Mal is having some trouble finding the right mask so he is still not getting enough sleep. But he’s working with a sleep doctor to try and find one and also re-calibrating to settings he can tolerate.
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Well we got the results from the CT scan: Stage Four Endometriosis. Some of it has gotten into the lymph system and the lungs. We have been referred to another clinic that treats endometrial cancer with chemotherapy. I was told that 50% of people who undergo chemotherapy are still alive after five years. Statistically strange, I think. It is going to take some time to absorb this and decide how to proceed. Chemotherapy, alternate (some dietary changes, natural progesterone therapy, more exercise), or both?
Most of the doctors I’ve spoken with have no idea that there is a difference between natural progesterone, and “progestins” (progesterone that has been chemically altered so that it can be patented, because natural substances may not legally be patented). Natural hormone cream can be purchased over the counter --no prescription required.
I’m still mulling it over and will be consulting with the new clinic in the next couple of weeks. I have many questions, of course. 
I have been experiencing a certain amount of abdominal pain/discomfort which is gradually decreasing with the new diet.
If you (and of course, your wife) don’t mind saying: How long ago? Did she go the chemotherapy route?
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Hang in there. 
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If you don’t mind me asking, what is the special diet? I would just like to add it to my memory banks, just in case. We never know what is to come.
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It is called the Budwig Diet. Mal did the research on it. We haven’t fully implemented it yet, only partially. Since no corporations are making any money from it, there are no “scientific” studies, only anecdotal evidence. But there seems to be lots of that.
But if a person doesn’t have cancer then the Progesterone balance would be best to check out, too. ("What your doctor may not tell you about-- menopause. Also another book called what your doctor may not tell you about premenopause.)
I believed I was still menstruating many years after using the hrt patch for over five years. I had heard other women say that theirs was going on for way too long, and said they should call it “menoforever”. When discussing the continued menopause with my (then) doctor, he said it was because I was on the patch and then stopped. Dr. Lee’s research made me realise that doctor was wrong.
I have a new health care provider who once I told her I was still menstruating, got very concerned and ordered tests for me. And that is where I am now.
My own responsibility lies with not taking effective action soon enough because of my phobia around the medical profession and its institutions.
And now I’m spreading the word about the difference between natural progesterone and synthetic progesterone called “progestins”. I have two girls and close friends in their thirties that I have started passing on this information.
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@TravelEcho - My wife was diagnosed in 2011. She had chemo, radiation, and a lumpectomy. They told her that if the cancer happened to reoccur (or another one developed), they could not use the same chemo treatment. She lost weight, had nausea from chemo, and developed neuropathy in her feet. She takes pills to help with the neuropathy, but it never really goes away. She has an incredibly determined, stubborn streak that drove me nuts during her chemo.
But my brother (who had a brain tumor) said that his experience is that the stubborn ones had a better survival rate. So I guess I have to count myself blessed! LOL.
My wife was told to avoid sweets and reduce simple carbs, which your body converts to sugars. Cancer just loves sugar!
My brother’s brain tumor was serious. Dartmouth Medical School told him that his survival chance was only about 2 %. He pulled through!!
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I too have friends who have walked this path. One has lived with lymphoma for many years. One had cancer removed, was doing fine and the chemo pill caused a rash and put her in the hospital. She came out on a walker but she recovered and is doing fine 6 years later. Another friend had a masectomy in her 50s and been cancer free ever since and is now 94. My aunt had a lump removed 10 years ago and is doing well today. And I knew a man who lived 20 years with a cancer, though I can’t remember what type.
They all eat very healthy. Lots of fruit and veggies. No or low sugar and they stay as active and engaged as possible, doing what they love.
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@TravelEcho I am wishing you all the best with your health, surgery, and recovery of course!
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Thanks for being willing to share some details. That is very helpful as well as hopeful! <3
I’m still not sure which way to go. We have an appointment with another oncologist tomorrow, this one at a cancer oriented centre, to discuss our possible next steps. These visits are already exhausting, even without the chemo.
I admire anyone who can make themselves go through the hell of it in order to get more healthy. Best of luck to you both! And thanks again.
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During her weeks of chemo, my wife once walked out of the bathroom and commented, “Who knew taking a shower could be so exhausting!” She gave a slight smile.
We were both happy when the chemo was over.
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Thank you for the infusion of optimism! Between you and @Clemm I’m hearing some really helpful stories! Good Positivity!
@DevilinPixy Thank you so much! I’m gathering all the good vibes and soaking them in! 
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Lovely! A sense of humour is essential! Good thing I have a Cartoon Brain. I sympathise with your wife. Taking showers has been exhausting for me for years! Maybe after all this I will be able to take one and still have some energy left. lol
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I swear when I peeked in here previously, I didn’t see this thread! I guess I need another eye exam…
What a sad / happy rollercoaster to read through. 
