On through the night

Copyright, Terry D. Turner, 2009

A couple of people, including my own internal self talk mechanism, have said, "be glad when you get back to your old self." No one would be gladder than I to attain the general demeanor I exhibited before having to deal with this fast moving cancer about which I have written in previous posts. Certainly I am not claiming that my old curmudgeon character and manner could not be improved on, but it was a much more energetic and personable character than I now find myself to be.

In part it is stress that has altered me greatly. And, largely, it is the stress of the unknown. As you can easily imagine dealing with cancer of the lung, spine, ribs, etc. is no picnic under any conditions. Getting past the initial treatments is a tough job and, then following the initial treatment there is the on-going follow up treatments which require considerable discipline and an uncommon effort in terms of food preparation, and other disciplines, along with the ever present attempt to help the liver detoxify by use of un-roasted coffee enemas.

While this effort to be cancer free goes forward, there is no visible evidence that tells you if you making progress or losing ground. It is a matter of hoping you are gaining on the objective but having no way to judge how far you have come or how far you must go. Progress, or lack of it, against this type of cancer has to be judged with the huge and horribly expensive MRI/CT scanning procedures which can look in your body and see what happens you take a big dose of something akin to sugar water --- cancer does love sugar in all forms and the medical techs have learned know how to light up the cancer cells which hit their party time buttons when sugar becomes available. Then, of course, one does not want to be scanned too often so, during all the time between scan results are also times in which you must wonder what is going on inside your body.

And naturally, you do not forget that this cancer blindsided you once and only a fool would rest easy with such a sneaky opponent.

With all markers and indications absent, all the follow on treatments, protocols, and and all that goes into the battle to be cancer free must go forward, so to speak, in darkness... hoping against hope that the protocols are working and that cancer is receding or even dead.

Under ordinary circumstances we have our health issues so well defined that we think we know where things end and begin... take this for ten days and be well; rub this on and it will stop. We'll just cut this off and that will be that. Take this for headache and it will cease and so forth. If you have the flu your own dripless nose tells you it is over.

Not so with cancer. Rising with cramps in the middle of the night, or, as I am now, sitting here drenched with yet another night sweat which forces me off my wet pillow and out of my wet sheets to change into fresh underwear, you don't know how you are doing.

What you do know is that you are exhausted with taking a hundred or two hundred pills a day. You know you are weary of these drops and those drops in thirty-two ounces of water; you are water logged with don't forget your food grade hydrogen peroxide (only eight drops in five ounces of water and only four times a day) and don't forget your lead free bicarbonate of soda and, by the way don't forget to think how to mitigate the extra salt; and don't forget your dose of molasses and bicarbonate of soda, and on and on. But all of this, of necessity, proceeds because it must...these are one's tools in a silent battle with a silent opponent. It rather reminds me of a famous line whose origin I have long since forgotten "Just because I am paranoid, don't mean nobody ain't following me."

So, with the battle fully underway between yourself and the cancer, what you do have the is recurring exhaustion that comes with every little pain which says, "Hey! What am I? Could I be cancer spreading?" Of course there is no reason to think so, but this aggravation is another burden on the attempt to have a tranquil mind

The sweats and the cramps, which just don't seem to end even though now and then I get a break from one or both, but they keep coming back. Are the sweats a good thing, like detoxification? No one seems to absolutely sure but they remain a constant companion during the battle.

And there is the tiredness of the aftermath of all the treatments. It is a flat, tired energy-less zone in which you remain too tired to rest, too tired to talk; too tired to do much of anything; it is a tiredness that reminds of that mournful haunting poem, Ozymandias.

Ozymandias
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert ...Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."


Ah, but tired or not, we must go on with enthusiasm, and on, through the darkness and on to the dawn when at last we will see proof of our labors; the cancer markers will fade, and the CT will look in vain for the sugared cells, and the nightmare will fade. And in time, the cancer will be forgotten, new treatments will arise, and in due course the forty year old popular health destroying death treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, in the main, will be replaced with the alternative life supporting treatments such as hydrogen peroxide, bicarbonate of soda, zeolites, oxygen, and such. And I will be left with the memory of the many, many friends and family who came to my aid in this battle.

God Bless You and Yours in All Things,

Terry
The Constant Curmudgeon