To start from the beginning go here.
By this point in my semi-weekly treatments my veins went into hiding. I used to have plump and voluminous veins that were easy to poke and put IVs in. As a nurse, I would often allow new and inexperienced nurses to practice inserting IVs in me. Now I had to prepare myself each visit to have Dr. John, who was very proficient at starting IVs, spend several minutes finding a vein to use and then possibly missing a time or two to get it in. It was a little painful, but I kept considering the alternative of conventional cancer treatment and considered myself lucky that I only had to deal with a minor inconvenience of having to be poked a few times.
During one of my routine ozone infusions, Dr. John looked a little concerned as my blood was draining into the IV bag. He commented that my blood was looking especially dark and that wasn’t a good sign. He questioned whether I was still juicing and if I was staying on my organic vegan diet. “Of course,” I replied, feeling defensive. But I started to doubt myself and I thought harder about my diet. Could I be making better choices? Was I drinking enough juice? Do I need to cut out bread and other gluten products? He added the ozone to the blood and it turned bright red. I could distinctly see the line of demarcation between the dark non-ozonated blood in the tubing and the bright, hyper-oxygenated blood in the bag. Despite the doubts and uncertainty I felt, the ozone days were my favorite. The treatment was much quicker and I didn’t feel any side effects.
Learning about my MTHFR mutation made me think about ways other than food that I could be exposed to toxins. While delving into the world of alternative and holistic medicine, I quickly learned that the skin is the largest organ and is a semi-permeable membrane of our body. What we put on our skin can be absorbed into our bodies and can cause adverse effects to the body–even more so for someone whose body cannot easily rid itself of the toxins, like me.
Jeremy decided that, for the benefit of my health, we would get rid of the microwave. There’s not a lot of definitive research that shows that radiation from microwaves is harmful, but there is enough questionable evidence and anecdotes that imply that it may be. Erring on the side of caution, we got rid of it.
He also replaced our shower-head with a filtered shower-head that filters out the chlorine in the water. Through his research, Jeremy found that the heat of the water in the shower can cause the chlorine in the water to be vaporized and thus increasing the amount of the toxic chemical that we breathe in as we shower. The public water that our city of Buckeye, Arizona provided was already questionable and highly chlorinated due to the warm climate we lived in that having a filtered shower-head seemed advantageous for even more reasons than just the removal of chlorine. We also had a reverse osmosis filter in the kitchen for drinking water for this reason.
I also began to examine all of my beauty products and toiletries to see just exactly what was in them. I threw out my deodorant and made my own from coconut oil and baking soda. (It still remains the most effective deodorant I’ve used.) I changed my make-up to a cleaner brand I found at Sprouts, a local health food and grocery store chain. I chose to adopt the “no poo” method for hair care, which means I stopped using shampoo and conditioner. I did that for about a year before reverting back to using hair products with clean ingredients. I switched lotions and stopped using perfumes. I was serious about cleaning my body: inside and out.
My prescription for the Arimidex was running out by this time and I was debating about refilling it. I had mixed feelings. Back when I was first diagnosed I received the pathology results which showing that the cancer cells had estrogen and progesterone receptors. I pressed Dr. Wingo to try the hormone blocking therapy. It made sense that the pregnancy hormones were part of the reason the cancer grew so quickly, so if we deprived my body of all of those hormones the cancer would “starve” and not be able to grow back. But now I had different thoughts. Considering my recent scans and blood results I could see that what I had been doing with my diet and IV treatments were working. And adding “unnatural” pharmaceuticals to my body with their side effects would maybe hinder my progress instead of helping it. It’s difficult to make these decisions when there is no research or model to follow to know how exactly this would affect me. In the end, I felt good about discontinuing the Arimidex. But I didn’t tell Dr. John that I stopped taking it until several weeks later when he was reviewing what supplements I was taking. I listed them for him, and he noticed the omission of the Arimidex. He questioned me about it and I told him I didn’t refill the perscription and I didn’t want to take it anymore. He just said, “okay” and didn’t pursue it further.
September came and with it, my birthday. Normally, I would decide which of my favorite cakes to make–usually chocolate. But this year I gave up the idea of celebrating with sweets. I had become accustomed to my new way of life and I accepted that I really couldn’t have my cake and eat it too. The kids were having a difficult time wrapping their minds around the idea that I wasn’t going to have a cake with a candle to blow out. After all, that’s what you do on birthdays, right? In an attempt to appease the kids more than me, Jeremy took on the challenge of making a healthy treat to put a candle on. He had become very adept at making bread at this point and opted to use the bread recipe to make cinnamon rolls. And instead of cinnamon sugar inside he used cinnamon and honey. And no icing. After having gone so long without sugar and watching him spend a lot of time and effort making these cinnamon rolls, the first bite was very anticlimactic. Not really sweet at all. Just basically rolled bread with some honey and cinnamon. However, the kids were excited that I was able to blow out a candle and that we could celebrate together with a “treat” after having gone so long without.
Early in October we sat as a family in our living room to watch a broadcast from Salt Lake City of leaders from our church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they shared messages of comfort, wisdom, and spiritual guidance. During one of the songs performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, my sister-in-law, Sheridan, took a video of me feeding Blake a slice of apple. In the video you can clearly see how orange my skin is in comparison to Blake’s creamy white skin. I had heard the urban legends of people who ate so many carrots that they turned orange but I never really believed it. But here I was: living proof that if you eat, or drink, too many carrots you really will turn orange!
To continue the story go here.