Category Archives: Health and Wellness

My Frenemy, Dexamethasone

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When initially discussing chemotherapy treatments, most people begin with the thought that it is the chemo drugs themselves, those infamously toxic concoctions, that the patient would complain about most, or fear, or suffer from. And chemo does suck, what with the potential for nausea and fatigue and that notorious chemo brain. But do you know what really sucks, dear Reader? Steroids.

I recognize the importance of the Dexamethasone pills I take for three days at the start of each infusion cycle. And I appreciate that I am not taking Prednisone, which some of my friends have been saddled with for lengthy periods of time and which I had seen turn my father’s final years into a much less pleasant time than they should have been. I owe a debt to Prednisone, without which I would not have gotten ill enough to eventually lead to my cancer diagnosis, but I will never take it again. Dexamethasone, on the other hand, I can deal with. I don’t like it, but I understand the need to make my peace with the sleepless nights and mild dizzy spells and increased irritability, the hoarseness and seemingly endless peeing. Continue reading My Frenemy, Dexamethasone →

The Give and Take of the Support Group

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I met some nice people today. People who I would not normally have crossed paths with in my daily life. They were a happy, optimistic bunch, or seemed so to me, in spite of the circumstances that brought us together for the 90 minutes allotted this morning. Most of the small group knew each other, but were largely strangers to me when I walked into the room. It was my first time attending a cancer support group.

I had no idea what to expect from the meeting. The truth is, I had not been in any particular rush to attend; my impression of such a gathering was based on flimsy Hollywood portrayals, and that fuelled more by onscreen AA meetings than anything else. The coordinating nurse who ran the meeting was also the person responsible for setting me up with my oncologist and taking care of most of the administrative functions revolving around my early care from the point where my tumor was identified until I had begun my chemo drips. And she has been a part of the process since, if not directly, keeping tabs on me and checking in now and again. She had asked me on several occasions if I would attend a support group meeting and I had always put it off, thinking that I was doing fine and so, really, it wasn’t something I really needed to do.

Then she sent me a flier, with a personal note at the top, and I went and put the date in my calendar. And then there I was. Continue reading The Give and Take of the Support Group →

The Cannabis Cancer Cure Explained

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Let’s put the Cannabis Cancer Cure into some perspective.

If we face the facts, anyone purveying hemp oil or cannabis as a cancer cure is either willfully ignorant of the facts or is delusional about its proven effects. While certain cannabinoids or other chemicals found in the cannabis certainly show promise for potential cancer treatments, thus far the only valid studies have occurred in Petri dishes or grafted animal tumors. And there is one insidious fact left out of the claims proliferating across the Inter Webs.

Cannabis can make some cancers worse.

That’s right, the same chemical components that appear to kill or slow the progression of some cancer cells have also been shown to speed the growth of other cancer cells. There is a matter of dosing, too: some doses help reduce tumors while other doses will actually cause progression. And this is still in a highly controlled lab dish setting. Getting those doses correct through the filter of individual human metabolism could be a disaster, if it even works at all. Continue reading The Cannabis Cancer Cure Explained →

The Chemo Diaries: 10 Months

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Let me just start by saying I feel great. I just had another CT scan about a week ago and it is showing clearer edges to the main tumor, some puckering in the middle and overall indicates good progress. Yesterday I had my infusion of Alimta and for a nice change of pace I have cut my steroid use in half — which so far is going quite well for me. I am not a fan of steroids and this was one of my top objectives. The result has been a clearer head so far, a bit more sleep and less swelling of my feet, which translates to a nice win in my playbook. All in all, I am quite pleased with my week.

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The only downsides are things that probably won’t be issues for a while, possibly a long while. One of the effects of infusions is that slowly but surely veins collapse. I always had marvelous veins for drawing blood but they have taken a heap of abuse over the past year and a half. The labs approved by my HMO tend to use the biggest needles possible for the fastest draw and while that never bothered me before, the chemo had made it so that I bruised easily and had to rotate veins every few weeks just to avoid issues with leaking. It wasn’t until about eight months in to my treatment that a nurse in the infusion clinic asked me why I didn’t just request butterfly needles… The veins are much less prone to bruising now. Who knew?

