 23% were, which I think is pretty good odds. With what I’m doing right now, I’m thinking I can control that 23% and, in the end, get rid of all of them!

Of course, she encouraged me to do the standard of care treatment (chemo, surgery, radiation), to which I again said “NO!” In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, she told me they would first want me to do a short round of chemo BEFORE the surgery, which made absolutely no sense to me! Why do something that is going to destroy my immune system, then do surgery on diseased cells that will probably be released into my system elsewhere, into an immune system that has been compromised by previously ingested poison! It seems just so ludicrous! I was also asked what is in the Protocel. When I couldn’t tell her the ingredients, she told me I should at least know what was in it if I was going to be taking it. Later, reviewing the conversation at home, I thought, “I wouldn’t know what is in the chemotherapy drugs, but you’d expect me to take them!!!” At least I know I can take Protocel every day for years, and it won’t kill me!

So that’s my update! I’m feeling good, except for needing naps regularly; and I get kind of bored with my current meal plan. Much of that is my fault for being too lazy to prepare different recipes. It’s just easier to reach in and grab the organic greens/spinach, organic broccoli, bell pepper, celery, etc. and throw my homemade salad dressing on it! Bon appétit!

Two nights in a row of insomnia.  It’s currently 4:18 a.m.  I think exhaustion and my Sleepy Time Tea may finally be kicking in (that and an hour of reading Facebook posts and email).

I think part of my problem has to be brain overload.  I’m reading soooooooooooooooooooo much about treating cancer the natural way that some days I feel as though my head is going to explode!  It makes me obsessive at times now.  For instance…my lack of sleep…does not give my body the amount of time it needs to regenerate and get rejuvenated!  If I take naps later today, will that make up for at least part of my lack of sleep tonight?

Do people who are diagnosed with other life threatening diseases obsess over every little choice they make?  No sugar anymore…but is a tablespoon of honey in my green tea okay?  Limited carbs…but is my occasional whole grain baguette with my soup at Bread Co okay?  What if I eat an occasional homemade potato chip in a restaurant?  Am I eating enough “green stuff” each day?  Not eating meat…but damn…someone just told me shellfish are bad.  Alkaline water is preferable and so is organic everything!  No more regular milk or soy…almond milk, instead!  Thank God berries are highly recommended…but what if I can’t find organic ones???  Sheesh!

Of course, all the obsessing is definitely worth the outcome, which I’m feeling extremely positive about every day!  Besides, I can now fit into some capris that I haven’t worn in at least three or four years, so I guess I won’t complain too much!   LOL….

Just a quick little message to apologize for the read-ability of my last post!  This blog “theme” is quite dysfunctional, and I’m currently looking for a new one to replace it that will be not only more author friendly, but also more reader friendly, as well.  I know some people have complained they can’t post comments and can’t subscribe, etc.

I’m very sorry for these issues, and I will be correcting them very soon!!

Years and years ago, Jim (my ex-husband and close friend) and I were people watching.  I commented, “Have you noticed that, even though all of us have the same things to work with (eyes, nose, ears, mouth), none of us look the same?”  It’s quite amazing, I think!  Now it’s a running joke between us whenever we’re in a crowd.

That “revelation” should also be carried over to our internal “looks”.  We all (or most of us) start with the same parts:  heart, lungs, liver, brain, intestines, cells, etc.; however, the lives we lead soon make all of us so different on the inside.  Yet the traditional medical community wants to treat those of us diagnosed with cancer as identical!  They recommend a “standard of care” treatment that generally follows a daunting route…surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.  In the traditional medical community, the faster they can get you under the knife and start introducing radiation and chemicals into your body, the faster they can “cure” you (or so they want you to believe).  Worse, if your cancer is in an advanced stage, they make the horrifying mistake of actually giving you a death sentence, turning off your brain to optimistic possibilities, and squashing what little hope you may be trying to cling to in order to get through treatment and RECOVER!!!

As I mentioned a couple of  weeks ago, I am doing a lot of reading about cancer…which I will be sharing in upcoming posts…but two of the most important things I’ve learned in the past two months are:

• People should be made aware that they have OPTIONS!  If someone (a surgeon or oncologist) tells you you have to have surgery, radiation, and/or chemotherapy, you need to understand that those are not your only options!  I’m not here to tell anyone what to do or that they should ignore the recommendations of their doctors…if they feel that is best for them and feel confident that the recommended treatment will make them better.  What I am saying is that you should “Take a deep breath” (which is what my very good friend, Linda, told me immediately after my diagnosis).  Do at least a little bit of research and reading, if only to find out how to make yourself the strongest you can be in order to come through surgery with the best odds of surviving without a recurrence or how to tolerate the chemicals you may be given.  YOU HAVE OPTIONS…AND IT’S IMPORTANT THAT YOU KNOW THIS!!

