This past week I had scare. I was feverish, fatigued, and convinced that the scar tissue in my neck was changing. As I slowly moved my fingers from one lymph node to the next, I had trouble differentiating between lumps and bumps and scarring. Beneath the skin lies what was once was a battle field. What used to be filled with cancerous tumors is now scar tissue, which serves as a reminder of what was and what is.
As time passes, my scars change -- the ones that I can see and feel, and the ones that lie beneath. Keeping up with those changes can be daunting.
My encounter this week with fatigue and fever led me into a tail-spinning panic.
What if the cancer is back?
What if... What if... What if...
The what if's were starting to overpower my ability to be present.
I have worked hard to be present.
I decided that I would rather have them open me up and look inside than to be left wondering-what if...
As I coated my belly with barium, and wrapped myself in a cocoon of warm blankets, I breathed in, one, two, three, four, five -- and out, one, two, three, four, five, six.
As I entered the CT scan, overwhelmed with fear, determination, and hope, it became clear that even if cancer has left my body, it has not left my mind.
The following morning I was told that my scans were still clear.
As I breathed a deep sigh of relief, it became all the more evident that this post-treatment chapter is a constant balancing act between sickness and health. Like my disease, I now live somewhere in that grey zone.
As I continue to live in the here and now, in between the black and white, in between the sunlight and shadows, I have some decisions to make. Every day I have the choice to either let fear overpower my present or to let determination and hope guide my future.
Every day, I have the choice to let myself be defined by the disease, or to live in spite of it.
And every day I have the choice to retreat into what was, or to accept what is.
I choose today. I choose now. I choose hope.
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the finding that those non responding or inpart responding to chemotherapy greatly enhance the treatment to positive treatment by starving at time of treatment.
This seems to involve the idea of causal differentiation or the stem cell of the uppermost part of a tree directing the tree to proper growth against the forces of gravity--
and in this the starving in some way prevents the remaining few cancer cells that may be even more active with the radiatian in them --simply by plant similarity above-- the cancer cell poorly differentiates and starving diminishes in favour of the good cell leading new growth without trouble from the cancer which cannot witststand starvation--
here
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/chemotherapy-and-fasting-to-treat-cancer/3963102