I feel a need to include this information because of how quickly this new episode of cancer came upon me and it may very well be that the absolute eruption of stress hormones, toxins of all sorts and whatever other nuclear strength cooties that came into my system was the catalyst for this episode. First came the dual “surprise attack”, which happened within two days of each other of a false accusation from a client looking to get paid by my liability insurance, which I couldn’t disprove due to having been on what I thought was my deathbed in 2019 and, well, I’m not going any further due to possible implications in the event that I live, but it was, and is, some BIG bullshit! Then, the very next day that I found out that I was going to be investigated for that, which has additional implications, civil for sure, and possibly criminal, my wife of less than a year, Diana, and I separated in a way that seemed impossible to repair. 

Exacerbating things my health has never come back since the last bout with cancer. I’d say 80% is the best it got and that only due to great efforts of uber-nutrition and daily exercise. When this shit hit the fan I stopped eating well and sleep was very hard to come by. There was a lot of stress, not only for those reasons but there were other things that were heinous going on as well and I just now started to detail for the reader just some of that but that becomes a whole story unto itself. Cutting to the quick I slid rapidly into an extremely dark place. As a clinician I will allow for some self-diagnosis to say that I went into a mild temporary insanity. Perhaps someday I will write out the finer points but during this episode with the acute phase which included suicidal ideation and a mild disassociation lasting some days. The initial phase was fueled by lots of meth which I justified since I didn’t have the energy to make it through the day due to my fading health, lack of sleep and poor nutrition. I started to spin my meth addled brain into a knot that lasted perhaps four or five days. I got it into my head that I should go have some gaming “fun” and within hours of pouring thousands of dollars into the project of self-destruction by way of throwing away money at the casino I was contacted by a casino host and getting comped luxury suites and anything else they could give me to keep me there, which worked. I spent bundles of cash, in the next several days running to the bank to withdraw the maximum $5000 a day, a couple of times going to two different US Bank branches in the same day to double that to 10k. I just watched myself around the clock in a dissociative state from outside of myself going nuts. 

That was the worst of it but it also resurfaced to a lesser degree for some days here and there over the course of maybe 6 weeks included dumping over $70,000 dollars into the Mystic Lake Casino, a LOT of meth use, heroin, and other opiates use and finally a short relapse into alcohol. I was eating high fat, high carb, and sugary foods. Sleep would come a couple hours at a time after some 30 or more hours awake. 

Going a bit further ahead with the preface to 2019 I was just worn out after having been housebound and literally waiting to have enough energy to go someplace where my corpse wouldn’t be a burden to anybody, like the wilderness, then covid hit so I was down another year with everyone else, then all of this other shit hit the fan. I was simply worn out. On those days when I was more focused on my misery I wanted out of the whole deal of living so this was my lazy man’s approach to a slow but steady demise. And all of this was going on a couple months before the cancer diagnosis, which came about very quickly, so, I’m guessing I probably gave a turbo-charge to what was already floating around in my system waiting to show itself at some point soon anyway. I figured that I don’t need money since I’m going to be dead soon. And that was before I got the diagnosis.     

Due to all of this self-destructive behavior I was having some problems with my breathing; I had become weak in the legs and loosing coordination so I was staggering even when I wasn’t under the influence. I was getting dizzy occasionally in general and particularly when I stood up so I sent a message to my doctor who ordered a heart scan for me. I suppose one might wonder why I was contacting my doctor when I was actively trying to do a dirt dive, but that’s too complicated to get into, so I won’t. A couple days later on the day before I was going on a long-planned cruise to Alaska I got a message saying that an oncologist wanted to talk to me about my scans. That seemed like it could mean only one thing. Still it was going to have to wait because I was about ready to cruise and whatever they had found either it could wait a week, or, if it couldn’t, then it would be all the better to be on a cruise to Alaska, if you follow my logic. 

When I got back from the cruise I found out what I suspected was happening which was that they found what looked like cancer, now in my lungs. We had to schedule a biopsy, of which, to my mind was a foregone conclusion what they would find. I also spoke with a pulmonary oncologist and he was kind enough to provide me with some probabilities of diagnosis and prognosis factoring in the last scans that I had taken a couple years ago which showed nothing, then comparing the size and amount of nodules that were now present I asked him what he thought was happening? The news was fairly dismal, but it isn’t like I haven’t heard dismal news before, eh? Meanwhile I had just started talking to Diana again who, by some miracle of months of meditation, as she tells it, had some insights resulting in her starting to acknowledge how she owned her part in our challenges. Anyway, I told her about the fact that I had a biopsy coming up and what I suspected that it indicated which was that the result will show malignant cancer. Her response was to encourage me to get to her as soon as possible so that we can start the Gerson Protocol. We agreed that we should wait for the results of the biopsy just in case they had information, or treatments, that would be of value, understanding that Gerson is our best bet. 

For those who don’t know about the Gerson protocol it entails a specific diet with a lot of supplement that are tailored to the needs of the patient whereby many blood tests are given along the way and an optimal balance of vitamins and minerals is sought. There is a liver cleansing process that occurs daily and sometimes twice daily. Meditation practices are not officially a part of the protocol but most practitioners and patients recommend it based on the accepted research showing how much a positive state of mind helps the healing and recovery process. 

The next thing in a series of events leading to a very late start getting to Italy and getting the protocol started was the biopsy was delayed for a week. Then by the time I got the results just two weeks later my health and energy were identifiably taxed and walking up one flight of stairs was already hard on me. Then came the ordeal at the airport which would have qualified as by far the worst single day at the airport ever and the second day was worse than the first. If you allow me to offer the details of that ordeal I would LOVE to know of anyone who has had a weirder and/or harder time getting on a flight. I know times are messed up due to covid and all, but, really, if you want to check it out, fine. If not and you want to just ahead to the protocol process, it’s all good to me, jump ahead. But this was a strange f-ing deal. So, I will offer that little bit of weirdness in a separate entry (assuming this blog get’s off the ground, now 3 weeks overdue) to offer the details of that and then we’ll head off to Italy and the start of the treatment.   

Finally seeing Diana was an instantaneous joy for me and it was nice to be back with her and in Italy. We had some tedious stuff to deal with regarding getting all of the organic foods we needed etc.. I will always try my best to make things interesting for any readers and so the hours that we spent going to various markets and getting the different organic foods for the protocol would not make for interesting reading, so I’ll omit that. We finally made our way to the apartment that we have rented which is glorious for its location on Lake Garda. I suppose I can provide a link in case anyone cares to see the area. It is quite beautiful. Here goes a link; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Garda 

I spoke with the protocol doctor for about an hour. He had required that I got blood tests prior to our meeting in order to determine the values for an array of maybe 30 different vitamins and minerals and I don’t even know what, so that he could “prescribe” a very specific diet. The protocol requires six fresh vegetable juices of two specific kinds at specific times daily. Nothing processed is to be eaten, no sugar, no salt and a twice daily purification of the liver to remove as many of the toxins as possible. The process of getting these items fresh, preparing them and cleaning them is very time consuming. There is almost no meat other than fresh fish daily, and, unfortunately, I’ve never been a fan of fish so I’m choking this down along with fresh salads and whole grains. 

Medications are not allowed unless they are organic such as CBD oil, or cannabis. I did get some cannabis but it isn’t doing much for me since I have long history of chronic pain med use. In fact I had been using prescribed meds for chronic pain since before the last cancer and I did take myself off of them for about a year in an attempt to be as free of toxins as possible. Now the challenges in knowing that the pain relief is right there in the closet by way of Percocet’s and my effort is to stay away from them. What I can say is that I’m doing fairly well. But Diana is emphasizing the need for complete abstinence from them. And that goes for coffee as well. Grrr…. 

The medication restrictions mattered even more once I settled in because my regular chronic pain was bad enough but the first morning after getting here I developed a pain in the area of my chest where the biopsy had been done. I wanted to grab my prescribed Percocet’s very much thinking “just tonight, so I can get some sleep”, but then struggling to stay on point and follow the protocol. The pain increased the next day and I started to think that this is going to be tough sledding, as we say. I have managed some days without using the pain meds but I am not at all sure that I will be successful always, or even as much as I should, but I have good intentions of following the protocol to the letter. 

So then we have the six juices, the specific diet, I am doing cleanses twice a day, I take an estimated 30 supplements a day and I’m trying to get an exercise and stretching regime going. I have a blood replacement treatment that has been twice a week the past month which is now moving into a four times a week phase for the next month. Diana and her friends do “energetic work” on me a couple times a week that is kind of like ceremonial Reiki, at least from where I lie. 

 I still have plenty of chronic pain from the last cancer that never went away, specifically in my neck and lower back. I am almost always feeling some amount of fatigue, and both things combined make the abstinence from coffee and Percocet’s obviously harder, but I’ve probably made that point as much as I need to. Diana provides me with neck and back massages a few times a day and pretty much at my request. The massages help but she puts so much effort into it and it seems that 10 minutes after she’s done I’m back to where I was so I don’t push it.   

I intent to be thorough in sharing so you will also get nifty extras like the fact that I hack up some kind of goo from my lungs about 30 times a day. My breathing isn’t labored yet, but as I described at the outset of the narrative I had already been out of breath going up a flight of stairs ad dizzy when standing sometimes and unsteady on my feet. 

The good news is that so far the effect on me has been noticeably better in all ways, if only incrementally on some days relative to the pain and fatigue. Still my gait is steady on most days and I’m not putting effort into breathing and I’m getting around just fine. 

Obviously this can all be stressful and I have been missing some sleep due to a variety of reasons, some reasons would be obvious and others not-so-much. One such stressor I have to navigate is the ever-present challenges of dealing with a woman who I truly believe to be the most wonderful and sometimes maddening woman I’ve ever come across, Diana, my wife. I am sharing this because it is absolutely a huge part of this hopefully healing journey. Must people are tuned into the fact that people who have positive outlooks and are generally happy have better treatment outcomes than those who do not. I’m kind of a tough customer when it comes to this because of the fact that Diana brings to my being an absolute euphoric mixture of chemicals flowing into my body almost all day every day and I say that without exaggeration and not because she will be reading this .It is simply the truth. Most times I and awash in the absolute tsunami of love that I get from her and I want nothing more than to overcome this cancer and spend whatever time I have left on the planet with her. But I have to admit that there is a bug that circles sometimes just barely within hearing range, like that GOD DAMN mosquito that we’ve all dealt with on some summer nights that circles around my mind and tells me to just go ahead and move along to whatever is next. But when it comes down to it a mosquito is an annoyance and Diana? Well, Diana is a tsunami of love, so… 

Saturday 11/20/21

Yesterday I finished up the twice weekly for a month blood ozone replacement therapy. It was pretty straight forward simply sitting in a chair for about an hour as they drew blood and replaced it with new and (allegedly) improved blood mixed with ozone of which there is no research to support efficacy and some which shows it to be harmful and even fatal. They mix it with tons of antioxidants for obvious reasons. 

I am looking at going into a month long procedure that is 4 times a day and the information I uncovered above has me reconsidering this plan. 

I do feel better overall, but that can be attributed to all kind of reasons. I am going through the protocol, I am exercising some, trying to stay with 15 minutes meditation in the morning and 15 in the evening. Sleep is a bit irregular but to be expected given what I’ve got on my mind. 

Which brings me to this mind-blowing experience that I had last night. It started a few night ago when I did not get a minute of sleep because I allowed my mind to go into all kinds of scenarios that are long overdue for consideration. When my thoughts get into a particular grove of considering VERY important things that have to do with my situation, life and death, there sometimes comes a freaking instant fireworks-like display of thoughts and possibilities to consider. This state of mind is not anxiety and in fact I’ve done too good of a job in NOT considering the array of possible decision for now and the immediate future.

So the metaphor I will try to help you understand the challenge is to imagine that I go down one road, let’s say the one where Diana and I successfully love the cancer to death and there is no sign of it in my body anywhere. Well looky there… here come 30 more roads to consider, each having side streets, some with dead ends, some opening up to more avenues of consideration. Then all of sudden I find myself on the onramp to the highway called “what if it doesn’t work and so how much time does that leave me? Will I be in good enough shape to have some fun?” These are NOT the same as worries, they are important considerations because there are implications that are NOT simple, cut and dry kind of stuff well, maybe they are, but the more I’m thinking about it the more I feel that I SHOULD be thinking about it. And I am having Honest to God visions, one of which has changed for me A LOT of what I was planning, so, there’s that. 

And the vision is where the weirdness rubber hit the mind-blowing road last night as it were. Diana has a friend of over 25 years I think it is who she believes has been through many lifetimes with her and obviously there are countless implications that run through this for me, but jealously of romantic involvement is not one of them. He is clearly uninterested in woman as romantic partners. She counts on him for so much and he will deliver on any account as a great friend would, but that has allowed for her to have him to fall back on far too often when what needed to happen, in my opinion, was for us to problem solve and work on conflict resolution. I know, I know, a bit TMI, but, so what….this is an honest narrative and I promised you that and I warned her too that there might be more information disclosed than what she might want if I were to do this blog, so…

Anyway, this guy “Ago” for short, is a good dude. He has a good heart and is as good a friend to her as can be and will just about always step up for others if he is asked to do anything. So, for example, he is the reason that my blog looks as good as it does, cuz I damn sure don’t know shit when it comes to any of that. 

Anyway, so the other night, as I lay fully awake in bed with my eyes closed I saw a vision. Now, I have a good imagination and there have been times when I’ve had what one might call a vision, but I’m not trying to play it off here as if that’s how I roll. But in this vision I had made the decision, after finding out that all attempts to overcome the cancer were leading to imminent death that I would stay here because Diana’s is truly the last fact I want to see in the world. But I have concerns about her ability to hang out next to my death bed not knowing how long it takes to move on, or whether she will be willing to watch me go as I chose my own hour of death. In this vision she left her boy, Ago, to look after me for a while as she went to rest and I opened my eyes for my last breath and dude was the last thing I saw on this earth. ARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGG…..this was a powerful and frightful notion and totally put me off to the idea of dying here, even though Diana won’t say if she will come to the U.S. to be with me if I die. 