• No two people are alike.  Now, as you can tell from my story at the beginning of this post, I had already “discovered” this some time ago; but I’d never really considered it regarding my internal problems until my diagnosis.  NO TWO PEOPLE ARE ALIKE INTERNALLY, AND THIS SHOULD BE CONSIDERED WHEN TREATING CANCER. Although there are some things that all people who are diagnosed with cancer should do (which I will talk about at a later time), there are many things that should be assessed individually.  “Cookie cutter” treatment (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy) is not a good “standard of care”.

In upcoming posts, I will share a lot of what I’m learning in my attempt to “thrive to 105“!  I am confident that this little “blip on the radar screen” is not going to set me back or prevent me from getting there.  In fact, it may actually have been something I needed in order to assure I reach my goal!

I have four minutes to make this my weekly, Wednesday Information Junkie post.  I should be in bed by now (don’t tell my watch dogs), but I had to post a client blog; and now I want to do my own!

Since I’m so “in tune” with anything to do with the ‘c’ word, and since spring is sprung (or close enough) and that means barbecues will be coming out, I thought I’d pass along a “Cancer-Quashing” marinade posted in Prevention last summer.  I shy away, as much as possible, from barbecued meat, because I know that it can contain carcinogens.  But I had heard that marinading the meat did cut down on those nasty things.  The marinade should be wine or beer based (this from the University of Porto in Portugal).  According to this study, soaking your meat for six hours lowered the “heterocyclic amines” (that’s the bad stuff in the crust of the meat when bbq’d) by 88%.  A Kansas State University study reported a 77% reduction when rosemary was used in cooking the beef.  So here is the marinade to try when grilling your next steak or hamburgers:

Dark beer (i.e. Guinness), garlic, rosemary, olive oil, low-sodium soy sauce, and dark brown sugar OR

Red wine, olive oil, red wine vinegar, rosemary, and garlic.  Season both of these with fresh pepper.

Okay…here is another interesting bit of info.  I think last week’s Information Junkie post had information on men and getting them aroused.  Truly, I’m not searching out this kind of info; but if it helps somebody with their love life, why should I keep it to myself?

Researchers in Israel found that in men with moderate to severe ED (erectile dysfunction), 15% had chronic gum disease.  Men who did not have ED had only 2% chronic gum disease.  So guys, while your lady is baking you a pumpkin pie and putting lavender oil behind her ears…go brush and floss your teeth!

That’s it for the Information Junkie tonight.  Bedtime!  My wonderful, healthy white blood cells need their rest!

Being an information junkie has its drawbacks, but right now it definitely is working to my benefit.  There is SO much information to be had if you’re open to knowing more than what you can get in a 15-minute visit with your surgeon or other doctor.

In their book called, Getting Well Again, Carl and Stephanie Simonton outline their research and an actual six-week program for helping those who are sick to use their minds as an aid to their healing process.  It’s a “step-by-step, self-help guide to overcoming cancer for patients and their families”.  Carl is an oncologist; Stephanie a psychiatrist…a powerful combination for the kind of work they’ve been doing for over three decades!

Part One of the book is titled:  The Mind and Cancer.  The first chapter is: The Mind-Body Connection; A Psychological Approach to Cancer Treatment.  It starts out dealing with the will to live, talks about the “whole-person approach” to treating cancer and discusses putting theory into practice.  My big takeaway from this chapter was:

It is our central premise that an illness is not purely a physical problem, but rather a problem of the whole person, that it includes not only body but mind and emotions.  We believe that emotional and mental states play a significant role both in susceptibility to disease, including cancer, and in recovery from all disease.  We believe that cancer is often an indication of problems elsewhere in an individual’s life, problems aggravated or compounded by a series of stresses six to eighteen months prior to the onset of cancer.  The cancer patient has typically responded to these problems and stresses with a deep sense of hopelessness, or “giving up”.  This emotional response, we believe, in turn triggers a set of physiological responses that suppress the body’s natural defenses and make it susceptible to producing abnormal cells.

