Tuesday, February 25, 2014

relapse, baby...

i've been at the receiving end of my fair share of a tour of liabilities... blindspots in my thinking, details that get overlooked, assumptions that prove disastrous. i consider the attention i'm getting at this threshold of my life a greater gift than the malignancies i'm getting coaching from, and everything i have to report must be read from this context of immense gratitude, commitment to change and learning.

a couple weeks ago i was offered the opportunity to get some structural bodywork done, as detailed below. i felt extremely fortunate since my personal finances are down to a trickle. while i have the prospect to begin earning more income, its predicated on my recovery of health, a catch 22. the lesson i'm about to relate is that diligence of thought and consultation with gut instinct must continue to operate even and especially when you are the object of charity.

i presented myself with a dear friend as translator a couple fridays past for the evaluation. the elder practitioner wearing surgical scrubs met us at the door and kindly ushered us into his treatment room. i noted on his wall canadian diplomas in naturopathy and massage therapy among others. the assessment went well in that he deftly located all my trigger points and areas of congestion. he decided i needed four consecutive treatments, monday to thursday of the week next, a two week break, and then two more treatments.

we arranged for me to have the sessions before work and immediately i began to have reservations about his technique (he rubbed tissues and never engaged the fascia) and about his strategy, for he honed in on the scar, on my remaining breast, and on the lymph nodes throughout the front of my body. i asked him about this, saying that everything i'd read and knew of contraindicated this approach. the literature says to avoid cancerous tumors or direct work on lymphatic nodes if there are of suspicious character or metastatic. he replied that if he did -not- work on these areas now, i would end up in serious trouble later. he was so emphatic i relented and i'm not sure why. perhaps it was because i'd already given my consent to the treatment and was on the table and feeling like a needy child. all last year i had the gumption to say no to authority figures telling me what i should do when my knowledge or instinct guided me otherwise, but somehow because he was a kindly elder and these treatments were a gift, i made a grave error, and it was mine alone to make. it was easy to say no to the oncologists behind their desks when they were, to my mind, talking foul. i also recognized a synchronic rerun, hearing ukrainian again. i struggled to connect to the language i once spoke so fluently, which can only bring to mind mother, an admixture of stage performance joys and personal misery.

a few days earlier i had a dream that i found two large tumors under my L armpit. one of them on closer inspection proved to be a small replica of a breast. i also had a dream a few days before of finding a lump on the side of my head and when i looked at it in a mirror, found it too was depicted as a small breast. during my assessment before the treatments started in earnest, there were no palpable nodes save for the nodule just below the scar i wrote of below.

by the second treatment i noticed i was having a sharp increase in pain while i was at work. not just local but systemic, erupting in multiple locations at once. breast, underarms, heart, lung tips, scar line, groin, bladder, ovaries, lower back, kidneys. i started taking my pain narcotics again and foolishly tried to press on. it wasn't until the third treatment on wednesday that i asked my questions again and on getting the same answers began to move beyond being hard of understanding.

that night the pain went out of control, driving me from bed after hours of restless tossing. as i went downstairs to fetch water and percocets i felt my L arm rubbing up against my body in a peculiar way. after i quenched my thirst and put a couple percs down my throat i investigated my armpit and ribs. i found my rib cage was measurably swollen compared to the R and then to my surreal deja-vued disappointment, i found a new tumor the size of an apricot that hadn't been there a mere six days earlier. faaaak. i knew instantly what i'd done. i don't blame the bodyworker for i see this as something i certainly brought on myself. i of course have no choice but to put my experience in writing for him and ask him to reconsider his convictions, but my followup will be governed by concern for others, not a displaced blame for my own lack of judgement.

i reached out to the hyperbaric clinic owner who has consented to let me get treatment on credit. i told her of my relapse and when i arrived for my first dive since a couple post-op she greeted me with moist eyes in the hallway with a big hug. she said she had a surprise for me. it turns out just a week before she brought on board two new practitioners who work with frequency therapy to heal cancer. she told me she's arranged for me to get some treatment, and that my first session would be that very night after my dive. i was gobsmacked. this was special synchrony as a dear friend in california had only recently sent me a book about frequency as a healing modality which is sitting at my desk at work waiting to be read amid a prodigious pile of library books. i wrote to my friend a couple days later to tell her of this magic turn of events. in yet another synchrony she had just found a cheap copy of a book she wanted to send me which only two days before i signed out from the library, 'Mind-Body Deceptions....' (see my twitter feed) a book which, having just started to read, i will cherish in my office library.

the previous weekend at the medicine buddha retreat where i took the empowerment, i had sincerely asked the universe for some help with this unexpected relapse. i'd been plowing along by my own powers with inconsistent supports and now had made a terrible mistake. i knew this mistake was consistent with the kinds of learning experiences one needs to acquire if the goal is to learn how to manage this ferocious disease, but for the first time i experienced a few days of feeling dark and pessimistic.

after my dive they invited me into a serpentine le corbusier chair and hooked me up to the machine. a band around the head, the wrists and ankles. first the machine reads your imbalances and then it starts inputing new frequencies that will slowly restore you to health. the assistant had never seen so many residuals of trauma... the head injuries, brain hemorrhages, neck and soft tissue injuries, the shoulder, groin and pelvic traumas and repeated joint sprains and strains. on the emotional scale she noted i'd had recent problems with depression, disappointment, anguish. she also noted, and i chuckled, that i have pronounced relaxation conflict... meaning i'm incapable of giving myself proper rest and feel guilty for taking the rest i need. she also told me that its indeed strange that i developed breast cancer... that its certainly an overlay related to psychological distress, not something rooted in a weakness in the body or genetic disposition, something confirmed with the genetic testing i had done.

she said the main weaknesses were the lungs, which she said are in a borderline situation and must be taken care of if i'm to avoid problems there, and also the heart, which is interesting since i started having chest pains and heavy vomiting the week before. she also indicated the bladder is a source of concern, more than reproductive organs, in keeping with a recent history of bladder/kidney infections when i took up booze in earnest a few years ago.

this first part took about an hour, then the reprogramming took another hour. she said the new frequencies would hold as long as my body was able to retain them and the longer it does the better the median level of health. most people in my situation with active cancers can't hold the frequencies at first but the treatments can only be repeated every 3-5 days. they wanted me to sleep at the clinic rather than go home to preserve the frequencies, but i noted a profound feeling of exhaustion. i dragged myself home knowing the clinic would be active again in the morning and i likely wouldn't be.

i slept for 18 hours the next day and into the night. as a result of some intensive IV therapy, a dive and the frequency treatment i've been able to stop taking the hydromorphone and the percocets. onwards!

No comments: