The Golden Age

With the holidays and all, I’ve been pretty busy, so forgive my ridiculous procrastination and delays. I hope everyone had a marvelous Christmas. I spent the day making my rounds with my own family, Mike’s family, family friends, and Chris, of course. This time of year is the hardest time for eating healthy, in my opinion. Which brings me to a quick update on my health. I just recently had my 3 month lab work done (you know, the one that was supposed to be D-day to determine if I have to start taking a type 2 diabetes medication). Some labs have improved but the most important ones have gotten worse. It seems all my half-assed efforts have, in fact, failed. I am so pathetic. I have my follow up appointment in February when the doctor wants to “discuss my recent lab results at length.” Great. In the meantime, I have a pumpkin cheesecake, chocolate turtle cheesecake, ice cream bars, boxes of cookies and candy, and a 6 pound bag of gummy bears to eat. Based on my twisted rationale, I must eat these things as quickly as possible to get rid of them so I can’t eat them anymore. I’ll update you on this fascinating topic after my appointment.

Now I must get back to where I last left off. For about one month, starting mid to late May 2011, Mike experienced what I think of as an improvement phase within two weeks of starting PLX. We had about a month of being really hopeful because things were looking up. PLX was really starting to kick in, he decreased his Oxycontin dose down to one sixth of what it had been, he was throwing up every few days instead of daily, he was more awake so we could hang out, he gained a few pounds back, and he was smoking pot like it was going out of style. This was a period when we thought we had much more time than we did. We were making plans for next year, wondering how long I’d be on a leave of absence from work, and talking about how much better Mike would feel in time for hunting season. When we saw Dr. Nichols in Spokane she was amazed at how good Mike looked and she was able to feel through his abdomen that his liver had shrunk, which probably explained why he could eat more and felt better. I was cautiously excited.

Mike had worked for Deer Park Ambulance before he was accepted into Physician Assistant school and before he began getting sick. His old coworkers started a donation account for him at a bank and also arranged for the pizza place in Deer Park to donate a portion of their proceeds each Wednesday night to his fund. Mike was able to make it to pizza night one time at the end of May. He sat in the backseat of his parents’ car smoking a joint the whole ride there, prepping himself for a pizza gorging. We joined lots of family and friends there for dinner. The hard wooden seats made Mike’s back ache, but he put on a smile and was deeply happy to see everyone and feel that much support.

There were so many things we were trying to balance, I felt like my brain was going to explode from stress overload. Despite my skepticism and mockery of alternative medicine, we were on the cusp of trying anything and everything. We had a family friend who was experienced in reflexology come over and give Mike a couple foot massages. Reflexology is the theory that application of pressure to certain points on the feet correspond to certain parts of the body and can promote a beneficial physical response. I had all these videos on reflexology, and whether I believed in it or not, I felt pressured to learn some of it in case it could actually help Mike in some small way. But that mostly got put on the back burner. Mike also tried one session of acupuncture and moxibustion at an East Asian clinic where we were educated about the Yin and the Yang and unbalance of energy. I just sat back and took pictures of Mike with needles sticking out of him the whole time then was horrified when I had to pay the bill. We were hopeful that it would help his pain and nausea but it didn’t. Mike even saw a Reiki healer in Spokane. Reiki is a Japanese spiritual technique of “laying on of hands” that is purported to promote healing by transferring energy or qi. Some of the things the Reiki healer said were interesting, such as Mike had a “lack of trust in God.” She also said either in a past life or one of his ancestors had been shot for “speaking their truth” and that Mike harbored some resentment. Not sure what that information did for us, but it was interesting. And expensive. We also went to a more holistic physician who gave us the name of a doctor in New York who had started a specific alternative cancer treatment program. I went home and looked that doctor up and found that his practices involved coffee enemas and an organic diet, and that he’d had his license revoked for running clinical trials that had no evidence of benefit at all and he’d fabricated the results of trials in his favor. Even so, after hearing so many people claim an alkaline diet helps cure cancer, we still made some recipes from the pH diet cookbook. We figured it couldn’t hurt. I made this pot of something that was supposed to be soup called “anti-cancer soup” from the cookbook. I couldn’t tolerate one bite but Mike ate 3 bowls. We also were communicating with a doctor from Hawaii who was recommended to us. She was an MD but had turned to much more alternative methods in her practice and had a lot of success stories. We were considering even going to Hawaii to see her, but she was planning to come to the mainland at some point so we hoped we’d be able to see her then. I was incredibly overwhelmed by all of these alternative practices because I knew I didn’t support them, I found most of them ludicrous, but as I said in a previous blog, we all know someone who knows someone who has a success story with something like this. And you desperately want to try anything and everything. So although Mike and I chose to make God the center of our focus and put our faith in Him, we also had the mentality of wanting to leave no stone unturned. I couldn’t bear the thought of failing to giving everything a try. 

More torturous, Mike said, than the pain and nausea, was the major restlessness he was having. He would get restless leg syndrome and anxiety during the night. We went as far as trying the weird old wives’ tale that people swore by: putting lavender soap under the sheets at the foot of the bed, although we laughed at ourselves. And as strange as it sounds, it sometimes seemed to work. Placebo effect, maybe? I’d sometimes get up in the middle of the night with Mike and keep him company while he smoked some pot. No, I never smoked it with him while he was sick. I was obsessed with making every decision as “morally right” as I could, for fear it would alter our spiritual quest and the outcome. We finally discontinued one of his anti-nausea medications and his restlessness got a little better. Medication side effects can really mess you up. Always consider those as a possible cause of symptoms. 

Although Mike was feeling much better, no longer having fevers, or throwing up daily, we were still so frustrated that he couldn’t feel great. We had all this time together, the weather was good, but he just couldn’t enjoy it. We were desperate for him just to have one or two great days. But he didn’t. Every morning he would wake up with vague, sharp stomach pain, and we feared what could be causing that. He typically would grab his blue garbage can every morning and dry heave in it the second he sat up. And he was still in pain. 

The first of June we went back to Seattle for a check up with Dr. Thompson. For the first time at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Mike walked into the clinic instead of rode in a wheelchair. When I realized this, sitting in the waiting room, I began to cry with gratitude and pride for Mike. Mike had the typical routine of lab work done on the first floor then his appointment with Dr. Thompson, who thought Mike looked great, just like the other few patients on PLX, and it was clearly working. We went over his labs with the doctor, and they had all improved (some of them even to normal levels). Mike also had an EKG to check his heart rhythm since that’s a possible problem with PLX. Our friend Phil who lives in Seattle visited us at the SCCA house that night and we went to dinner at a nearby restaurant. 

The next morning we were slated to come home, but Mike got a wild hair and after arguing over who had to make the phone call, one of us finally called his uncle Chris who lives on Whidbey Island. I got directions from him on the phone (this was before either of us had smart phones with GPS) and after checking out of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance hotel, we headed out. It would turn into a fun little impromptu trip which I can’t pass up the opportunity of talking about in my next post. I’ll write that post “next year.” 

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