WOW! As so many who are diagnosed with cancer must feel, I wondered “why” and “how” when I first heard the ‘c’ word.  But it made a lot of sense after reading the very detailed explanation in this book.  Eighteen months prior to my diagnosis (or possibly 24) I had the whole laundry list of events in my life that cause the most stress: I moved, I got married, I lost my job, my stepmom died, my relationships with the people I loved were strained, I got divorced.  At times I did feel a sense of hopelessness.  It makes so much more sense now.

Now understanding how the cells can become “abnormal”, it isn’t a hard segue to start wondering if it isn’t possible…with the right kind of physical and mental forces applied…to transform them into “normal” cells again.

We shall see!

As I alluded to in a FaceBook status posting recently, I’m a book addict. I LOVE books, and I love to buy books.  The only problem is I don’t always have time to read books, thus I have a ton of them.

In the initial days of living in my new, wonderful apartment, I opened a box of books to unpack. On the top of the pile was a book I don’t even remember buying. It’s title…Making Miracles: An Exploration Into the Dynamics of Self-Healing (How 11 incurable patients battled illness – and won). If that wasn’t a ‘sign’, I don’t know what is!  I immediately found time to read this book!

In this day and age with millions of people out of work and millions without health insurance (like me), our initial reaction when faced with health issues is that our options are very limited…go into deep debt or get sicker! But yesterday morning it occurred to me that this is one of the “whys” of my path right now…to learn about different options and to share them with others like me or others who know and love someone like me. Our bodies are miraculous in and of themselves, and we seem to forget that reality as we go through the motions of everyday living. But this book is inspiring and enlightening!

One of the most well-known subjects in the book is Norman Cousins, who was the Executive Editor of the Saturday Review and an advocate for world peace, as well as the healing powers of our bodies. He cured himself from a terminal illness through massive doses of Vitamin C and laughter, literally restricting himself to a hotel room where he watched funny TV shows and movies and had a nurse read humorous stories to him. Years later he also recovered from congestive heart failure and a heart attack without surgery.

Here is a quote from the Norman Cousins’ interview with the author (Dr. Paul C. Roud) of the Making of Miracles:

The doctors would call my absolute confidence denial, but it can be beneficial to deny, to defy the verdict you think is attached to the diagnosis. If you can recognize that the diagnosis is a challenge, not a verdict, and that there are resources to work with, and not all of them lie outside yourself, you can liberate the body from the complicating factors caused by fear. It seems to me that this frees the healing system – whatever that is – to assert itself and also creates an environment in which medical treatment can do its best.

I doubt there are many of us in this day and age who aren’t aware of the terrible toll that depression and stress can have on our physical well-being. Unfortunately, our health insurance and national healthcare systems aren’t helping the sick feel confident, calm, and upbeat. But maybe if more of us become educated in the option that moves us away from dependence on strict, scientific medical treatments, we can help ourselves!

Again, from Norman Cousins:

Panic, fear, and depression inhibit the ability of the body’s own apothecary to function properly.

Helplessness is a product of our education; we seem to be convinced that serious illness always proceeds in a straight line unless interrupted by some outside agencies. It’s a kind of education that prepares us for weakness rather than strength. We’re not educated in the essential robustness of the human body. Consequently, victory seems to be very elusive.

Personally, I refuse to feel helpless, fearful or depressed! I refuse to let victory elude me!

So…I’m an information junkie!  Most of the “junk” I like to read about and digest has to do with self-improvement and health (I need as much help as I can get to Thrive to 105).  I’ve always thought it was a shame that I couldn’t share this information.  Even though it is usually in a public forum (magazines, articles, books), not everyone has or takes the time to read about some of the things I find.

Well, I’ve decided to post a routine blog post where I will begin to share all these little gems and tidbits of information that could be of help to someone…we never know, do we?  These posts will be titled, aptly, “Information Junkie”.  Hopefully, it will get to be a fun part of reading my blog that will be looked forward to with happy anticipation.  Maybe you can share some information you think this junkie will be interested in that I may even pass on to the multitude of readers I’m amassing!

Here is a little taste of the kind of things I’ll be blogging about in the Information Junkie posts from Thrive to 105:

• From Prevention Magazine (Nov 2009) – the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation has found in its studies that most smells will increase penile blood flow for a man.  Why is this important?  Well, ladies, your perfume only increases the blood flow by 3%!  The smell of a cheese pizza increased (in their studies) blood flow by 5%.  Buttered popcorn (make sure you take a seat at the back of the theater) increased blood flow by 9%!  However, to get the biggest (no pun intended), best reaction…bake him a pumpkin pie and dab lavender-scented oil behind your ears.  These combined scents increased blood flow by an impressive 40%!!!  Move over Viagra!