It turns out that I have plenty of people who I would love to see if I go out slowly, which I doubt that I will go out with a wimper, but many of you reading this I do want to see again before it’s all over. The idea of a hospital bed is almost nil but I sold my house and bought an RV to travel before all of this came about so that’s not gonna work. My lovely friend Loila pointed out that hospice is probably a good solution. I still doubt that I’ll go out slowly no matter what kind of decent drugs they give me. I just can’t imagine that. But I’m also a realist when it comes to knowing that things might very well change if I want to watch that last episode of Mattlock before I go. Who knows?

So then, here comes the weirdness; about once a week Diana has some of her people come over (I probably didn’t mention that she is a very powerful spiritual being and has a small cadre of “friends” who she helps along to grow spiritually. To say that they are her “followers” is a bit much, but, she’s alpha for sure.) and they do “energetic work”. The best way for me to explain this is that I lay on a massage table while they do what they do which is probably best described as a combination of Reiki and Laying on of Hands with some chanting tossed in for good measure. I’m good with whatever, cuz, what do I know, ya know? I keep my eyes closed probably 95% of the time to stay focused for one reason and to keep from chuckling as well, to be honest. 

So there has always been at least Diana involved in the “energy work” along with whoever else is doing it but last night she had to dip out to deal with things happening on her computer, cuz, well, priorities I guess. So she was too tired to do the work, which I assume is draining and she stopped to respond to her phone and at the very moment I opened my eyes I was confronted by the exact image that I had two night before of Ago, with the exact clothes, with the exact expression, perfect to every detail. I had to thank him for his effort and hustled off to bed in order to run away from the waking nightmare I had just encountered. Well, to say “waking nightmare” might be a bit strong, but certainly it solidified my decision to return to the U.S. if this doesn’t work out where I’m cured of cancer.

SURE THEY'RE GONE....BUT I DIDN'T GIVE IN WITHOUT A FIGHT. SOMETIMES YOU'RE JUST MISMATCHED

On the the 21st we had our anniversary which in many ways was just a beautiful thing. They trippy thing for what is about to follow is that for at least an hour while we were having dinner we shared with each other the fact that when we are around each other we both recognize a declined in our ability to process information which is all mushy and romantic but when you’re dealing with a language and culture barrier, not to mention and in different ways of looking at the world as we do, having full capacity brainpower would be hard enough of a challenge but then add to that that we both get lost in each other to the degree that we do that just adds another level of challenge to the whole thing. I also mentioned that something that occurs is that I also lose focus and attention as it applies to coordination as well which make me far more klutzy than usual. And I may as well add to the mix the fact that my coordination isn’t the best these days anyway. Keep in mind this was literally the topic of our conversation for an hour before we decided to go roller skating….yes roller skating!

 Having gained a little confidence by going around the rink a couple of times I decided that I would do a spin around to skate backwards in front of my beloved wife which resulted in the landing on my tail bone with my forearm straight out resulting in a broken coccyx and a broken forearm. The forearm was broken in a way that they were concerned that they might have to break it and operate. Fortunately a CT scan showed that all I needed was a regular old cast. As for the broken tailbone well there’s nothing a person can do except try to keep weight off of it for as long as it takes to heal.

So now I’m working on the protocol with one hand which matters because there’s a whole lot of food preparation that goes into it. Fortunately D has been doing most of the work and like a champ. Unfortunately there’s currently a disruption in The Force and I may be coming back with the protocol half done and which may as well be a complete waste of time not to mention money and energy: not to mention the fact that using this time to work on the protocol instead of doing what they folks at the university wanted to do may in fact and probably has in fact a shortened my life significantly since these are crucial months. 

The rift happened because one of the components of the protocol is to get an ozone treatment into your blood and apparently doing that four times a week wasn’t enough so that when of the doctors yesterday couldn’t figure out why they were having problems that lasted for more than a half hour where what they were supposed to be doing wasn’t working and they didn’t have an answer for it I lost confidence in the whole process. When I mentioned to Diana that I was not going to return to people that didn’t seem competent to me she told me I might as well go back to the United States then in “order to get better treatment” (to my mind code for do what I tell you to do or else) than because that part of the treatment was so important that I couldn’t live without it basically. Never mind that reliable sources like WebMD and the and mayo clinic indicate that ozone treatment is not only not beneficial but can be detrimental and his fact has caused death. 

So far she has tolerated the fact that I have not followed the protocol 100%. The factor that I have followed it way above and beyond the call of duty as far as I’m concerned doesn’t matter when it comes to the ozone treatment. As she sees it that needs to be followed without exception…. Or else… Well one thing I can tell you about to go to his “or else” doesn’t work for me. On the other hand of already invested far too much time and money and effort into this project to go halfway with it and then bailout simply because I have a tendency to get my backup when it comes to being threatened. 

All things considered I suppose since I’m going to be here in Italy at least another 20 days there doesn’t seem to be much logic in stopping at this stage simply to show that I won’t tolerate being pushed around regardless of the source. Besides, since the “source” happens to be the one person on the planet who can take my breath away and basically cause me to lose myself by doing the most simple, mundane and every day things like…. I don’t know….. name anything ….opening a car door, or pushing a grocery cart…. The woman can just watch TV and if I happen to look into her eyes I might get lost for the next half hour, simply floating off somewhere in the universe barely able to make it back to myself….. I’m saying really what chance does my lame-ass male-ego have to compete with when I’m up against that?

So okay Diana sign me up for whatever it is that this poor wretched lovesick Mother Fucker needs to do! The way I look at it if you’re right and we beat the cancer then we both win and there’s no shame in being a winner, especially when it comes to beating cancer. And if it doesn’t work ….well, then I’ll be far too dead to give a shit anyway. Still OK sign me up for all you want. If it turns out the next thing that is required for me to be in compliance with the protocol is to drink yak urine aged for exactly 148 days in a golden chalice, guarded by virgin elves and stirred rigorously only on the full Moon, simply a bargain at the low low price of $1000 a cup….. Bring it darling….. And yes I understand that by posting this my castration is on full display for the world to see and I understand how very unappealing a castrated man is…. I wonder if there’s still work for the castrato these days? Or maybe I can get something that can help pay for it all on Ebay assuming there’s a market for some gently used gonads. Anyway You win…sign me up for all you’ve got, Cheers.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

Hello dear reader. I say that assuming that you are a person who has been interested in this blog information in the first place so here we go;

If you read the last post you know that one of the reasons that I have not been doing post entries is because I broke my arm and I’m using voice recognition and it is very cumbersome so that it might take, oh four or five tries to write the same sentence to get it right, and that, my friends, is not something opened the that is very much fun. But still I feel compelled to make an entry today, as a matter of fact it can be said that my to my decision to post something today came as a result of what I’ve called spiritual guidance in the past. And even if it is just my imagination to make a distinction between the two, ( and what I’m talking about is the distinction between my imagination and spiritual guidance, the so if something pops into my head and it has what I will call a special sense to it ) I choose to give it the distinction of being spiritual guidance and then choose follow that.. guidance even it comes to being a huge pain in the ass. Is so just a share with you a little bit about the challenge faced here is that since I broke the words hello dear reader it is probably been a good 15 or 20 minutes I don’t have the patience and tolerance really to go into a detailed entry and even know I want to very much but I can see this literally taking 5 hours to do a few pages so allow me to synopsizes and then once my cast comes off on the 29^th I will try to commit to many more entries and two catching people out on what’s been happening.

So an interesting part of our story is that Diana and I have the same birthday, December 13, and while we have known each other for six years this is in fact the first birthday we spent together. We had what would be the best considered a lunchtime dinner party with some friends of hers. While Diana and others did their best to translate it was mostly 95% conducted an Italian so I simply spent most of my time listing and trying to stay out of trouble, which I seemed to do with some amount of success.

It’s hard for me to know where to go with this because I want to offer is some synopsizes description of how know things are going, but at the same time I’m compelled to be more detailed and this voice  recognition system just is too much of a burden for me to be able to do that.

So allow me to offer the following synopses of my health and try to be more entertaining reading once again the cast off my arm because it’s just too challenging to want to share my thoughts freely and fully, hopefully entertainingly and not take all day to write one page.

My days are filled mostly with following the protocol and there is on a whole lot of residual effort that goes into it the detail of which would simply be to bore you but you know there’s a lot of time and preparation and driving all over the place unexpected problem is due to cove and restrictions and testing and just an array of time consuming things that sometimes just show up and then the next thing you notice the end of the day and half of the things that we wanted to accomplish mean not have not accomplished because it just thing’s popping up. Thank God, literally, that I have Diana because if I didn’t then I wouldn’t be able to do one 10^th of this which essentially means I wouldn’t do any of it. So when I beat the cancer we know exactly where the bulk of the credit lies, even though I’m sure she would simply just turn it all over to God, where I know the credit truly belongs, but she is a splendid conduit for a the process.

Well that’s going to have to be my birthday, or I should say “our “  birthday entry for now because this has long ago used up my tolerance and it’s a minor miracle that the computer is not sm ashed against the wall right now. 

I look forward to getting back to being able to type my thoughts out and share knowledge is what’s going on but I still have a pile of stories to tell which I’m eager to get started on.  

ON WITH THE SNOW....

Well then I’m not sure what the calculation/ration of fb thumb-up to  effort afforded to keep writing is exactly  but 8 likes in a day and a couple of comments will keep me a-tip-tap-typing away for a while anyway. But so how to catch up on two months, be informative and keep your attention eh? 

Maybe if I get right to the good news. I did a contrast scan about a month ago and the doctors reported that the tumor (I have to parenthesize because there are a lot of them and the American oncologists aren’t sharing original photos. Don’t get me started!) but the main tumor seems to have stopped growing. This month the therapy has been intensified and so that is supposed to determine if this is going to turn this around. Enter, stage left, this monumental thick skull of mine who has been taking pain meds, even though I KNOW how harmful they are to the process. I’ve been eating the occasional pastry, even though NO SUGAR is part of the protocol. I’m not supposed to even drink coffee. 

If I were taking giving myself a grade from a class I would give myself an ”A”, but I don’t know that this effort will work even if I bring an A + to it and we are, after all, talking about no less than life, or death. So, today, I phase into A + phase and ask any and all of you who are inclined to do so to send your positive ju-ju. Abstaining from pain meds is gonna be the biggest temptation since we human beings are wired to avoid pain and pursue pleasure and your truly has ever been one who is wired to the gills like that. I’ve always been not just pain avoidant, but my wiring has always been “if a little is good, then more is better.” Historically there was no real stopping point, short of passing out. So for a character like me even taking pain meds as prescribe has been a real success over the years. I’m not looking for a parade in my honor for stopping as I have discovered that cancer loves those pain med chemicals to feed off of, but I’m just saying, I’ve learned that asking for outside help, even if it’s in your positive thoughts, call it “prayer”, “meditation”, “surrounding in white light” (some of you know what I mean), or the passing positive thought, is worth asking for while I pass through the withdrawals and travel into the world of reaccepting pain as part of the deal. Oh…whaaa….right? Anyway, it’s true, so…. 

So then, I have a very specific diet, all veggie with some fish, which I’ve never liked but now after a few months with basically nothing else in the way of proteins I’ve starting to develop something of a taste for it. Well, more accurately a tolerance for it. It’s all pretty bland, but no doubt healthy, no sugar, no salt, no coffee, except, yes, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, a coffee enema, held for 15 minutes after a liter is in there, if you’re keeping score at home. There is some research suggesting it cleanses the liver among other things. 

I get about an hour of ozone, oxygen and pure vitamins pumped directly into my arms 5 times a week. So far I’m still kicking, so there’s that. Sometimes I’m unsteady on my legs but mostly I can walk without stumbling. I’m fatigued and it shows up in heavy breathing, not quite gasping, but like I woulda usta have done in a light elliptical, or jog before the 2019 cancer. On the other hand I did 30 situps, weights and floor exercises today and so there’s that as well. I’m blessed anyway you look at it inasmuch as I am delighted to be here in Italy with Diana and whatever way it goes I’m really glad I made this decision as opposed to the one I had in mind, for example sky-diving into low altitude releases and whatever other mad thrill I could get. This is nice, I like it…. A lot…and at least it has the potential for coming out the other side and seeing what Coda does with the rest of it.   

A prayer and shout-out to my dear friend Loila getting her pancreas removed tomorrow to get rid of the rest of her cancer. What a fine human being she is and I could only hope each of you has someone as wonderful to talk to as a friend. Thanks for being that for me Loila. See you on the other side of your surgery.

Dakota 

TOUGH DAY

It is on a day like this that I damn sure hope someone is reading this thing because it is a rotten fucken day and what I really want is to get back to bed and not sound like s sniveling puss in writing this out, but, here goes; A good way to think about withdrawal, especially from opioids is basically what happens is the opposite of whatever the substance does for you that you took it for in the first place. So opioids give you a warm, fuzzy, nice feeling. It dries up mucus and in most instances might cause some degree of constipation and, of course, pain reduction. Withdrawal provides a person a chill down to the bone, runny sinuses, diarrhea, lethargy is probably the best one can hope for all the way down to just an absence of energy and feeling like complete shit. And the thing for me is taking the pain meds is legit and not some fun-time choice.

I can stop this feeling like shit in 10 minutes from now and the solution is right over there in that drawer and man, am I ever wanting to stop this feeling. But, if the cancer likes it and I’m going to overcome this thing then I gotta do what I gotta do.

What lingers in the back of my head is the question what if it doesn’t matter? What if the cancer wins out anyway and I’ve spent all of this time in pain for nothing? I mean, who knows right? Well, for now I’m gonna take the tougher road in the spirit of doing the right thing.

LATER THAT EVENING.....

Due respect to you by way of full disclosure my dear reader; My Doctor had prescribed codeine for sleep and I have indeed indulged. The 10mg Percocet's are still in the drawer. This might seem like splitting hairs to the uninitiated but to this old addict codeine is still going in the right direction. If I'm wrong, if I go the wrong way on this, I will not hide it from these pages.

WITHDRAWAL AND ON-GOING TREATMENT UPDATE...

JAN 25TH

Tapering off of Percocet's using small doses of codeine was a winner, especially since it took the edge off the pain to some degree. I've begun getting direct injections of ozone into my back and neck, about 20 in all each time that he shoots me up. The pain and stiffness there is due to the last cancer episode. Still it provides some relief. Diana provides daily massages to those areas in order to loosen them up and that is a massive relief. The doctor says that he wants me to continue treatment for another month, so that's where you'll find me until the end of Feb. 

An Emotional Eruption!

I made a promise to you that I would write this out with all of the honesty and willingness to self-disclose wherever and however the journey went and where it took me. At the time that I started this I felt as though I made that promise with the necessary consideration for whatever difficult things might show up, mostly medically, but no matter what kind of “stuff” might come about. Well, I hadn’t bargained for what I am about to share with you, but it is a big and legitimate part of this journey. What follows is some sharing of a very unexpected result of this “trip” that is extremely intimate, which I couldn’t have imagined putting out there since neither the subject matter nor the effect that it would have had ever come to my mind as a possibility. As I write this I imagine any reader thinking some version of “Well, damn, isn’t he supposed to be an allegedly fairly self-aware individual, not to mention a FREAKING THERAPIST, how could he not see this coming?” So, I will start there.

If you’ve read any of my stories so far you can probably understand how a guy, starting as a boy, might learn how to protect himself emotionally by effectively compartmentalizing his emotions in any variety of ways. Clearly some compartments I had developed were anger, acting out, violent, anti-social, and self-destructive, as only a partial list. I also learned to take my sadness and repress it to a degree that eventually my emotional callousness became such that, with the exception of maybe a half-dozen times in my life, I hadn’t cried since I was maybe 10 years old. I would add that probably none of those episodes were more than maybe a mild weep lasting less than a minute at most. So, that is to say that I had not had a real deep cathartic cry for over 50 years.

While I can easily understand how that fact alone can be saddening to read. I have navigated whatever misfortunes that have come my way by acknowledging them for what they are, in other words by not denying them, but more importantly to then place whatever was happening into the context of my life as a whole. By this I mean to look at the bigger picture of my life which sets whatever unfortunate thing I would be going through into my overall story of good fortune in too many ways to count, personal growth, redemption and most of all the notion of being on a spiritual journey and how that applies to whatever I’m going through at the time. To my way of thinking this is how to live the saying “I am not so much a human being having a spiritual experience, as I am a Spiritual being having a human experience”.

Of course I understand the implications of not crying for all of those years and when I started to “do my work” of my own therapy, perhaps hundreds of hours of it, among other things, I did explore this down to the nub. I knew how important and good for me that learning how to cry would be, but a real cry can’t be faked, eh? Eventually I felt that I had examined this issue, or “problem”, if you will, to the extent needed to be as good of a therapist as I could be. Hopefully I did a good job of being as emotionally available and emotionally detached at the same time as a good therapist can manage. Certainly I feel that I developed some genuine compassion and I doubt that my practice would have thrived without it.

As the years turned into decades without a good cry the fact of it was pushed so far into the background of my life as to be too remote for consideration on any level. The two conclusions I rested this matter on were; 1) After all of the close examinations I had done on this issue over the years the fact that I never even felt like crying, much less repressed any cries simply put the matter into a category of “Okay, I get it, I “should” cry for my own emotional good, but I can’t, so, leave it there.” And 2) I accepted what was probably a self-perpetuating barrier that couldn’t be overcome due to the very nature of it, which was that I imagined that if I started to cry at any point along the way then years of grief and sadness would erupt and I honestly didn’t think that would go well, and it might even result in some problems I couldn’t even predict. So this issue became a “let sleeping dogs lie” kind approach. Well, more to the point, since I probably didn’t think about it, or discuss it more than maybe once every five years perhaps it would be more like “I’m pretty sure those dogs are dead and not sleeping, so, move along”, kind of mindset.

Certainly a good cry would have been about a million times better for me than my self-destructive response that I shared at the beginning of this cancer story narrative, so there’s that. But, for me, the inability to cry is just that, a disability. Just to offer the following for emphasize, not to bum or shock, but the first time I can remember weeping even for a half minute I was around 40 years old having run over a sweet little puppy that I got for the family less than a few weeks previously. I was on the way to work, the puppy was shading behind one of my car wheels and it was a fucking horror show, since the poor thing didn’t die right away. I still went to work, but some hours into the day I told my supervisor that I couldn’t keep my mind on my work and what had happened and that I should go. I buried the dog which I had previously set out in the field before going to work. I played my flute over the burial and wept, or more like sniveled a few tears, and that was that. Still, after 30 years that was a lot!

Meanwhile during those years between 10 and 40 years old I watched my father die a slow tortuous cancer death at home and I remember that while it was a “bummer” and all, I was mostly trying to figure out how to get my hands on his end-of-life pain meds which he couldn’t take even by eye-dropper while he moaned his way out of this world for far too many days.  My mother also died from cancer during this period. The point being that plenty of events worthy of a healthy cry took place over such a broad time span.

In another time I might be concerned that I am making too big of a deal about this, since, as we know, it wasn’t that long ago, and to this day, in our culture, as well as plenty of other cultures, that men are denied by parents, culture, society and themselves to be able to cry for their entire lives. Of course that does nothing to change the facts that it was, and is, emotionally “unhealthy”, to put it succinctly and mildly, for any human being to repress crying since it is good for us in so many ways. With that caveat established as an almost throw-away acknowledgment, this is my narrative so onward I go:

Shifting to another fact established in these pages is that the greatest of all of my tragedies, by far, had been the absolute mind-boggling relationship I was in with Diana. Perhaps I will get more into the weeds about this later but allow me that the experience, knowledge, education, self-work and whatever else I may have going for me of over 20 years of helping others in their relationship that I am not naïve to the pitfalls that are inherent to pretty much any and all relationships in some ways or other.

I’m saying that this relationship is different and I can easily support that statement in plenty of ways. Allow that there are levels to this relationship of which the most significant were not even the practical matters such as living on two separate continents, not yet having put into practice our plans for building a life together. Plus, just to establish, “little things” like language barriers, cultural barriers, upbringing differences, age differences, she being 15 years younger, bringing with it differences you might not think of, like standards for communications where she grew up with technology and used it differently than I did and do. This is no small thing for a guy who, when I met her had texted nearly nobody at that point and thought that the caring thing for anyone to do is get back to you as soon as possible, regardless of format. So waiting for hours for a simple response when the app showed that she was on line all that time, for example, seemed very inconsiderate to me. Well, feeling like a partner is “inconsiderate” is one of many issues I would say that need to be dealt with and cleaned up in any relationship. Of course that isn’t how text works and so my misunderstanding of the proper “text etiquette” led to a plethora of other misunderstandings, which, to my relationship-problem-solving mind required attention and resolution.

I digressed like a mad dog on that text/technology issue, which was truly minor in the grand overview of the multitude of our challenges. Still, to be detailed somewhere, is that our greatest challenges were not even the practical ones except to the point that they did cause and/or overlap into very complicated and complex matters of understanding what this relationship was all about. Then, if that isn’t enough the whole thing bleeds heavily into the metaphysical realm. In the metaphysical domain I accept the vastness of what I don’t know, or understand. In the metaphysical domain I cease to have problem solving skills. Hell, for plenty of our challenges I couldn’t even figure out exactly what the problem was to solve.

This lasted for years while I knew, and she knew that we are supposed to be together. Again, this is not some kind of fairytale naiveté notion or claim but one based on countless hours of examination from two people with advance degrees in psychology as well as deep spiritual practices. Setting aside what “supposed” to be together even means it surely does not imply puppy dogs and rainbows, although there are plenty of those, but hard work and specifically work that is perhaps literally ego destroying. I would make an easy argument that by the very nature of it to grow spiritually requires some amount of ego diminishment, if nothing else.  

As part of my spiritual practice I repeated a more-or-less daily “prayer” where I had been asking Our Creator to help me transcend ego. Then I have been gifted Diana. For years we had been going through a lot of spats and even though we got married last November it was more of a strategy for avoiding covid travel restriction as it was anything. Some of these “spats” turned into full-on breakups where both of us came to the conclusion that whatever it was that we were supposed to accomplish in this lifetime for our spiritual journey was just going to have to wait until next lifetime because we couldn’t figure out how to do it in this human trip without causing each other more pain than we could stand. Last May somethings happened that made it “clear” that everything was fucked-up beyond any possibility of repair.

Again, in this narrative I have shared only some of how I reacted during that time. To say I imploded is probably a pretty good description, but I’m not sure it quite captures the vigor with which I was being self-destructive, while still not going for the quick and clean suicide. If you read between the lines of some of my stories in here you can see that “is my way”. Oh, and a good thing, as I would not have lived past my teens if I wasn’t so relatively passive about my self-destruction. In fact, as related to self-destruction,  I would not be a bit surprised if I invited this round of cancer back in to take care of business once and for all. But that gets ahead of the story. In any case I did what I could to make it impossible for her to contact me ever again and destroyed almost anything that would remind me of her as a kind of self-protection and she did the same thing. From there I aimed for the dirt and she aimed for a Higher understanding (God bless you woman, for now and forever!) and did some massive work, mostly through meditative strategies.

We reconnected around mid to late October. I have very bad recall for times and events of any sort so I could be off by a month, or even more. In any case we talked about the effects that the dissolution of our relationship had on each of us. In a manner of speaking and to whatever degree this idea applies we both died. It was clear to me right away that something radical had changed in her. We discussed the idea that maybe we should meet up sometime and see if the new me and the new her could get along. And to say “get along” the most I had even considered was to experience the love that was always there between us and to try to avoid messing that up with our differences for as long as we could manage doing that.

Meanwhile during my implosion I had reverted to a more gregarious time when I didn’t concern myself about hurting other people’s feelings and that was liberating in certain ways that I really liked, for whatever that was worth. I didn’t revert all the way back to the “Mike” character I had been, but it did allowed for some fun-time characteristics to find a way back. I couldn’t unlearn what becoming “Dakota” meant to me either, nor did I want to. So there became something of a synthesis, a combination of Dakota and Mike which were kind of working for me as I “saw my way out the door”, as it were.

I had gone back to allowing myself to lie so there was no more rigorous honesty, no more being impeccable with my word. In recovery there is a philosophical way of life that some people develop and maintain which is to live by “principals and not personality”. Surely some of the principals I had learned to live by became deeply engrained enough as to be a part of my character over 2 decades of recovery, but some clearly were optional. I even let her know that is what happened to me so that, if, someday, we did meet that she was “warned” that I was not to be trusted, just flat out.

For her part she sounded very good. In fact she sounded like a new person and much better for it. She had gained a better understanding of my experience and that made a lot of difference. For one thing she now saw how I felt like I was sometimes in a maze with no exit and how crazy-making that would be. She acknowledged that she occasionally put me there, wittingly or not. She apologized regularly, which was huge because there was no way that she used to apologize, which was one of the many issues I had a problem with. There could be a list of improvements in her character that I heard coming from her, and I was just floored by them, and by her. Unquestioningly hearing her own her part in our problems began to have an immediate healing effect on me. I have plenty of ownership that I am not trying to pass off but still these were gauze pads on gaping wounds, so, while the bleeding slowed some I was still in “critical condition”. Then I found out that I was literally in critical condition, of a sort, according to the U. of M. anyway, and that’s where the story gets good.

So I got a call from the oncology department of the U. of M. after having had a MRI scan for my heart in late October so I understood the implications of them trying to reach me. Still I had an Alaskan cruise planned for early September, so, too bad, I’m taking the cruise. When I returned there was a delay in the biopsy, blah, blah, blah a couple weeks later I get confirmation and they said that this time I have lung cancer and it is not going away but with the right treatments of chemo I can extend my life a couple of years. Not interested. I shared the news with Diana and she basically told me to get my ass to her so that she can help me through the Gerson cancer protocol. “Well, since “I’m heading out the door” why not visit the love of my life and hang out in Italy for as long as we get along? That might be nice. And if I want to go do hazardously life-threatening things like low-level skydive parachute openings, which, yes, I have done, and no, there is not a better thrill to be had as far as I know, then I’ll go do those kinds of things. Meanwhile, lemme go see D.”

What I found when I got here was literally unbelievable. Her evolution, transformation, call it what you will, was something I, the seasoned psychotherapist, had not witnessed in anyone, anytime, anywhere close to what had happened with her. I’ll set aside any attempts at using words to describe it because the important thing, and I’m saying “important” beyond compare to anything I could imagine being more important is that it allowed us to see each other in a way that we couldn’t before. This is too intimate to share and probably doesn’t lend itself to words anyway, so I will attempt to describe it by way of the effect that it had on me.

First off, taking one step back, to say that we were both sure that we could never reunite on the physical plane and be in a healthy marriage is a massive understatement. Fast-forwarding through the intimate details, mostly on the spiritual domain by the way, what has occurred falls into the category of miraculous without hyperbole. On every level things have transformed. To my mind, as I’m living the following truth there is no greater testimony to the power of this change than to say that it changed my thinking from how am I going to die to how am I going to live? I doubt that anyone who has not been in a situation where they are driven headlong into their own demise to have it turned around like this would fully understand how powerful that is.

So now to where the rubber hits the road; With this transformation in us has come many different noteworthy changes for me, not the least of which is that I have probably cried some 20 times in some form or fashion during this time. The reason I started writing this yesterday was because we were watching a movie called “Life Itself” which is about lost love and grief and familial influences over generations and I cried so hard the first half that I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the end. Then at the end we were both crying together and it was powerful as all hell.

So as it turns out I do feel the catharsis of a decent cry, although an all-out uncontrolled bawling has not yet occurred. The “loss of control” kind of crying has lasted perhaps two minutes maximum, but still, having gone from not crying except for maybe 6 times in 40 years to 20 times in a couple of months is a pretty radical change. However I have to admit that I don’t like too much how easy it is for me to cry now, which is still not much at all. The crack has become a bit of a gap and I am just now trying to figure out what I think about all of it. If the “big one” hits perhaps I’ll let you know. 

What’s Up With That?

This entry is intended to help anyone who might find themselves, or someone they care about, in the unusual and extraordinary state of lethargy due to serious physical, or mental decline. The closest comparison that I would think that most people would have is a serious flu, but I’ve had the flu and while there is a desire to lie in bed it is still a bit of a different animal than what I am talking about here.

The point is that while I have by typical stream-of-verbose-preface leading up to it there is good and practical advice to be had at the end. So, if you don’t care to wade through the little bit of story about how I came to thinking this was a good idea, then, off to the end you go!

It has been a tough day for me regarding the standard daily pain and fatigue. What made it worse is that I had been dealing with a low-level migraine lasting the last 24 hours and as an extra-added bonus woke up with bowel trouble that wasn’t minor.

Then, later in the today I had a particularly intense regime of treatment where they dripped somewhat more of whatever they put in me. These drips usually last an hour and I was in there at least 1.5 hours. This all came before I dealt with the approximate 20 injections at the end of it. Still this is not nearly as bad as daily radiation for 7 weeks, and chemotherapy, but still, not something you would hope for.

I’m not even trying to snivel here when I say that it has been a particularly hard day, because there are plenty of hard days and the “easy” days are hard, just less so, and that’s just the way it is. Plus, since I have established that the Percocet’s are counter therapeutic to the cancer treatment, and that I am actively not taking this, it becomes an effort to keep my pain-avoidant paws off of those as well. 

I found myself coming home right after treatment, eating lunch and taking a nap, even though I had only been awake 6 hours off of a good 10 hours of sleep. I got up and ate a little and I jumped back into the bed. I was laying there thinking about not much and my mind drifted back to those months in bed after the cancer treatment in 2019.

I’ve written that my radiation oncologist in 2019 told me on several occasions that she had given me the most potent radiation that she has delivered to anyone, ever. For those who don’t know I had tongue cancer and due to the size and advanced state of that cancer she had to be very aggressive with the radiation.

Just as an aside the radiation type itself was “proton” radiation, which is a technology and treatment so new and powerful that there are still only a handful of places that have these machines which are massive. For example some are as large as 3 stories high and 100 yards long. I was at the Mayo Clinic receiving my treatment. The point being that the treatment nearly killed me and that isn’t an exaggeration. I spent months in bed, sleeping up to 16 hours a day and sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep I would just lay there. I spend months thinking about things and sometimes just staring at the wall not thinking about anything at all, just zoned out for hours.

As I have written previously I eventually started to plan in my mind how I would kill myself and how to dispose of my body so that nobody was going to have to deal with that as a problem. But in order to pull off that plan I had to be able to get out of the house and into the wilderness to “drop off the package”. I also needed to go see my beloved Diana one last time, just because, I had to.

So what this comes down to is that I had to improve enough to get to a point of traveling so that I could kill myself due to being sick and tired of being sick and tired. I thought then and I think now that I had come to a rational decision to end my life based on what felt like an unending slow decline with little energy left anyway and nothing to compel me forward even if I could find a way to turn it around.

So anyway during those months of, let’s say, 15% life-force if I managed to drag myself out of the bed for some hours that would be a good day. If I found myself walking into my bedroom for any reason there was a pull towards the bed that I have never experienced before, no matter how sick I was in my life, which was plenty. It is difficult to sort this truth out so I can’t explain it to the reader sufficiently but maybe if you hadn’t eaten for a day and there was your favorite food and you had to choose to not eat it. What I’m talking about is being bound to the bed like a lover you are desperately dependent to.

Anyway my reason for even sharing this is that, as it has started to happen to me again this time, now, I caught myself and know that this can be a downward spiral. So I wanted to help anyone out there who might, as a result of their own serious disease, including mental health, find themselves falling into this trap that I will specify further in a moment and how to avoid the trap.

The trap being that the more that we are seduced by inactivity and the calling of the siren song of the bed due to illness the more we need to do the complete opposite. It is a plenty weird thing to have this feature as part of our humanity because it is contrary to life, so why would we have it?  Perhaps it’s a “culling of the heard” kind of thing so that the week get gone and the species is stronger for it? In any case I think humanities numbers are pretty secure and so let’s bring it down to the individual level.

Sure, getting and staying rested is important to the healing, but clearly too much rest will not pull us out of the spiral down of an unhealthy amount of time in bed. What is needed by the body, mind and spirit is to get out into the fresh air and sunshine and move. This is not opinion but is supported by endless research into the topic of what will energize and heal us. Even if you are not suffering from anything and want to get more energy, or even just want to start your day off better, the first thing you want to know is that getting outside, under direct sunlight, even if it is cloudy out, activates photoreceptors in our eyes that releases norepinephrine, also called noradrenaline, which is basically adrenaline in the brain, causing us to want to be more active. If you get up before the sun you would want to turn on as many overhead lights as possible. Having the lights overhead matters.

Also there are breathing exercises a person can do that are also known to active the brain in this way. Specifically and most simply taking 25 to 30 deep breaths, not necessarily lung capacity deep, but deeper than usual, inhaling through the nose and exhaling through the mouth, then holding the exhale for around 30 seconds, times two or three, will give you noticeable energy for an extended period of time. A cold shower for a couple minutes does this as well. What you eat and when you eat it matters, obviously. What isn’t so obvious is, for example the consumption of carbs because it depends on what kind of carbs you eat and what you do soon afterwards, like, do you exercise or sit on your ass for the next two hours? And while most of this can be a “one size fits all” kind of thing food and your metabolism might factor into it. But there is simply endless good and valuable information available.

The bottom line here is that, while anyone can benefit from this information I am in particular talking to anyone who might find themselves in the unenviable position of being seduced by the temptation of crawling back into bed for what might turn out to be eternity if we don’t push ourselves to move. I have spent literally hundreds of hours in that downward spiral and I hope that it doesn’t repeat now so I’m pushing myself forward. For most of that down-time the seduction clouded any awareness of these facts described above and all I could ever think about was succumbing to the call back to bed. Maybe if I had this information in the forefront of my mind, or perhaps if I had someone to remind me of it maybe I would have done differently. Maybe if I had pushed myself then I wouldn’t have spent months suffering immobility and lethargy. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference but now, as I am hearing the “siren song” of the bed calling out to me far too much I recognize it and am going to do something about it.   

Great Day….Relatively Speaking.

Tomorrow is a big day for a variety of reasons the most important being that I get my next MRI scan to compare what’s happening in my lungs to the MRI done a couple months ago. Today the doctor who I have now paid somewhere in the neighborhood of 20K dollars gave me a little talk in broken English and with no translator available saying basically that if the scan shows little to no improvement not to take that at face value because, ….well, the rest sounded like so much bullshit to me. The thing is that he doesn’t really need to cushion the results because there is a part of me that wasn’t all that convinced of the efficacy, or value of the treatment in the first place so it’s all good. Sure I care and want to live longer in relative health, but I’m also very accepting of whatever comes my way.

Meanwhile I have come across four people in the last couple of days, each of whom have said how great I look by comparison to seeing me since a couple of months ago. Perhaps I should offer a photo, but for now want to get this posted. Most importantly to me is how mind-blowingly wonderful all of this has been in a variety of different ways. Setting aside my relationship stuff which is very personal, I understand that, but it is tied inexorably to this story, and is also the catalyst and main motivator to the massive growth that has occurred for me these past 4 months. Anyone who knows me, knows my story, or has read any of my story so far in the blog, knows that I have had a shit-ton of transformations in my life. Yet this has been the most transformative over the shortest period of any time in my life by far. Not only that but it has also truly been the happiest time in my life. Yes, even though I’d say that my life-force energy is at maybe 60% of optimal health, and I’ve been a human pin cushion, I’ve had the restrictive diet, daily cleanses, etc… and blah, blah, blah….still, by far, this has been the happiest four months in my life. Personal growth is my highest aspiration and Diana is my greatest joy and both experiences are have been simply off the charts.

In addition there are these residual goodies that aren’t lost on me such as it was so sunny and warm today that I actually had to cover my head while sitting outside with a sleeveless T-shirt. This matters not only as an obvious joy and contrast to Minnesota winters, but because I had put it in my mind since last year that I just could not spend another winter there. So when the diagnosis came down, not knowing how long yet I had to live, with the first prognosis being six months unless I get chemo, I started to wonder if my last winter on the planet was doomed to be in MN, given insurance and whatever else might factor into my needs in case I was actually dying. I digress, (yeah Dakota, what’s new?) there is a very large, beautiful, snow-capped mountain range just to our North for daily majesty. Being a fan of older architecture I get off on just driving along and seeing houses, churches, building, narrow streets from generations past that I get off on. I am in a state of joy that sometimes bleeds into bliss on a daily basis and even moment to moment basis, and that does not suck!

Except occasionally for the orbs. Someday I will have to talk to you about the orbs perhaps.

I’ll let you know what comes from the scans.

Good News!

In case you don’t remember I had a MIR contrast scan in December where they said that the tumors looked like they had stopped growing and we did another one Wednesday night and it seems that the cancer is still arrested. There is some question as to whether some of what shows up in the MRI is scar tissue but the recommendation is to continue with the treatment, with the doctor saying to do 3 months more and get a PET scan in another month to see what is scar tissue and if, by some miracle the cancer has been resolved. Unfortunately I am still feeling like I have cancer and I’m sure that the treatment has an effect. Still I’m pushing myself to lift minor weights, do sit-ups and sometimes pushups daily, along with other efforts at physical therapy. This is great news, however the treatment is very expensive and I hate to bring up finances to the general public, but I did say that I’d be honest and transparent so I’m thinking that I might have to go back to the gofundme page and see if I can scrounge up some help. I am also thinking about firing up my youtube channel Mental Health Free for All offering whatever good advice I can on a multitude of issues and perhaps offering what I have written in the blog website to see if I can do the world some good for free to the listener and to monetize that in some kind of way as I need to figure ways to make money after having closed down the business expecting to not be around much longer. So, it’s very exciting to be considering a next chapter of life and seeing where it will take me. 

GOFUNDME page.

As I said I have created the gofundme page and here is the link; https://gofund.me/a60f5d64

NEXT STEP:

The following isn’t earth shattering news but I did say I’d keep readers abreast of my movements and progress wherever it took me. Since I got the news that the cancer has stopped growing it makes sense now to go back to MN in order to take care of loose ends that I left hanging because the assumption when I left was I was probably not going to do the regular, somewhat tedious things of life, like taxes….grrrrr…… and plenty of other things that didn’t concern me at all given the probable outcome in my mind need to be taken care of. Then I will be returning in a couple of weeks to continue treatment. 

Not So Good News!

I’ve been in MN for 6 days and I started my time here by being wiped out the first two days due to jet lag, or so I figured. But as the days went on I continued to be extra tired and, of course, I’m dealing with the ever-present accompanied pain. I chalked that up to the fact that I was no longer under the care of my wonderful wife and the treatment that I was getting, so that most definitely had, and has, an acute effect on my well-being.

Today I went to the MN oncologist and I watched as she compared the scans from December to February and as she dragged the measuring device of the computer over those two scans it was clear that there was growth in several of the tumors. The good news is that she did say that the growth has slowed some by comparison to what she had expected. The bad news will be given the following preface; I had to pry this out of her by assuring her that I understood that these things are unpredictable on a variety of levels and that plenty of things can happen to shorten, or prolong, any prognosis. With that said her estimate was eight months to a year before death. I asked her what I might expect as this progressed and she said that an inability to get anything resembling exercise, for example even walks, and a loss of appetite would be indicators that the end is near. I am still moving around without gasping for air, unless dealing with more than one flight of stairs and needing to carry things up them. Even then I don’t gasp, although I most defiantly pant more than is “normal”. Then, even though I thought that I had lost some weight due to healthier eating and daily exercise I’ve actually put on a few pounds. That might be because of my recent craving for Italian pastries. Even that might be a case of “forbidden fruit” since Diana wants me to avoid those sugary treats as much as possible. The bottom line is that my appetite is good and the last time that I had none, which was March of 2020 as I was closing in on ending my life from that horror show, Diana basically force-fed me back to life, so, she’s pretty good about that kind of thing. However, and I wish that I didn’t know she was going to read this, but she knows I’m not going to suffer into a slow death, so, there’s that.

But now is for life, love and as much wellness as I can manage. I am far beyond letting this news bother me in any sort of way. Diana helped me to get at least more two years out of my life since March 2020. Plus, as I’ve been saying, since it is absolutely the truth, the last four months has been the best of my life and if I can get “only” eight months to a year more of this then that will be delightful. Perhaps we can get more from this old boy. One thing is for sure and that is that Diana (or God, through her, if you prefer) has been able to manifest more than one miracle in my life so all things are possible as far as that’s concerned.

So then, I have whatever business that I have to take care of while I’m here and I can’t wait to get back to her. I’m even looking forward to the treatment for the benefit it provides to me, if nothing else for how I feel day to day. I am not trying to second guess any of it, but the fact that the doctors there said that there was no difference in the growth of the tumors and there clearly was growth clearly doesn’t inspire confidence in them. Still, if it all improves my health on a day-to-day basis then I continue to be on board with it. So, with that said, I just can’t wait to get back! For now, I’m hungry, so, off I go.

The Effects of Creeping Cancer-Or, If My Ass wasn’t Attached I’d Probably Lose It.

Dedicated to Dylan with appreciation for that gift and, as always, Diana for all you do for me my love.

It’s probably fairly obvious by now to anyone who has been reading this so far that I have had an increase of pain and fatigue left over from my tongue cancer treatment, which is now exacerbated by this cancer episode. It’s creeping along noticeably, but still not even close to intolerable. The pain meds help but I’m restricted taking them some because it seems that cancer allegedly likes opioids according to some research. It’s a hell of a tradeoff and sure to come to a head if this doesn’t go away. To make that challenge extra fun the pain meds cause me to be a little bit more tired when I’m already operating at a deficit in that area.

But where the fun really takes off is when dealing with issues like memory, coordination and the general irritation that often times raises to the level of anger. It is a great irony that I need to use all of those tools that I used to teach as an expert in the field of anger management. All of that had become second nature and automatic for me these past two decades, however everyday irritations are coming at me with such frequency these days that it’s hard keep my “water bottle from overflowing”. What a great irony that is, eh?

So when it comes to memory I suppose that speaks for itself. I guess that is probably as a result of my brain not getting all of the oxygen that it used to get, or should be getting. I will include a diminishing awareness of my surroundings which can be fit into this category as well. On example is that an item can be sitting out in plain view and it takes an unusual amount of time for me to spot it. Admittedly I’m not the tidiest person ever, but still there is a noticeable difference from before when I was still not the tidiest person ever. However it might be worth adding to the mix that I am a man who spent the majority of his life on motorcycles making me hyper-aware of my surroundings, if admittedly somewhat selective in that regard. All of that would take up too much time to detail in writing and not worth the readers time, nor probably the readers interest.

I will offer the following example that literally happened between the end of that paragraph and the start of this one. Unfortunately I’d say that the following is not so unusual these days, although absolutely magnificent in timing given that it actually happened in this time period between paragraphs.  So, now I wear hearing aids due to the radiation to my head causing loss in my left ear and a benign tumor in the auditory cortex of my brain causing loss in my right ear. As I will write later there seems to be an increase in general snafus as well and so my right hearing aid went out and I had to go somewhere just now to get it checked out. When I finished that last sentence I went to look for the address I had written down on a piece of paper that I had seen only maybe a half-hour before that morning and I had not left the room so it had to be here somewhere. Naturally I couldn’t find it for some time. I had to find humor in it given that I had been writing just moments before about memory loss. But because this is happening many times a day I still find myself having to stifle my anger. Finding it I went out to get into the car only to realize I left my water bottle behind. This might not seem like much unless you know about the fried saliva glans due to a radiated mouth since 2019, not to mention Diana pushing me constantly to drink 3 liters of water a day, so I carry water bottles all day every day. Then, bleeding into the “dumbass” category, but still kind of in the forgetful-ish category, while at the hearing aid place I needed to use their bathroom and I set my coat in the sink, not “remembering” that the water would turn on automatically. Not too long after that I was driving along having just left a doctor appointment with whatever array of items in the passenger seat next to me, needing to use my phone to get directions immediately, because I had messed up on where I needed to go, which is unfortunately a part of this nasty current circumstance far too often. Setting that aside I didn’t have an internet connection, which, again, is far too typical and as I have said somewhere before I might need to share the story of my orbs…which, I know, I know.. anyway, not now… so I threw my phone down in the passenger seat and drove along. Maybe ten minutes later I got to where I was going and was hoping to connect to the internet and went to get my phone out of my coat pocket only to not find it there. I thought that maybe I left it at the doctors, or it slid out of my sweat pants, or, who knows what because even with a quick glance at the passenger seat I saw only some papers were covering the phone. Any “normal” time I would have probably remembered throwing it there and moved the papers, but since this misplacing and losing things is so common I frantically checked all of my pockets twice, looked around the car everywhere but on the seat, until I eventually located it.

I’ve lost or misplaced so many things in the past few months that I’ll tell you that when I’m at home I end up going through the trash, or, let’s say, the refrigerator, just for example. I think we’ve all been through that state of mind where we think we’ve checked everywhere and think “where the hell could that thing possibly be” and start looking in completely unlikely places. When I am not at home I will tell you that I have been under more car seats in the past few months than probably the previous 5 years combined. So now it’s just that the frequency is in the territory of the bizarre and sometime I just need to content with that.

Most of you know that I’m committed to honesty and Diana, who reads everything that I write in this blog, will attest to the fact that these types of things are happening with absurd frequency. To her credit she endures it all with good humor and tolerance for her dopey husband. I mentioned a lack of coordination and this has had the effect of me looking like I’m probably drunk sometimes. The ground regularly reaches up to grab my feet. As I’m here in MN for these two weeks I have been waiting to land on my ass due to walking on ice and snow, but I have so far managed to remain upright, so there’s that. But you get the picture.

So then, I’m forgetting things, I’m fatigued, I’m in pain, I’m uncoordinated, I’m irritated, unfocused, and my I Q has probably dipped 10 to 20 points. Oh, and according to the MN oncologist I have about 8 months to a year before I hit my expiration date. Given all of this I do have to work all of the strategies of the anger management/anger reduction that I was so good at in order to not fly off the handle most of the time. With all of that said when I’m with Diana in Italy it is still the best time of my life.

God, I can’t wait to get back!

There’s Good News and Bad News

The bad news was that when I returned to Italy Diana was stricken in the early to mid-stages of Covid. Of course having a respiratory disease as well as a compromised immune system as I do it was probably not even smart of me to walk with her a for even a few blocks at least 6 ft apart. “Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mamma.” My first week back here consisted of mostly going on short walks on my own. I also spent time writing the army story that is posted in the blog.  Without Diana I only did a very half-assed protocol. She did a home test which showed negative towards the end of the week and tested negative “officially” on Sunday, which is now 3 days ago. We had a lovely drive into the mountains on Monday and then Monday night she told me that she got word that some energetic healer from Mexico that she has been interested in getting me to for some time. She was very excited to find out that he was going to be available to see me on the next day.

The guy’s name is Hector Galicia and apparently he has been in contact with “the brothers”, which are beings from the Andromeda star system, since he was 7 years old. They have taught him and still guide him in his work. Gotta love having some outside help, I guess. We went to this beautiful town a couple hours away called Lucca, which was one of these places where the city is encircled by a 50 ft high wall and the streets are about as wide as two people holding outstretched arms from side to the other, bordered by very old apartments, stores, cafes and whatnot. A quick search put the origins of the place back 2000 years with different iterations over time. It was extremely cool and worth the trip to me for that alone.

We arrived on time and proceeded to sit there for maybe a half hour to an hour more, because, well, Italy. When I entered Hector’s office with Diana as the translator she described what was going on with me physically. She was asked to leave and Hector had me take off my shirt and lay down on a massage table at which point things got plenty weird. Hector was digging into my back with what was probably his fingernail, or maybe more than one, creating patterns. The designs he was making seemed too complicated for one finger, the patters kind of made sense, even though I had no idea what they really were, and the movements were incredibly fast. Here I want to emphasize that I’m not just using the word “incredibly” to mean “very”, but to say that to my mind they defied credibility. While he was doing this he sounded like he had a Darth Vader mask on. Diana and her friend Ago said the same thing, but that their experiences weren’t as painful. When I was done I had Diana take a picture and it looked like I pissed off a cat while it was lying on my back.

When I was done they, he and his assistant, had me sit up and asked how I felt. I told them that I felt pretty much like when I came in the room, only with a scratched back. Ago was next to go and when he came out he told me that he needed a little time to “come back to his body”. Diana came out reporting that she had a great experience which included sensing entities in the room. She also reported a large boost of energy. In fact she was wonderfully playful beyond her typical wonderful playful self for many hours afterwards.

So I suppose I would place the Hector trip as positive for them and natural for me. But the good news, while I bit confusing and contradictory, has to do with the Italian doctors assessment of the MN oncologists assessment of the scans. He is convinced that the treatment is going fine and that there will be a positive outcome, especially given an additional two months of this treatment. Meanwhile I’m still able to move around freely with the same fatigue and pain that I’ve had for probably some months, but perhaps incidentally worse. But that could be accounted for by being in MN for a couple weeks followed by no treatment because of Diana’s illness.

Anyway I’m back on track with the protocol and happy to be “home”.

Getting High at the Lake

Yesterday, the day after Easter as the crow flies, I went para-gliding over Lake Garda. OH-MY-F-ING-GOD was it spectacular for a variety of reasons. It was a 20 minute flight and for a guy who loves to fly without an engine in (count 50 skydiving free-falls, one tandem hang-glide and a glider plane ride) it was fantastic. Even if we flew over an industrial area it would have been pretty cool, but the view! Attached is basically the view I had coming down.Aside from a grueling drive about which there is more to come we met the pilots down on the beach and then we all drove up hill for a 40 minute drive in a 4x4 up an incredible incline and I use the word “incredible” closer to the real meaning of the word, as in “not credible” and not the colloquial use of the word. There was also no real road to speak of and for the 40 minute drive up to the launch site it was like being in a blender the whole time. And keep in mind for the sake of the story that yours truly is in constant pain all day every day as it is, so there’s that extra little bit-o-fun that I had to contend with.

Aside from needing to pee, but knowing I could hold on until we got to wherever we were going within 40 minutes from the time we left, it was endurable. When we got to where the jeep dropped us off I stepped aside in what seemed like the last spot on earth that anyone (all males) would object to me taking a pee and the guy said “not here”. Wait! What? Instead he handed my cancerous, out of shape, just been through a 40 minute blender, ass , his paragliding gear, suggesting by this that I am to carry his shit uphill the rest of the way, however far that might be. If you can picture a skydiving parachute, then double it, more, or less, that would be the size of a paragliding canopy. Fortunately my younger friend Agostino was with me and I was able to pass this stuff off to him and we only walked a few minutes anyway.

So, after I took care of business I got geared up and off we went. I had been looking outwards towards the beautiful vista of the lake upon takeoff and I hadn’t noticed that we had gone straight up maybe 100 yards in the space of 20 seconds until the pilot pointed out that fact by showing me where my friend was waiting to take off. From there the pilot kept on checking in with me to make sure I was okay and I told him that I have had something like 50 skydiving freefalls and I thought that not only was it great, I told him to go crazy, which he did. We were corkscrewing down to where our feet were pretty much parallel to the canopy and then back and forth like that. Then I took a longshot at asking him if I could control the toggles of the canopy and go crazy myself, seeing as how I have hours under solo canopy myself and he did…and I did.

The downside was that the day after Easter is a big holiday here in Italy and the whole world seemed to be at Lake Garda. A drive that would typically take maybe an hour took over twice that each way. This played havoc on my body, especially with the 40 minute blender-ride in-between the going and coming.

But that “price” was worth paying in balance and it was really a wonderful experience.

PET Scan Yesterday

I got a PET scan yesterday and the results are that the tumor is still chugging along. Diana downplays it by calling it “active” and it seems to be growing slowly enough to be within a “margin of error”, but I see that as blind optimism. The folks taking the scan recommend the typical radiation and chemo approach but Diana is pushing for more of the same treatment I’ve been getting.

Meanwhile I just moved into the next Air B&B and it’s springtime in Italy and I have just purchased a spiffy little Honda Shadow so hanging here in Italy for at least another month getting the treatment I’ve been getting doesn’t sound horrible, given the residuals of being here and riding the Italian countryside, which, most def, does not suck. So that seems like an okay deal.

I have to admit that there is this notion creeping into my brain that looks at how fast computer knowledge is progressing and that maybe if chemo extends my life a couple of years then maybe within that couple of years they find a cure where there is not one now, perhaps that life-extension strategy is a good idea. That is something to ponder anyway.

For now I just wanted to get a quick post in since some of you good folks were asking how it went and I said I would, so, for now, there you have it. 

PET SCAN REDUX

When I last posted the info that blogged it was prior to the analysis provided by the oncologist who is providing the blood infusion part of the protocol. Having looked more closely at the PET scan he is still optimistic but he is also referring me to a “radiologist” type doctor who is going to do some low level treatment that they assure me is different than regular radiation in a variety of ways. One is that it is so low level that I probably won’t react to it in any way, except perhaps more fatigue than now, which is plenty of fatigue, but, oh well. This radiation is more directly targeted to the site as well. So, where I went through 7 weeks of daily 1 to 2 hours of radiation during the tongue cancer at The Mayo Clinic, I am likely to go through maybe 4 to 6 hours total on this one. The problem is that one doctor says to do it now while another says wait a month and the only “do it now” treatment is in Rome, which is a hell of an expense, tapping into various conundrums regarding finances incurred both on the life and death side of things.

My current oncologist is also going to increase and manipulate what have been infusions of vitamins, antioxidants and an ozone/oxygen mixture. Some folks have negative reactions to the increases and the reactions are best comparted to allergic reactions so he is asking that we go to his other office in Rome where he has quick access to what he needs in the event that I have a negative reaction. This is going to require a four day stay in Rome and, again, this does not sound like it sucks to me, aside from the cost.

Meanwhile we have moved into another Air B&B but unfortunately this one is a 45 to 60 minute drive to treatment and even with the whole “riding-in-the-Italian-countryside-does-not-sucks” thing going on the pain that I have to endure, be it on motorcycle or driving a car for anything more than a half hour does, in fact, suck. Still, there are worse things in life and worse ways to spend ones last days, if that’s how it goes, in love, in Italy, with a bike, in the spring/summer. So, I’m choosing that perspective when I can. 

A Monster of Miscellany

There have been plenty of things occurring over the period of the last couple of months that are perhaps noteworthy of sharing. These things have gone unwritten so let me start with the reason for that as a preface for rolling into the deets.

During a blog post a few months ago I shared the fact that when I had cancer the last time that the energy and motivation to even get out of bed for some months was a challenge and that the way to counteract the pull of lethargy was to force self to move. The advice of not succumbing to that pull, which is, in my opinion, death itself calling out, was, and is, recommended for physical, as well as psychological, wellness.

For me the difficulty has been compounded since I never really came back from the tongue cancer radiation treatment and so there has been a lurking sense of inevitability, that no matter what I do, that this time the cancer is going to win. I have been feeling that it is not just painful and irritating, but pointless to push myself to do all that I need to do to come back from this. To be clear I don’t always think this way, but it comes and goes as my overriding feeling.

The doctors here are saying that basically not only should I live another 20 years, but that I somehow shouldn’t be in all of this pain and fatigue that I’m in and that it is exacerbated by my emotions. Whatever! Meanwhile the oncologists in the states have said months ago that I have eight months to a year to be drawing breath and it’s a very positive sign that I am still able to go for walks and get exercise. My body is siding with the U.S. doctors and, of course, my hopes and Spirit is with these doctors.