Still, the veins are a bit of an issue. I still have plenty to experiment with, but we had to move from the arm down to the hand for this last round. My hand veins, possibly due to my normally low blood pressure, stay fairly plump most of the time, making them good targets. But it got the nurse talking to me about putting in a port one day, just to make things easier. Such a port would be under the skin just over my heart, kind of a permanent plastic plug right into my largest vein. Supposedly that would be good for a few years of constant use. Still, it isn’t something I am in a rush to do.

But a few years or more is certainly what I am looking at right now. While no one will put a timeline on anything regarding treatment, my oncologist did say that he expected I would remain on this current regimen for a fairly long time. That is pretty good news in its own special way. Of course, the main reason for switching off it would be the commercial availability of PD1 therapies. We are eager to try those, but not so eager to qualify for clinical trials, which would require progression of the cancer after the failure of my current chemo. For now, that wait is a good one.

Perspective: One of the Greatest Gifts of a Cancer Diagnosis

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I was skulking around the house last week, ruminating on just how bad I smelled. My wife was getting annoyed with me, insisting that I did not smell any differently; it was a hot, stagnant summer day and I was sweating (I felt) profusely. My chemo treatment was beginning to purge from my system and it seemed to me that as I would walk around a corner or even just turn my head, I would get a wiff of something nasty, putrid, sour. And I couldn’t shake it — that smell was just plain bad.

But it couldn’t be identified, or even located. And I was the only one smelling it.

Then I started to take stock of all my symptoms, which I do now and then as both a way of monitoring my body and keeping a sense of humor about the process. Because it can be pretty gross. Let’s face it, no one likes to think of themselves covered in puss-filled sores, hobbling about on swollen feet and wafting fetid breezes from God knows where throughout the room. Continue reading Perspective: One of the Greatest Gifts of a Cancer Diagnosis →

The Chemo Diaries: More Summer Fun

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Aside from my ever diminishing veins, the infusions during maintenance continue to be easy and relaxing. I guess I am lucky in that way — I know people who have different cocktails that they have various reactions to, from rash to fever to nausea on one end and flat out groggy sleep on the other. During these Alimta cycles, I am in and out fairly quickly and my biggest complaint is not having enough time here with the heated massage chair and my morning coffee to, uh, get any real work done…

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finally time for my cup of morning joe

 

Two infusions ago this chemo drug appeared to really mess with my digestive system, but it cleared up just in time for my scheduled CT scan and did not recur with the following round. The assumption now is that I simply caught a stomach bug that lingered for a couple weeks. The whole repressed immunity thing has been on my mind lately, and not just because what probably should have been a 24 hour virus took me 14 times longer to purge from my system.

Although the ensuing three weeks were relatively symptom-free (steroids make me irritable, mess up my sleep for three or four days and make me an emotional raw nerve; the chemotherapy wreaks havoc with my joyous time travel into the land of teenage acne, but even these things seemed to lessen somewhat), the issue of immunity and, more specifically herd immunity, was thrust back front and center when we brought a new kitten home from the pound. Continue reading The Chemo Diaries: More Summer Fun →

The Myth of the Wellness Warrior

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Please note, this is Part One of a series. Click here to jump to Part Two or follow the link at the end of this post. Part Two contains some very important information that greatly expands upon some of what is raised here.

Somehow I managed to miss the name Candice-Marie Fox when I was going through earlier research on foods that are claimed to cure cancer, of which her pineapple diet ranks as one of the more ludicrous. Through the grapevine, I learned of this diet yesterday and immediately I wanted to find out if there was anything plausible about it. Certainly, pineapple is healthy to eat and it is often used for digestive issues due to its enzymatic activity, so I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Of course, I did not expect that there would be an actual cure in there, but maybe I could ascertain some actual benefits to the diet that transcended my initial skepticism. I was excited about this possibility; less so about discovering one more person preparing to cash in on a faux cure.

Pineapple is good for you.

A quick Google search brought up hundreds of articles online about how this woman, Candice-Marie Fox, a former model (always in the lead of the story), beat “Stage 3” or “Stage 4” (depending on the article) thyroid cancer by “ditching her husband” and eating a diet dominated by pineapple and other fruits. As is often the case in this sort of story, even as it is translated into multiple languages, the text is almost identical from web site to web site. And most of those articles can be traced back to a source in that British rag called the Daily Mail — not exactly a solid, investigative news source.

A few other “news” outlets picked the story up. It makes great click bait, after all. But fascinatingly, these actual news stories manage to get a whole bunch of facts wrong. Which is not surprising, as the former model herself seems to trip over her own facts many times, even in interviews on other web sites after her celebrity began to grow.

Continue reading The Myth of the Wellness Warrior →

Let’s Talk Nutrition!

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Doing research on Cancer, you cannot help but stumble across about a million web sites (not to mention books, those old things) ready to inform about all the ways that food and supplements can either prevent or cure the myriad of cancers out there. So I thought I would do everyone a solid and break down the Truth About Nutrition and Cancer right here. I’m not a doctor, nor a nutritionist, but I am a human being who eats, takes his vitamins AND has cancer! Kind of makes me an expert, just don’t look at this as medical advice. (The info here is good for people without cancer, too, because everyone wants to be healthy!)

About the time that a patient receives a diagnosis of CanCeR, or any other crazy disease/condition/illness/mutation that sets the mind into panic mode, someone is going to be hot after a diet to improve things or search out a cause in the previous diet for where things went terribly wrong, or otherwise look to Nutrition for answers. And, just as inevitably as Nutrition will be sought out for those answers, the InterWebs will provide volumes about why whatever the patient had been eating was the cause of his or her maladies, or perhaps what the patient had not been eating, but whichever the case is there will most certainly be a solution/cure for whatever ails said patient in the form of an ingestible, potentially (or at least allegedly) natural substance. And, by gum, this is in spite of the fact that Big Pharma and the Medical Industrial Complex have conspired to keep the valuable information a secret (which is why it is available on thousands of non-academic, ready to sell you something web pages).

And this is when I point out something obvious, which many individuals fail entirely to pay attention to while distracted by the conspiracy theories being thrown at them: even when the information is being “given away for free,” the site you are visiting is almost certainly selling something. Continue reading Let’s Talk Nutrition! →

The Chemo Diaries: Summer Maintenance

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One of the fun things about chemotherapy is the surprise side effects that pop up, differing from one round to the next. For the most part, after you’ve had a few rounds, you know what to expect in broad terms. Some issues get cumulatively more pronounced, others perhaps seem less so. But the element of surprise is always there with something.

When I switched from the three drug infusion that was designed to beat the cancer cells with a sledge hammer, to a single drug infusion that is basically intended to keep tapping at those cells in a more gentle fashion, I noticed a huge difference in how I felt during the critical week that followed. After six rounds of the hard stuff, it had been really getting to me. My body, as healthy as it otherwise is, was feeling a bit worse for wear. I was exhausted. I felt like I had a brain cloud. Then suddenly, after the maintenance infusion cycles began, it was like a weight had been lifted. It wasn’t necessary for me to take my anti-nausea meds anymore. I could think (relatively) more clearly.

There were still side effects, though. The chemo still made me tired, still had smaller versions of the same things that had been bothering me before. Now my feet were puffy, then it would be something else. Another cycle or so in and some of the issues I had been so happy to avoid seemed to come back again, perhaps in a lighter dose, and I spent a couple weeks with some truly odd gastrointestinal issues before going in for another in my string of exciting CT scans. Continue reading The Chemo Diaries: Summer Maintenance →

Vanity

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I was reading a friend’s blog post a while back, a personal rant she shot off about tolerance (especially among the particular Christian community of which she considers herself a part) in response to Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn. I had not realized (at that time) that this was a big deal, or even anything particularly new to discuss, but then I have been living in Los Angeles for about 30 years and this sort of thing is long past novel for me. I know that there are plenty of bigots and idiots in Southern California, but I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with, if not always like-minded, at least open-minded individuals for most of my time here. I am also fairly confident that even my oldest friends from rural Illinois who remain entrenched in “Middle America” are soundly rooted in kindness and tolerance. In my well-lived-in fantasy world, it often seems that most narrow-minded people exist strictly as online trolls, waiting to lob their tirades at rational science or reasonably centrist political viewpoints. Then, every now and again, I wake up and venture outside.

For a long time, I’ve been repeating my belief that much of what is wrong with our particular society is rooted in a lack of Critical Thinking Skills. And I believe that tolerance, in general, is indicative of that same problem. If we, as a culture, were to exercise better critical thinking, then bigotry of all types should readily dissipate. After all, bigotry stems from a certain dogmatic thought process which is destroyed by self-examination and a broader understanding of how things actually work and fit together. Therefore, any thoughtful group of people ought to find that their differences make them stronger and unite them better, unless those differences are Continue reading Vanity →