And the update isn’t what I thought it would be at all. I was expecting all kinds of exciting art prospects from you. Sigh.
I’m in a similar but much smaller boat in that I have pretty bad cataracts in one eye making me mostly blind with it. Fortunately my own cartoon brain is doing a decent job filling out a proper 3D world. I went in for an exam last year and was given two options, new lenses in both eyes - might as well have them both done for equal vision. One set for near vision, requiring similar but weaker glasses which I’m used to, one set for far vision, requiring reading glasses. I decided to go for the latter, since I want to see the world properly again, and stupid glasses are never tiled right, skewing colors due to the refraction. It makes doing art and making liveries in racing games a bit of a chore as I need to keep tilting my head back to make the colors line up properly. But I’m digressing.
So being a similar coward / disdainful of doctors, hospitals and all that hell, I’ve been putting it off. Plus the fact that I’d need a ride to and from the hospital, though fortunately I have a friend who would sacrifice his day for me. What a pal. I have a letter from the hospital I really should open, as it’s been ripening for a week…
I’m not really worried about it per se. Like MacForADay, I’m simply bugged over anyone poking around in my eyes - ugh, my language sometimes. But that’s basically it. I know that I should just get it overwith, since it’s a fairly routine procedure these days. With a slight chance of death. Although I’m not worried about that either, even though I have plenty to live for. It’s just that this world is so transitory, and frankly, messed up lately that I yearn for those New Skies.
This world is what truly worries me. I’ve been losing sleep over it, and the fatigue and wooly headedness has kept me from my true love, writing, so I have a half finished chapter for my fic sitting idle for two months. Sadly, I’m still afraid of my other talents too, or lack thereof, so no art or music either. And even with as much as eight cups of coffee and tea a day - gah! - I’m too woozy to play something as chill as No Man’s Sky, and have been bouncing between Fallout 4’s gunplay and… Gran Turismo. Hey, I’m a racer at heart too. But I need a distraction from this sorry reality we’re stuck with. Unfortunately we all have free will, and Some People are using theirs to mess up this planet something awful. There is talk of World War III again after decades of being over all that, and it wouldn’t shock me if something bad happened. Not nuclear war necessarily, but something. Gah, Humans… 
While I’m ready to go any old time, I tremble for my fellow Humans on this dirty wet rock in space. For that matter, I feel compassion for all beings in every realm in these realities, and have been praying for all of them for the past couple of years. Who knows how many other peoples exist in various Somewheres? Thanks to science fiction / fantasy, and No Man’s Sky lately, I’ve been dreaming of meeting them all in eternity. I’m such a spiritual bleeding heart romantic. 
Eh, I’m doing that digressing thing again…
Well, back to your situation. News of your cancer stings a little as my mom smoked herself to death, and didn’t want to take her worsening health seriously. “Oh it’s just lingering pneumonia,” she’d say, and “Our family smoked into their 80s.” And probably dropped dead from cancer. And even when the prognosis came down, she still wouldn’t quit because she was going to die anyway. She was stubborn too, and it took seven months, passing away at home in hospice.
I like your approach and attitude. It’s a shame you have to deal with one crisis at a time, and I hate that your vision has to take a back seat to more pressing matters - and worsening because of it. I’ll add your troubles to the piles of worries in my prayer list. Maybe it’ll help. It can’t hurt, much. 
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My mother smoked two packs of unfiltered Players cigarettes all her life and she died at age 95 of old age. Go figger.
All good thoughts coming my way are helpful. Not hurtful. much.
Sorry to hear about your mum. And your difficulties getting to your art of various kinds.
I find that what helps with keeping the creativity going for many of us is to wean ourselves from engaging with the conventional news media. It can be a hard habit to break; harder than quitting smoking.
Best of luck with your visual problems, too!
The cancer oncologist has told me some good neww and some bad news. The bad news first: My cancer is “most likely” terminal. The good news: 1) it is a very slow growing form of cancer. 2) chemotherapy is not the only way to deal with it. There is a hormone regimen one can try instead.
He is looking into seeing if there are still hormone receptors for estrogen and progesterone. He advised that it has some side effects but none as invasive as those from chemo.
I asked him what the hormone therapy consisted of and of course it was synthetic estrogens and progestins.
I talked to him about what I knew of natural hormones and he actually apologized to me because he couldn’t prescribe them. He could only prescribe the patented versions.