Meanwhile I have had enough push in me to continue with the protocol for the most part. As I wrote before I am taking a trip four times a week to treatment. The distance is now doubled so that taxes my body, but the weather is nice and the bike is repaired so, while painful, it is still fantastico to be tooling around Italy in the spring on a decent scooter.

These past six months there have been logistical challenges regarding things like getting the meals, which are very specific to the protocol, getting regular exercise and walks in, daily meditations and trying to enjoy life where I can. It is one of those weird circumstances that feels like I have no time to write even though I really have plenty of time. Also getting into and falling out of the rhythm of a new place to live every month by way of moving into new Air B&B’s is a little taxing.

But, for now, I’ve turned a corner on the problem and have decided to push through the lethargy, pain, pessimism (some might argue reality) and reembrace life by ignoring the presumption of the inevitability that the cancer will win this round. One thing that has helped me to shift was talking it out with to Diana, admitting that there is a part of me, sometimes the overriding part of me that just wants to be done with this journey of my life. I told her that most of the time I have a thought in the back of my mind that any and all effort was, is, and will be, wasted due to the inevitability ahead of me.

It’s hard to explain that I don’t find this to be defeatist as much as acceptance. I doubt that anyone who knows anything about me would say that I back down from any fights and challenges no matter what the obstacles. It isn’t so much a depression either, as I have been clinically depressed as a younger man and I know the difference. However there is most defiantly an element of sadness that runs through it, becoming more, or less, pronounced given circumstances, mood, pain, fatigue and other variables that pop up as life unfolds. Besides, sometimes sadness is the appropriate response to ones circumstances. Whaddya know? The counterbalance to feeling that is that this is also the best time of my life in so many ways and in some moments and some days I feel so incredibly fortunate it blows my mind. .

So I have decided to start writing in more detail those things that have been happening, especially the things that are germane to the journey.  A theme here is taking trips, as you will see. The first trip that I want to start sharing might surprise some of you so a preface is in order.

Telling the Tale of Trips

I may have written about my intention of getting to Costa Rica, when this cancer is resolved to work at a treatment center that specializes in the cutting edge science of accessing the medicinal value of hallucinogens for all kinds of mental health issues. Not a lot of people know that one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, also known as Bill W. had advocated the use of LSD for people in recovery. This, as well as other hallucinogenic substances are not intended as on-going therapies, which is one reason that big pharma influenced squashing research back in the 60’s. There are other reasons but it is a real shame on our government, which influenced governments worldwide, to stop research and ban the use of these compounds. It should be mentioned that many of these compounds have been used for healing for as long as recorded history.   

Fortunately good sense has finally broken through that idiotic and, frankly, evil barrier and research conducted under strict, rigorous, and controlled scientific method had resumed some years ago and soon (my guess is within five to ten years) there will be license psychedelic therapists around the world, including the U.S., as there are now in Costa Rica. I hope to be one of them since I know, not just through my own academic research, but through my own experimentation, the great value of these compounds.

It might help those who think of this as “taking drugs” to know that it isn’t not just “the same” as drinking coffee, or taking aspirin, meaning “not that bad”, but these are serious and helpful substances that many millions know to be sacred and to be revered. Sure people can, and will use them as “party” drugs, however taken seriously they are most definitely not a “party”.

One reason that a person can experience lasting changes after one episode using these compounds is because a person comes to have a known, first hand encounter that, for the uninitiated is next to impossible to explain, but is very real. And if, say for example, an addict is having a known experience of their family being torn apart, which, up to that point in their lives has only been words and concepts, well, that can, and does, change lives. In fact many noted researchers and scholars in the field of addiction say that not even AA is more effective than one therapeutic dose of LSD. And for opioid users a substance called Ibogaine is more effective than anything known. These compounds and others are having fantastic results for a wide variety of mental health disorders and the information is readily available if one cares to do the research.

I have personally benefitted from using a variety of these substances over the years, maybe 20 times total, and have learned a lot about myself and Spirit. An interesting thing about using these substances is that they are completely non-addictive, as one might assume since they typically have the opposite effect. But one learns to use them judiciously as a seeker of insight, guidance, perhaps even wisdom and more. Still I don’t even really look forward to using them until and unless it is important to do so and things are “right” at the time. There is a standard by which a person should optimally use these medicines called “set and setting”, which means to have the right mindset and to have an environment that is conducive to the process.

I had returned to Italy a few months ago with a couple hits of LSD and it took several weeks before the time was right to take some. It is a good idea when entering into these episodes to set ones intention and so I did, which was nothing special but simply to see if I could learn from this cancer and how to chart my path forward. One thing that came from it was a clear indication of what I need to be doing that I wasn’t doing and to stop doing that I was. So at that time I had a renewed “umph” towards doing what the guidance (which, in this case was simply good sense) pushed me towards but at this point for me this effort is very much a case of “two steps forward, one step back”. Fortunately I’m back to pushing myself in a positive direction and I hope to remain this way.

At the time I was considering whether to share this post just as I was walking past this sign set in the doorway of a pharmacy. Of course it has nothing to do with LSD but to read “Repair Rapid Acid” just as I was considering sharing this story I knew I had to at least take the photo.

The next trip is to…

The Andromeda Connection.

Somewhere along the way I think that I have written about Hector, the Mexican, living in Italy, who claims to have the healing connection from the Andromeda star system. My willingness to go along with this falls into the category of, “what don’t I know” with a large dose of “happy wife happy life.”

My happy wife had asked me if I would be willing for the second time to go see Hector the healer, he of lighting fast hands, Darth Vader breathing sounds, and teachers in the Andromeda star system. By some “miracle”  he had an opening and for a low-low price of 120 Euros for a half hour or so I could be fortunate enough to get his services. Diana and friend Agostino reported great benefits from our trip to Florence for the first session and encouraged me with her powerful way to go again. For me that first trip I found to be a mostly interesting waste of time and money. She managed to persuade me to go. It wasn’t until I committed to it that I found out that it was in Naples this time. Naples man!

So we flew out in the morning and had a really wonderful time that day walking the beach and just seeing this very old and very cool city for some hours. It turns out that Hector has taught his wife whatever it is that the Andromeda connection taught him, Darth Vader sounds and all. I didn’t realize that she was going to do the treatment and was bothered by that fact until I changed my perspective and allowed that if Hector gave me nothing and his wife gave me nothing then what have a lost? Nothing! The treatment didn’t seem to do any good, but there are always those convenient caveats about how one needs to believe it’s going to do some good for it to do some good. Can you say “placebo effect”? Anyway being in Naples didn’t suck, even though the train ride back did a little. Still, if anyone would have asked me at any point in my life if I’d like to be on a train coming back from Naples with the love of my life under any circumstances I’m pretty sure I’d sign up for that.    And by no means am I sorry we went.

A Pleasant Ride

Ever since starting this cancer cure trip to Italy one of the biggest irritants has been moving to a new Air B&B every month. Keeping in mind this effort entails basically taking everything that I currently own from one B&B to the next every month. So it is with joy that tomorrow I move into a permanent place so far out in the country that there’s nothing but farms for miles. During times of fertilizing the smell isn’t what you might hope for, but the scenery and the vibe is wonderful.

There are horse stables about a mile away and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Diana was interested in going horseback riding. Over the course of my life I’ve owned two horses and I do like to ride them. However having someone from the stable walk with you and your horse for an hour isn’t really my idea of riding a horse. They told me that I could gallop once they saw that I could ride well enough but I guess I misunderstood that because they only let me gallop and trot for a minute. Still, it was cool to be on a horse and watching Diana get off on it was so totally worth it.

A Better Ride

I wrote of how it doesn’t suck to be riding around Italy in the spring and summer on a decent bike. That alone would be wonderful but there are two factors that make it that much more enjoyable. One of those factors is that one of the consequences of the 2019 cancer was that my body at the time seemed like I was never going to be able to ride again and I sold my bike to a friend for a song. So I had just kind of put the idea of riding for the rest of my life out of my mind. Now to be riding it’s one of those things that I didn’t realize that I was missing it until I was doing it again. And oh, how I missed it!

The other thing that is a bonus is the kind of riding that one can do here. There are plenty of reasons to like riding a motorcycle and one reason for me is the freedom to avoid traffic when it is slowed, or stopped. Another reason that I’ve always like to ride is that I enjoy taking risks. I am defiantly not a “safe” rider. Here in Italy it is common for a motorcycle rider to pass a car on a two lane road with oncoming traffic even though the oncoming car is only going to give them the space of one motorcycle between cars. This occurs not just when traffic is crawling but when it’s going along at speed limit. The cops don’t seem to care and the other day I saw someone do this right in front of some cops. This is my kind of riding!  

A Pleasant Aside

There is a hot springs close by that is just outstanding. It has several Jacuzzis that might hold 30 or so people at a time each and a couple of grottos and maybe 20 fountains and on and on. It’s huge, built on beautiful grounds and they are adding a pantheon that as far as I can tell looks like it will be the size of the original. To go at night with ones beloved is exquisite. I try to go with Diana as much as possible but she is sensitive to the warm weather and as it gets warmer the appeal of the place diminishes for her. Still, the trip a week ago was beautiful as always. For me the best time to go is during the full moon. Speaking of which..

Day of The Blood Moon

Last week on the day of the blood moon we took the 20 minute cable car ride up Mount Baldo, which overlooks Lake Garda at an altitude of 2200 meters, which translates to 7200 feet. Arriving at the summit we enjoyed a spectacular view and decent meal at a window side table of the restaurant. Unfortunately after lunch I often get tired and with a bit of an uphill hike to get to the cable car by the time we were done eating it was siesta time for old Dakota. At the summit there is also another restaurant and bar where there is a sweet outside lounge section. The next time we go there I might want to nap in that area, but since we had Diana’s mother’s birthday to attend that night I felt that I needed a good nap in a comfy bed, so off we went.

My relationship with Diana’s parents, and in particular her mother, has been an interesting thing worth sharing, even though I don’t really expect to get through the reader the whole extent of how unusual it is given the starting point. Basically Diana let me know from the start that her relationship with her parents has been challenging and tense her whole life to say the least. Additionally her parents were not happy with me from day one and they didn’t seem to want to have anything at all to do with me. They didn’t attend our wedding which was a little understandable since it was in November, 2021, during the pandemic, and they were both very cautious of catching covid. Afterwards they did come to the door of her apartment were we had our makeshift post-wedding party to tell me in Italian that if I don’t make Diana happy that she will kill me. It was all tongue-in-cheek, but this woman doesn’t seem to have a humorous bone in her body so it came across very much like she was serious. Not that I cared about the threat but it was just creepy for her to show up and that was essentially what she wanted to say. I took it all in stride, given the circumstance, but it was really just reinforcing of the fact that she had a general distain for me that she had no interest in hiding in the least.

Just as something changed radically between Diana and me, so had something changed between her mother and me. She stopped being overtly negative, even subtly hostile, to me. For my part I found her to be, well, a trip. She is just a stereotypically bitter old Italian women and once I learned to just take her shit in stride I began to truly enjoy being with her from an entertainment standpoint. She knows that I don’t speak Italian yet she talks to me, often times in rapid fire for extended periods of time and sometimes with nobody around to translate, as if I know exactly what she’s saying. She just cracks me up for a wide variety of reasons. Plus, somehow, she seems to have come to like me. She sometimes tries to look out for my comfort, for example on a cold day a couple months ago showing me to the comfy chair in front of the fireplace.

So it was a pleasant enough time at her birthday dinner, but the real fun started when we left just as the blood moon was on the rise. The moon was as beautiful as could be and the optical illusion that is well-known to have the effect of it seeming to be enormous as it is on the rise was in full display. Diana was driving and I couldn’t keep my eyes from the beauty of it as it was on the rise, still as orange as an orange might be. As we were going along a country road I had to point it out repeatedly and at one point Diana felt a need to pull over and she suggested that the three of us, which included friend Agostino, have a gratitude chant together. We all recognized it as a great idea and once we got to chanting within a minute the color changed from that great orange to a deep yellow. Once we were done chanting we all had a great time acknowledging what we had all witnessed. What a great gift all of these things were, all day long.

Being Amused

Lake Garda has a decent amusement park with several roller coasters and other decent thrill rides. Miserably the first roller coaster I went on I failed to notice the warning that anyone with hearing aids, of which I have both, should not ride with them in. The reason for that is because it was one of these rides that shakes the shit out of your head while the solid safety harness is set on both sides of it. The moment I realized that I was going to be basically punched in the ear for the next couple of minutes it was already too late. The pounding was rapid fire and to take out the hearing aids while not losing them in the process was not possible. I had such a miserable time that once the ride stopped I wasn’t sure if the ride itself was decent so I took out the hearing aids and went right back on.

There was no line, which, at any amusement park is unbelievable and that was another motivating factor. Unfortunately getting back on that shaking bitch again so soon after lunch ruined my stomach for the rest of the day. I managed to not lose my lunch but I still had to avoid any more thrill rides. Still the fact that the park is 20 minutes from our house and I got a season pass factored into the decision to leave after only four hours, but the park was closing anyway, so the trip was worth it.

Rome-ing Around

Next week we are going to Rome to get an idea about how to set up our next treatment. I have been there before and I have already seen the sites but it turns out that Diana has not. To get into places like The Vatican, or the Sistine Chapel takes literally hours in line. So here is where having cancer is a bonus because it is to the front of the line for those in wheel chairs. I get that some people might frown upon such a move but first off, I couldn’t care less, and secondly I actually doubt that I would be able to stand in line for hours before and after walking all day. So, I’m looking forward to that. 

The Diagnosis Rollercoaster

The results of the Rome consultation resulted in good news, but to some degree I’m getting whiplash from the conflicting medical information and opinions. The pulmonary oncologist in Rome said that she thinks that the treatment that she has in mind would work to get rid of the cancer. I don’t even know what to make of that given what the U.S. doctors have said. Plus, like the doctor that I’ve been seeing for the treatment these past months in Verona she thinks that the pain and fatigue that I’ve been feeling as a result of all of this is excessive. She has ordered a Spirometry procedure which measures the functioning of the lungs vis-à-vis the airflow into and out of the lungs. WWWWW –TTTTTT-FFFFF???? NOBODY THOUGHT TO ORDER THIS BEFORE NOW?!?!??!? Well, okay, I guess better late than never. Plus maybe we find out something worthwhile.