• From MORE (December 09/January 10) – I loved this one.  A woodworker from Maine named Chuck Lakin makes furniture that can later be used as a coffin.  Now all you need is a little plot in the backyard, and you can cut out the middleman and do your own funeral!

Okay, I know neither of these things has anything to do with self-improvement or longevity; but I’ve just moved, and a lot of my notes are still waiting to be unearthed here in my humble (and cluttered) abode.  How about this, from the Mind, Mood, and Memory newsletter for all you “multi-taskers” out there:

• If you frequently multi-task, you could be less able to concentrate than those who DON’T multi-task.  Tests were done that asked subjects to do tasks that involved “cognitive control” or how your brain directs its attention and decides what’s important.  People who make a habit of multi-tasking, when asked to ignore blue rectangles as they made determinations on aspects of red rectangles and switch between number and letter-based tasks, had more difficulty blocking out the irrelevant information.  It also took them longer to switch between areas of focus.  So if you like to brag that you are a great multi-tasker, you may not be quite as effective and efficient as you think.

That’s it for the first ‘installment’.  Check back soon for more “Information Junkie” junk!

Driving home one day from who knows where, I got a phone call from a woman I had never met.  Her name is Linda Watson.  She had gotten my name and phone number from a man whom, to this day, I have yet to meet (although some day I would like to thank him in person for the connection).  Linda was searching for women of like minds who would be open to learning about, discussing, and practicing the benefits and strength of the body, mind and spirit connection.  Although I wasn’t sure who, of the women I knew, would be important for her to know, I did know that I felt a strong attraction and bond to her almost immediately.  I told her I wanted to meet her in person!

I have to say, “Thank you, God, and thank you, John Freeborn, for bringing Linda into my life”!  When we first met, we talked easily for a couple hours; and before I left our first chat fest, Linda offered to do one of her treatments on me so I could experience what she wants others to know and learn through her practice, Wellness Without Walls.  The “treatment” was an amazing session, relaxing me more than I think I have ever been and putting me in touch with MY  mind/body/spirit connection, the significance of which I am just now beginning to see.

Most of us have likely heard or read the opinion that if you have three or four true friends in your life, you should consider yourself fortunate.  Well, I am more…much more…than fortunate.  I believe that the number of my true friendships is quite a bit higher than that; and now Linda is a most welcome addition.  Why have I been so blessed?  Perhaps it was all building up to this very impactful time in my life, because God knows I need them all very much right now.   True to form, they have not let me down; and for that I am tremendously grateful!

Friendship…another sign!  Value your friends; nurture those relationships!  There may come a time when they will help to save your life!

If you, like me, grew up a child of the 60’s and 70’s, you’re familiar with the song evoked by the title of this post.  Unlike the signs in the song, however, the “signs” I’ve seen of late are of a more positive nature.  Like the author of that song, I also feel a strong need to share the viewing and recognition of my “signs” and their significance for me.  Perhaps by sharing my “signs, at least one other person reading my blog might start paying attention to the “signs” in his or her life.

It’s hard to know where to begin; when you start to recall the signs, more seem to take shape that you may not have recognized before.  Perhaps the first one was the restlessness I began to feel living in the home of a very dear friend (Irene).  At the time, the opportunity of moving in with her was a God send for both of us.  Not only did it benefit us both financially, but it also rewarded us with time together to nurture our friendship at a juncture in our lives when we both needed it.

But I began to find myself feeling claustrophobic in my living space, my personal piles of “stuff” stifling and stressful.  I also found myself getting short-tempered and upset by insignificant things, which is a problem for me; because I am usually hard pressed to express anger outwardly towards others (which will become a topic of interest in future blog posts).  For this reason, I decided it was time to begin searching for my own place to live, knowing that the time was right for both me and Irene.

I sent an email “blast” to my wonderful circle of friends (to which I referred in my last post), asking them to help me find a new home of my own.  Needless to say, they came through for me and (thanks to Mary Kay and Sherley) I am writing this blog post from my antique rocker in the living room of my terrific and therapeutic new apartment.

The call to a new living space of my own was the first “sign” of things to come for me…and soon for other important people in my life.   Are you paying attention to the “signs” presenting themselves to you?  Today…try and be open to what the universe may be telling you that could impact your life…something that could help you “thrive” to….!