I asked if he thought I had the time to try the natural hormone treatment myself (answer was yes due to it being a very slow growing cancer) and would I be able to track the progress of that treatment through his clinic. The short answer was “Yes! Of course! I’m not going to kick you out.” He smiled. He put in an order to have the labs check the biopsy sample for hormone receptors and we will find out next week.
In the mean time I am still slowly going through Dr. Lee’s book: “What your doctor may not tell you about menopause”. I am learning that endometrial cancer is a strong side effect of taking synthetic hormone replacement for five years or more, and that is something that I did take for five years.
The main thing is that he actually advocated hormone treatment for this kind of cancer for people who don’t want to do the chemotherapy (he is the third oncologist I’d seen and the others were all “chemotherapy is the only way”, was willing to see how the natural hormones vs synthetics worked out, and was sorry that he was unable to prescribe it.
So 
we may yet push the terminus a little farther out, and on our own terms.
Thanks again to everyone here for your interest and your good wishes/prayers.
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Yes. I had my cataract surgery (left eye) in 1988. I was lucky enough to have a surgeon named Moses. 
I had not thought about it but found that the colors I saw with my right eye no longer exactly matched the left. The right eye’s view of the world had a slight yellowish tint due to aging. The artificial lens in the left eye let me see colors more naturally.
So your color vision is likely to improve a good bit. … Something to look forward to.
Since I started working in the accessibility area, I have come believe that there is no such thing as one normal vision. The specific shades of colors that people with “normal vision” see are not exactly the same. Close, but not exactly the same. My wife insists that a heather gray blanket is a shade of brown, for example. And what see as a teal blue color she sees as a shade of green. Yet we both pass the color tests. We are more diverse than we know.
(Don’t get me started on my view of software that defaults to chart and table colors that are a problem for folks with a color vision deficiency! 
)
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There are many claims of people living to ridiculous ages, but on investigation have proven to be bogus, or, at best, unverified. The oldest person proven to have lived was Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.
Besides drinking red wine every day, and eating a kilo of chocolate a week, Calment smoked cigarettes until she was 117 - when she gave up - “on medical advice”.
Go figure indeed.
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I suspect that future DNA analysis will find genes or gene clusters that provide enhanced protection from varied hazards such as carcinogens.
Until some such “miracle cure” is found, we do well to avoid such known health hazards.
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Saw the Cancer oncologist, Dr. Horowiitz, on Monday. He confirmed that I still have 100% Estrogen receptors and 50% progesterone receptors, so hormone therapy is possible instead of Chemo.
We told him we were pursuing a couple of other alternatives and asked if he thought we had time to do that. He replied that the kind of cancer I have is a very slow growing one so that shouldn’t be a problem. He gave us an appointment for another CT scan three months from now to see how things are going.
He was very sweet, and very kind. I feel grateful that we found him. Other doctors might be unwilling to monitor the cancer if you didn’t follow their prescribed conventional practices.
We will see what the scan reveals in three months. I’m being intentional about hoping for the best outcome.
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I’m half-glad to read this - and I thought I’d replied, but shiny objects keep distracting me, dag nab it. I’ve added you to my prayer pile for what it’s worth, when I can remember you anyway! My excuse is it’s a pretty big pile. 
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@TravelEcho
The title of this topic caught my attention & re-reading through the earlier posts was a heatwarming experience…and then I got to the 2 year update bit & my belly went cold & a dozen tales of those close to me sprang into my mind. They range from spectacular recoveries from dire illness to the unexpected loss of a perfectly healthy young friend (heart attack at 23).
Life is very weird that way.
I send my heartfelt best wishes to you & yours.
The reason the topic caught my eye was that my wife has just undergone a successful cataract surger on one eye with the other to be done in a month or so.
She has discovered that she had for so long been seeing the world through a sepia filter. It was quite amazing watching her marvel over all the new ‘blue’. She stopped to ponder the dead leaves with all their colours & was amazed at how many shades of brown there is.
It reminded me a of a child discovering colours for the first time & was a joy to witness.
In an update to my own post 2 years ago, I’m doing much better.
It’s been a long road & I was a bit dissapointed that once I got to a certain point in my recovery I seemed to stall but have since accepted this new normal.
My speed, mobility & flexibility are permanently lessened but natural daily exercise helps.
I ache pretty much all the time but its like a tiredness from sport, rather than an injury. I go for daily forest walks with my doggy pals & regularly just go for walks because I can. The more I do, the better my general well being is. That’s why I don’t game as much anymore. I need to keep active or I sort of seize up like an old battered machine.
I’m back out riding my motorcycle again but long trips are no longer possible. That’s ok; I’m getting older now & I’m content with my casual rides to town or taking the long way home along the ranges.
As I proofread the above paragraphs it reinforces to me just how fragile & wonderful life can be.
Live every moment.
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