Un Fuck Me!

Meanwhile the procedure will take 10 working days, so two weeks and cost about 2700 bucks per day besides living expenses, all out of pocket. I set up a gofundme page a while ago and I suppose that it’s time I pushed that on you again because, well, I have to admit that I could really use the help. Sure there is a part of me that doesn’t want to worry about it and go with a “Let go, let God” mentality but, still… Anyway, I wrote and deleted multiple follow-up statements for this part but let me just say that any contribution will be appreciated.

Otherwise my pain and fatigue levels seem to be about the same as they have been these past months. The other variables in my life are joyous, so there is that. I’m just very sick and tired of being sick and tired. Oh well, things could be worse…

Macadamia Mystery and Other Assorted Weirdness

Have you ever had a time, or times, in your life when there seemed to be far more “coincidences” happening. Or times when those common oddities in your life seem to be coming at you in bunches that are just too much to be considered “normal” anymore?

I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me at least a few times over the course of my life where an abundance of these kinds of days stand out enough for me to remember. The first time that I remember this happened around 1996 when for weeks and maybe into months I noticed all kinds of numbers in sequence, perhaps on a digital clock, or a license plate, of some kind of other way. Another thing that stood out was that I kept seeing New Mexico showing up in some kind of way, mostly license plates, but also on T.V., or some other kind of unusual way. I was living in California and I had been working in the same job for over 11 years. A coworker of mine was Wiccan and he told me that he had learned that when we are living our lives in accordance with Universal principals, or something like that, that these things are “supposed” to happen. It was years before I embraced any semblance of spirituality so that seemed like just so much fu-fu nonsense to me. Still, within a year I was living in New Mexico.

The next time it happened was circa 2000 when I was getting sober and, oh-my-God were the “coincidences” popping off with abundance. By then I had read somewhere that, not only was this a sign from the “Universe” that I/we are on the “right” path, but that they would remain greater gifts if not talked about as if we were special for getting them by spouting off about them like they were our own secret and special jewels to anyone who would listen. So then, with that said, allow me to share some things that have happened recently in this regard, he said, tongue in cheek. Keep in mind these are not earth-shattering by any means, but just a sampling of approximately the past 24 hours of maybe a month of weird or coincidental things that have happened.

But first allow me to lay a foundation for what follows. One of the challenges that I’ve had with Diana is that many of the things that she does defies logic, much less good sense, to me. Unfortunately I am “condemned” to need to make sense of the world. Since I have known her she has taken the position that she not only does she want to live by less logic and rational thinking and more intuitively in her life. She believes that this is a big part of her spiritual journey. She believes that out relationship will be so much better if I can learn to do this as well. I have felt like this is just the opposite of what will constitute a healthy relationship. To make it is an even bigger challenge since I have cultivated a very rational and logical approach to life and this has been a boon to my life both professionally and personally. Well, personally up until I met Diana. However I have gotten a lot “better”, if you can call it that, at suspending logic when it comes to some of the confounding things that she does. Trust me when I tell you that this is not the “typical” gender difference confusion. There is defiantly some of that infused in all of this, but there is more to it for sure.

To confuse matters more there are the normal language and culture differences that we have to work through when communicating, which is exacerbated by the logical breakdown and subsequent upset caused by these things. So we were going through one of these episodes and it caused a bit of a rift between us and I was spinning around sleeplessly trying to figure out exactly what happened and how to prevent it from happening in the future when I realized it was this problem of me needing to make sense of what does not make sense to me. But certainly there have been plenty of times where I come to find out that the fault was in my logic and not just the “logic” of the situation writ large.

So while I have made some gains in accepting less logic in my life and in particular with my wife I realized that I was simply hurting both of us by not being even more flexible in that regard. So, after laying in bed some hours trying to sort this out I finally came to a conclusion at maybe 1 or 2 A.M. I decided to myself to work on being less logical and rational. Believe me when I tell you that it is difficult for me to even write those words, much less put them into practice. Then, as if I needed confirmation that I had made a good decision a couple hours later in the dead of night a set of two lights in the room turned on and would not go off by light switch. I had to unscrew the light bulbs in order to turn them off.

The next morning we made amends and after breakfast I headed out on my daily 45 minute ride to treatment on my motorcycle, which was out of gas, but, I thought, still had reserve tank left to get me to the gas station only a couple miles away. Instead it turned out that I had been riding on the reserve since at least the last fill-up and was completely out of gas. I had just passed the neighbor a minute ago and so I left the bike where it was and jumped off in the hope that he would still be around and maybe have some gas in a can somewhere. Confusing my Spanish and Italian I asked him for “gasolina” and he shrugged his shoulders since there is no such word in Italian. I gave him what I’m going to believe is the universal hand gesture for pumping gas into a tank and he said “Oh, benzina” “Si! Benzina!” I said. Ok, so, not that big of a deal as far as these things go but still very lucky and more to the point just another in a serious of unusual stuff happening.

I went to treatment where, in addition to the infusions that the doctor is giving me he is also providing me with a new treatment for the lymphedema that I got as a result of the radiation treatment in 2019 where the muscles all around my neck are like steel bands and almost always painful. The treatment includes a special cream on my neck followed by a hand-held laser, which necessarily is moved back and forth so as not to burn the skin. My doctor is a fine fellow but often times has the-morning-after-smell of a man who likes to get his drink on in no small way. In other words, dude is an alcoholic.

His assistant was out and he was so busy that it prompted me to go through the trouble of translating the statement “You seem very busy. Maybe we should skip the neck treatment today”. He didn’t like that idea and after waiting around for far too long it was finally my turn for him to get to working on me. Soon his cell phone rang and as he was talking on it I noticed my neck heating up. When I get this treatment I need to look away from the laser because of potential injury to the eye so it was out of the corner of my eye and with a burning neck that I realized he wasn’t moving the laser. Naturally I started moving my neck while sorting out in my mind how I was going to get out of there tactfully if this continued. So I kept moving my neck and luckily a major laser-fry of my neck was averted.

Keep in mind that none of this rises to the level of something that I think is worthy of mentioning at any given time. So, bear with me. Next Diana came home talking about how she had been trying to get through to a particular office and she spent a combined couple hours trying to get through. She mentioned it to a friend and he got through immediately…twice! So she just mentioned this tiny bit of weirdness in passing but added that there seem to be many of these kinds of small coincidental oddities happening to her lately.

Shortly after that I saw what I thought were macadamia nut cookies in the fridge, which happen to be my favorite cookie and nut, which I have never even brought up because, why would I? I haven’t even seen them here and didn’t know if they are even available. Unfortunately for me they were just strange little pieces of bread.

So I went back to binge watching The Office as we had been for maybe 10 hours or so the past week and I made an off-handed comparison between two of the female characters, those being Pam and Karen, if you care. Karen had been on the show for probably 10 or so episodes before I made this comparison and moments after I said something another character, Kevin, made that comparison almost down the exact lines I had just done. Moments after that Michael decides that he is going to give gift baskets to clients that the office had lost in order to get them back. Included in the basket, he said, were macadamia nut cookies. At that point I mention to Diana for the first time that those where my favorite cookie and nut.

This is where things got weird enough for me to want to write out this blog post. She became very animated and had to pause the program to tell me this story about how she had tasted one macadamia nut about a year ago, decided she like it and then went out of her way to go find some, organic, of course. She finally found some but then after she ate a couple for some reason she decided that she didn’t like them after all and so they sat for months until she finally threw them away. Then, some months later, in a way that was so weird that she emphasized that she was compelled by some strange force that she couldn’t begin to understand and struggled with that she had to buy them. These sat around for months until she recently moved out of the place she had been living for some years a few months ago. When she moved she said that she threw out all kinds of things, including foods she hadn’t eaten, but for some reason didn’t throw out the nuts.

Meanwhile, since I have mixed nuts daily with my breakfast grains I have been cracking nuts for some months now but ignoring the mysterious round nuts, not knowing what they were, having never seen the shell of a macadamia nut. Now I was delighted to have a whole bucket of those yummy nuts in front of me as she told me this strange little story.

Then a friend who I hadn’t thought of for over half a year who I had just thought about calling the night before texted me to see how I was doing. I know that we’ve all had that experience but put together with all the rest of this within a 24 hour period fits in pretty nicely.

So then, is it me, or is something in the air at this weird point in time?

Onward! Good News and Credit Where Credit is Due.

I had shared that there is an oncologist in Rome who said that some low-level and specifically targeted radiation for perhaps ten sessions should wipe out the tumors in my lung. Of course this is hard for me to comprehend given the fact that the American oncologist gave me a death sentence, but, hey, what do I know? Plus there was a little matter of cost that was estimated to have come to probably something like 30 to 32 K Euros which is around 33 K in Dollars, when all was said and done. Given the fact that I’ve already burned through a sick amount of retirement since I started this other treatment in November it caused me to put my hand out to see if maybe a gofundme campaign might help. That plus the idea of practically giving therapy away was the plan, but, unfortunately neither one panned out. Oh well…and thanks to those who did contribute.

Fortunately Diana has a characteristic that I wasn’t aware of inasmuch as it seems that she has a bit of Pitbull and Tigress in her and she has made multiple trips to Rome, a six hour drive, and worked tirelessly on the computer and phone managing to establish me as a resident here so that the cost of the treatment itself will be paid for. There are still other expenses to contend with but that will cover the bulk of it. YEA DIANA!!!!

We still don’t know when the treatment will start but we’re figuring on probably within a couple of weeks, or maybe more. Meanwhile I’m continuing to do the other treatment getting 4 times a week blood infusions and laser treatment for the problems in my neck. Pain is a constant companion as is the fatigue. I’m now sleeping perhaps 10 to 11 hours a day and I have really not felt well-rested in years, unfortunately. God do I ever hope to be recovered from both someday.  And if not, if I can still stick around to enjoy love and life and perhaps doing some continued good in the world, I’ll take it!

Health Update

We went to yet another specialist last week who is located an hours drive from here. He is an oncologist with some sort of fame for doing some kind of thing that was extraordinary, for what it’s worth, and Diana felt like he might provide us with at least some info regarding the fatigue and pain. Well that part was easy for him saying, in effect, your body is dealing with cancer (I will add it has been in some way since summer 2019) and of course you have fatigue and pain. This is only interesting in contrast to two other oncologists here who said that I should not be experiencing that level of fatigue and pain. Ah, medical science!

But there were two really good things that came from that meeting. One was that he suggested that I try oral steroids, which, if you don’t know, are not the same as the body building injections. Anyway these things seem to be having a noticeable effect, perhaps 10% overall betterment in both areas, which is not nothing! The other thing is that he managed to finally make it clear that getting rid of the lung cancer by way of this mild radiation strategy is dandy for the current tumors, but that my cancer is systemic and I have “activity” in my liver and bone. This is good news only inasmuch as he said that he thinks that his team can whip up a type of chemo cocktail that might get rid of the cancer in my whole system, as well as a T cell and immunotherapy. IF that works, he said, IF everything goes perfectly I can be on the mend in as little as 6 months.  

That’s nice to hear, but in my mind it puts me back to last September when the oncologists in the U.S. seemed to be suggesting the same thing, except for the T cell/immunotherapy deal. A huge difference is that back then I really didn’t care to go through that for a year or two extension on my lease, whereas having found the truly unimaginable joy of the new and vastly improved love that I have found that a year or two of this heaven seems like a great deal worth trying anything, well…mostly… to stick around for each extra minute that I can.

So the current plan is something like wait until we hear back from dude and his team while moving forward with radiation-light in Rome and perhaps continuing on the Gerson guy here in Verona. I posted that Diana had figured out how to get me on the national health registry but the Gerson guy is not part of that deal so that is still in the many thousands of Euros a month, something that is becoming a questionable expense given the other things in the works.

Still given that the radiologist in Rome needed a new PET scan we went there on Monday. While we know that the health care system in the U.S. is screwed up in many ways, professionalism is not one of them. The things one goes through in order to get treatment are really haphazard (okay, like a freaking clown show most of the time) and, for one thing, we covered the same ground in the hospital, back and forth, for different reasons, when, as far as I could tell, we didn’t really have to. They missed my veins 7 times before getting one on the 8^th that worked. While I was on the platform for the PET scan, with female technicians around, a male technician comes into the room and pulls my sweats down around my knees. Good thing I don’t care about such things, but, dude….really? We sat outside that area afterwards with a port in my arm for no good reason until I finally had to remind one of them that I needed that out and we had a train to catch. And I know it was for no good reason since I’ve had at least 10 PET scans over the past 3 years and nobody ever had to do that, much less left me waiting until I reminded them. None of this raises to the level of a big snivel, I’m just supporting my statement. Just to punctuate my point two days later the Gerson guy managed to reinsert his needle, get this, until the 12^th effort. A rookie junkie could do better, am I right? Sheesh!

We did just get the results of the PET scan which looks pretty good but we are going to consult with one of the oncologists, probably Rome radiologist, to get her take so we don’t get ahead of ourselves. Meanwhile, as I said, I’m feeling a little better since the steroids and so now my good reader you are up to the minute.

Thanks for caring. It does mean a lot to me.

Medical limbo in the dog days.

Just to update I am in a limbo of sorts inasmuch as the folks who plan on doing the chemical therapy are trying to sort out dates for the procedures and the Radiation-ish treatment that is supposed to happen in Rome is on hold until after the chemical therapy. This is a real drag since it might turn out that the ordeal of a trip that I went on to Rome to set this up might need to be redone because it has now been weeks since they set up the PET scan and it might turn out that by the time we get around to it that the previous settings will have to be redone so the whole process will need to be redone. This Friday the chemical folks are supposed to be doing a bunch of tests to get things rolling, but the processes here seem to be very uncertain.

