Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Andy... getting ahead

If you see a guy that sounds like me, has my beard and my unique sense of fashion BUT he has no hair..... That's ME... I shaved my head again. I get regular hair cuts, every 10 years or so and it was that time of the decade again.

Friday, November 21, 2008

From Rebecca's mouth to your ear...

Hi, Rebecca here. Much less eloquent than Andy, but here are some quick facts.

So folks want to know what is up and we have not been very forthcoming with updates. Life is just moving slowly. No I am moving slowly. It is something that I have been working toward for a long time and I am trying to maintain it.

Some days I feel almost normal. That means a little woozy if I move to fast, like get out of the car and think I can just move normal pace (for me). Other days, I can do things, but I have to take breaks and sit down between. I call it fragile. Too much motion or noise or too many people at one time make me very woozy and want to hide. Some people have lived their entire lives like this. It is just new to me.

I think that a lot of this is caused by the energy work that is being done on me.

So here is a break down of everything that is happening:

Kaiser is giving me Faslodex, which is a hormone blocker. This has been agreed as the best next step for my treatment because I am ER positive, so I don’t need chemo just yet (yippie). At first my neck got more swollen and tender, which only today I found out means that it is more likely to work. Good news. It is a shot once a month. We are doing it for 3 months and then getting a scan. That will be in end of Jan beginning of Feb.


The integrative doc in Sebastapol, Amitabha Clinic, does anything under the sun that they understand works. They agreed that the Faslodex is a good thing. They also give me lots of supplements and other pills to take. I am on a low acid, high alkaline diet from them. I get IV therapy that has Vitamin C, K, B, DMSO and lots of other good stuff in there. I do that supposedly once a week.

The Chinese and Tibetan doctors work together. I have seen them together two times under the Tibetan medicine direction, two weeks apart. I take herbs from them 3 times a day. They agree that my healing over that two weeks was very huge and that if it goes at that rate, I will be in great shape. Good news. I see the Chinese doc alone and get acupuncture from him next week.

Leo in South Africa has been working on me for the last two weeks doing distance healing. Both he and Brian (another healer I am in contact with) say I am responding well. More good news. I believe he is the cause of most of my exhaustion right now as I was mostly recovered from the pneumonia before he started.

So that sums it up.

Andy has been out of town this week and Allen Poole has been here helping out from Oregon. He is fabulous and we have had a great time. Andy comes back tomorrow, Allen leaves in an hour. Andy does not leave town without us any more in 2008. Yippie!!

I have been having some people cook for me and some shop for me. We have signed up for a computer system that will organize our helpers, but have not set it up yet. We don’t know what we are going to need quite yet. I am hoping to have an ongoing 2 meals a week support to cover us while Andy is working and I am getting back on my feet. I do not know how much energy I am going to have after Leo winds up his work. He has one more week left.

I am loving hearing from everyone, but don’t always stay on the phone long. Please don’t take it personally. I love each and every one of you.

More later.

Gotta take Allen to the train.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

But me no Buts

Rebecca started her new treatment today... 2 injections... one on each side. 

She has been receiving distance healing from Leo (the guy in South Africa) every day this week. 

Thursday she returns to the Tibetan doctor.

Larry, Rebecca's dad has been here since Sunday. I have been at a conference this week and he has been more than picking up the slack. Not only has he been getting the kids out the door in the mornings and home in the afternoon; he's been cooking and doing laundry... He's actually catching up on our insane laundry backup.  THANKS LARRY.

Next week I'm back in Dublin so yet again we will need help. After this trip I'll be home for while.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Stronger

Just a quick note to tell you all that Rebecca is continuing to get stronger and feel better. I wouldn't say she's back to where she was 8 weeks ago but it's getting closer.

We have confirmed with Rebecca's oncologist that she will do the Faslodex treatment next. Here is some text from the Faslodex.com home page:

FASLODEX is a hormonal treatment for metastatic hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. It is for postmenopausal women whose disease has returned or progressed following an antiestrogen (medication that blocks estrogen), such as tamoxifen. FASLODEX may be effective when tamoxifen no longer works for you.

And unlike a pill you have to take every day, FASLODEX is an injection you get once a month in your doctor's office. So you can focus on you, not your treatment.

Doesn't that sound fun!



Monday, November 03, 2008

Back in Berkeley

I'm back from my week in Dublin Ohio visiting head office of my new job for the first time. It went well, it'll still take a while for me to feel like I know enough to contribute anything real but I think I have something to add.

Meanwhile, Rebecca continues to recover from the pneumonia and continues to get stronger. It seems to be 'common knowledge' that it takes weeks to recover from pneumonia so there is no surprise that she's not yet back at full speed. The big question that remains to be answered in the short term is how much of her current condition is the pneumonia and how much has 'other causes'. My understanding is that the cancer in her lungs now gives her a predisposition to infections like pneumonia because the standard lung cleaning operations are obstructed by the cancer growth. I'm not sure what we do about that.

The results of the last biopsy showed that Rebecca's tumor is still estrogen receptor positive. This means that it can still be treated by 'starving' the tumor of estrogen. The doctor has proposed a hormone treatment that is a monthly injection. He hopes that the treatment will either stop the current growth or may even shrink the tumors. I'm not quite sure how that aligns with his other statement that there is a 30% chance of this treatment being effective. The proposal is that she tries this treatment for 3 months and then we check to see if it has helped.

One of the main questions we have right now is: Why not jump in at this stage and aggressively treat the cancer with chemo therapy? Not that Rebecca particularly wants to do chemo but we are wandering why that isn't the recommendation.

In other news... Rebecca went to see a new doctor at the end of last week. At her initial meeting there were actually 2 doctors present, the homeopath and the Tibetan doctor. They sat on either side of her both checked her pulses while discussing with her and with each other what they were feeling. Rebecca was particularly impressed that rather than asking her what her symptoms are these doctors felt her pulses and told her what was going on... You are sleeping poorly, you have back pain, you have 'this ' type of cough... etc. Rebecca has great hope that the treatments offered by these doctors; herbs, dietary, etc, will address not only these symptoms but the underlaying systemic causes of the cancer growth.

We continue to gather information about all of the cancer 'cures' that are available out there. Many of you have sent us pointers to various practices and practitioners. We have to try to work out which of these avenues Rebecca should pursue, some of them are mutually exclusive.

More as the news comes in...