Meanwhile the daily ozone replacement therapy Doctor is on vacation. I have recently had a weird pinched nerve in my back while doing essentially nothing at the time so that has hampered movement, exercising and riding around on the bike.

I want to add how unbelievably happy I am here. It is a very weird deal to be in pain and fatigue and happier than I’ve ever been in my life. So, it is what it is and I thank you for letting me share.

4 days? WTF?

I entered the hospital today in order to get an biopsy tomorrow for the immuno-chemo-ish therapy at a time to be determined after the biopsy. The kicker to this story is that when I got my lung biopsy last year in MN it was like 3 or 4 hours start to finish and here they want me to stay for 4 days! I suppose this speaks to a radical difference between care when an insurance company isn’t involved, but Je-sus Kee-riste…4 days?! That’s 4 days where I’ve got nothing to day (Thanks God right now for my computer and wi-fi) where I don’t speak the language, and…well, ok, nothing else, but that’s plenty to bitch about as I enter the hospital a couple hours ago.

However they did do a rather splendid job of shaving my torso from neck to navel with a trip around the corner into the pits, which is nice, this being bikini season and all.

Will keep you posted.

OMG! NOW I get it!

If you read my last post it was obviously from what I wrote that I was confused about the biopsy since the last one I did last year they went through my chest to pull out a sample of a nodule in my lung in order to determine if the nodules had metastasized, which took all of about 5 hours as I remember it  from the time I walked into the hospital until walking out. Here was this other biopsy for which they said I needed to stay in the hospital for four days. All I could figure was that they were exercising an abundance of caution in a healthcare system that doesn’t concern itself with insurance company requirements that mandate that the patient is in and out asap. Wrong!

(if you are interested in reading the rest go to d-coda-blog.com, cancer this time section and scroll to the bottom of the page)

In order to provide some context for what I will share I’d like to take you back the cancer the last time for comparison reasons. During that treatment I was radiated with what the Mayo Clinic oncologist told me was the strongest dose of Proton Radiation that she had given anyone ever due to the sever nature of my condition. The radiation of this kind for anyone is going to result in what could be compared to the worse sunburn that you can imagine in the throat, and not nearly as problematic, but still not fun, also to the outside of the neck, and shoulder areas which needed special treatment for weeks after the radiation. Having been an alcoholic/addict who loved going to the beach most of my life, and having passed out my share of times in the sun I know of what I speak using that comparison.

Anyhoo…. The big fun happened back then when, during the last weeks of radiation, and then into the first six weeks of post radiation recovery when I had to throw up, which I would estimate to be around 20 to 30 times, probably more. I bet that throwing up with a radiated throat felt very similar to rubbing sandpaper over a burn. I share that only as a baseline for a comparison to the pain from this trip, which was significantly less painful, but still, right up there on the scale.  

So this time the biopsy consisted of going down my throat, using my trachea to get into the lung where they removed several cancerous nodules in order to determine if there exists a particular molecule that is required in order to make this new suggested treatment viable. Additionally they placed a tube that was about the diameter of a finger through my side, past ribs and into the lungs in order to suck out whatever it was that needed sucking out. This was not something I knew was going to happen so when I woke up from surgery with this tube in me and suffering pain with every breath it was an unpleasant surprise.

Before surgery I made it clear to anyone on the medical staff who would listen, with the last person being the anesthesiologist, that I had taken regular pain killers for years and had developed a tolerance and please make sure that was understood for my post-op pain management. While everyone said that they knew of this I still had normal pain killers in what I can only imagine was normal amounts, which did exactly jack shit for my pain. Of course I had to struggle past the nurses (all of this without speaking Italian, mind you) and to the doctor who finally got me some kind of meds that did some minor amount of good.

I offered the description of the pain I endured during the last cancer episode so that as I describe this episode that it might be understood and/or believed that I am not exaggerating. I gave plenty of consideration about how to describe it later on and what I thought of as an apt comparison would be having a screwdriver shoved into the lungs. Most people have heard the saying “it only hurts when I breath”, well, in this case it was absolutely that.

I had a roommate with a breathing apparatus that didn’t just beep but freaking blared all night long. He must have been used to it because he slept through it, but I’m sure that it is no exaggeration to say that it could be heard clearly from at last 60 yards away through walls and I was like 10 feet from him. Maybe a clearer understanding might be hearing every word from a TV playing downstairs from your room, but I was in the room.

I started throwing up at around 2 A M and that wasn’t pleasant in the least, since, as I said every breath was plenty painful, so you might imagine what throwing up felt like. I called for the nurse to give me some meds to keep me from throwing up, which she did, but still, for the life of me couldn’t imagine why they didn’t give me that sooner as a precautionary measure.

This was all the worst of it but by no means all of it. With the language barriers and the fact that nobody kept me informed with the surgery starting some 8 hours after it was due to start and that I could not eat for over 24 hours after my last meal was given, blah, blah, blah…it was not a real great party for ol Dakota.

They made 3 incisions and pretty much every movement at the moment is painful. The stitches come out in 3 weeks. I lost my voice on occasions but that was pretty much minor. Even given the pain meds I probably slept less than 4 hours each of the four nights on average and even when I was at top physical form pre 2019 cancer I needed 8 each night or I was dopey. I’m catching up on my sleep now having been back home for two days, but going through that and lying in bed for four days set back any semblance of health that I had improved over the last months.

Perhaps someday I will offer a more detailed description of this little ordeal. For now I am just trying to live up to my commitment to offer as much information about my journey as I can with the time, energy and motivation that I can come up with at any given time. Oh well, one way or the other, this too shall pass.

Biopsy Results: Perhaps I’m part cockroach!

So the biopsy wounds healed pretty much perfectly with the care of my loving nurse/wife. Last week we got a CT scan and there were significant shrinking on 3 or 4 tumors. One stayed the same and there was a very small increase in another, but that one was so small that it fell within the margin of error for measuring them. Is this remission? This is a question I will be asking the specialist that I am seeing today who ordered the biopsy that I had several weeks ago to see if this procedure he recommended to allegedly eliminate the tumors can move forward. As I write this I am sitting here waiting to speak with him. Fingers crossed and will report before sending this out. Another question is to find out if the reduction in tumor size is in fact considered remission?

It turns out that the biopsy left some kind of liquid surrounding my lungs, not to be confused with in my lungs, which is not a problem and for which they are in no hurry to fix. It does cause me to struggle to breath more than normal and any exertion, even, say, a flight of stairs, causes me to gasp a bit for air. Not so you would notice, but I huff and puff a bit, is the degree that I’m talking about.

As I prefaced we spoke to the oncologist today who looked at the biopsy results and provided us with updated info. Ready for this? (oh man, I don’t want to jinx this and get ahead of myself but…) He has declared that I am basically in remission and that the results indicate that I can move forward with the procedure that he thinks will eradicate my cancer altogether. Keep in mind that the lungs are only one effected area as this is a systemic cancer and I have some small masses on my liver and a small area of bone, but those seem to be stabilized and should respond to treatment as well.

It turns out that when I got the biopsy they removed the biggest tumor in my lungs, which I didn’t even know about until they told me today and….GOD DAMN!....no wonder it hurt like it did and I couldn’t breathe well, even up to today. That is also why there was that liquid around my lungs at the spot where they removed the tumor, which he said was to be expected (He, Doc, did you think I might want to know? But I was hardly going to be upset with all the good news going on, eh?) and the liquid will naturally be absorbed over time.

So then, I imagine that there will be some amount of joyous responses, cuz…well…that’s the kinda folks you are, and I’ll thank you in advance since we’re going on a cruise from the 1^st to the 10^th from Rome, hitting the Naples, Sicily, Turkey, Greece and … I forget…so, it should be nice… but no internet, so…cheers!l

So the cruise was a nightmare so much so that we’re suing carnival and I didn’t realize until now that I had not posted that story and I wrote a massive narrative because of the lawsuit so maybe I will post it in a separate section in here.

Meanwhile here is my medical update January 2023.

Greetings all! It is time for a medical update… well in fact it’s very overdue. And the thing about my physical health is how much it affects my mental health. I really don’t feel like doing anything I mean literally anything which includes for instance, posting an update in my blog. Even something as simple as the emails that I have been meaning to send for over a week and that’s just an e-mail so the point is that during much of this journey I sometimes just wanna stare out into space. I mean television does the job as marginally better than staring out into space, but that’s about it. 

That’s especially true at times like these past few days. Every once in a while I am going to a hospital which is located over an hour away to get chemotherapy where they attach a kind of mild chemo to me by way of a bottle to a semi-permanent port I now have under my arm going into a vein close to my pit as you’ll see in the picture I will post and facebook. I’ve spent the last five days with the slow drip of poison going into me. For more details go into the blog with a link here for anybody that doesn’t have it and wants it. D-coda-blog.com and if you go to end the section that says cancer this time as scroll down to medical update January 23 to get the rest of this update the

I estimate that I have had the port for a couple of months now and it needs to be cleaned once every week or so and it got infected one time and then the most recent time something that they did where there was a whole lot of twisting and turning going on with a needle entering my arm and that was less than pleasant. But it is just part of the process and by no means the worst of it. But not complaining because I can still move around and those parts of my life that are joyous are very joyous so I will take it.

I do try to keep moving and Diana is great for that because she loves to walk and I love to be with her so I push myself to go for walks with her almost daily but still a walk of 100 or 200 yards has me gasping for breath as though I did a fast jog the whole way even though I’m just walking slowly.

My coordination is suffering as well. And there are multiple occasions where I stagger and almost fall during the course a week and in fact one time I did land in the mud. Anyway I’ve developed a new pain in my right hip joint which they say is related to the cancer and is coming on fairly rapidly and as far as intensity and duration end. It is one of the areas of most intense pain for me now hope especially when getting out of the car or walking upstairs so any kind of weight is pretty darn unpleasant. There’s been a pain developing that is often on located in the general area of my lower left area of my rib but my guess is that it feels muscular but it comes and goes in a way that tells me this not muscular and more than likely cancerous lung. 

Some really good news is that I went to the dentist recently checked my teeth and jaw bones which were placed at risk during the radiation into my throat during that tongue cancer and that all looks perfect which is great news. Another bit of great news for me relative to that matter is that I just learned recently that that is not a lifelong concern as I had believed and are just a concern that lasts for a couple of years post radiation so I suppose that means that the worry about getting infection in my jaw bones and having to deal with those complications is over, so one less thing to worry about.

So the next thing is that on the 31^st we are going to get a full body scan to see what’s happening with the cancer and to get another 4 day chemo drips and the doctors will assess what is happening their self that will be an exciting post regardless of the what the results are so if you follow this then early February will be the next post with pretty important information.

Remission!!!

I got the results back from the most recent pet scan yesterday and my cancer is on the run! There are a lot of tumors in my lungs, liver and bone but they’re all shrinking. A couple of tumors are down as much as a centimeter which were three centimeters and October! The Dr. declared that the cancer is in remission and I will sort out to the best of my ability what exactly that means in a minute but for now a little rejoicing!!! 

A close friend that I sent the good news to by text yesterday wrote back the response “prayers answered”. Yeah? Maybe! I know for damn sure that it didn’t hurt at all that sent me your loving thoughts and well wishes in your prayers. And once I understood the power of prayer some 20 years ago I became very fond of saying that even if it doesn’t help the person that I am praying for, I know for sure that it’s helping me to be doing the praying.  But still for sure I’m not out of the woods yet.

We still have chemo treatments to do and I still need to find out at the next chemo treatment which is February 21 what exactly and it all means? Does she think we can wipe out every cancer cell? Will the pain and fatigue ever go away? With enough exercise, the right diet, and whatever other things I need to do can I ever get back to anything resembling normal health or has that ships sailed for good? 

The one thing I do know is I have to start living my life as though it’s going to last a long time which means a source of income so if you know anybody that wants to access a very competent and experience therapist at a buck a minute using secured on-line sessions, I’m available.

Meanwhile if anything changes and/or after I talk with the Dr. on the 21^st I will share more. Thanks so much for all your support and well wishes.



This parade ends the same place for us all. 7-13-23

I am thinking about how to present this information because it’s really difficult sense there’s so many moving parts and contradictions in my mind and uncertainty about where to go and how to go about doing whenever it is that is in front of me. Those of you who were with me will know something about what I went through that during the 2019 cancer and how I had planned for my death only waiting for enough strength to get out of my house and not subject my roommates to a rotting corpse. That episode was, for me, without a hyperbolic or dramatic bit in it was just simply fucked-up to the extreme. If you want to know more detail that can be found and the blog section cancer last time.

A huge difference is that I went through it largely with the help of my two sisters who worked as wonderful, wonderful helpers and a friend of mine as well; but that doesn’t compare at all to having my twin flame Diana here to go through what I need to go through, whatever that may be.

So what may that be? At the very least we are going to go through some weeks of radiating my brain. The oncologists here saying that there is likely to be no cognitive decline and it’s likely that I should be able to continue to help those clients who are willing to let me work with them. Of course there’s no expectation of any clients doing that and it would be totally reasonable for anybody to respond in any way that they see fit. But you will each get whatever amount of time and information from me as you require as has always been the case for whenever I am going through during challenging times.

I also have an abundance of very intelligent and knowledgeable people suggesting that I go on a particular diet that starves the cancer which will also emaciate me and likely cause cognitive challenges as well as more pain and fatigue and those things that I have actively avoided my entire life when they’ve shown up. I watched my father wither away and vowed that I would never let that happen to me. It matters to me that I’m not talking here about simply avoiding pain and clinging onto life but there are deeper issues I’m grappling with that are at this point are too personal and unresolved for me to figure out much less put out in public.

For the oncologists the plan would be to see what happens with the radiation and then go with the whole serious chemo package. It may be that if I do the fasting (starving myself for weeks!) I won’t give much of a fuck at that point, but it’s in play, along with other options.

Meanwhile I am back on the “looking death in the eye” journey I have encountered far too often. So it’s back to The Tibetan Book of the Dead , podcasts on taking the journey and related topics, meditation, pushing myself to exercise through the increasing pain and fatigue and seeing how this story plays out