This Journal / Blog goes backward from the most recent to time previous. You can read the latest entries and come back for more as time passes. And you can work backwards in time or if you want to study the situation and learn as I did you can start at the bottom and work up.
Ilana has started her own blog, read it here. (which is much better than mine so far – B)
2011
December 14 - I got down to the whole body hyperthermia treatment room at 8 am. Herzog decided the evening before that I should probably not do the extreme hyperthermia with chemo but for now do the moderate hyperthermia. The extreme takes the body to 41 degrees C and a person needs to be sedated because you can not stand getting above 39. During moderate hyperthermia I am fully awake. I had temperature probes attached to my armpit, chest, back and had a rectal probe as the main internal body sensor. My heartbeat and blood pressure were also being tracked. I took off all my clothes and lay down on a mesh massage like table. I had saline and glucose set up through intravenous started and then was covered with a metal frame or tent like structure. Then two large sheets of aluminum foil were placed over my body like a tent.
i had to use this photo from their brochure because they wouldn’t let ilana watch …
The heater was underneath the bed I was lying on and I could see the computer monitor and all of the temperature readings if I turned my head to the side. When the heat was turned on my body temperature was 36.5. (normal body temperature is 37) My temperature gradually increased and the temperature in the tent was maintained at 40.5 to 41 degrees. At 38 degrees internally it was beginning to get uncomfortable and then the climb from 38 to 39 was very uncomfortable. It took 1 hour and 25 minutes to raise my temperature to 39 and I was counting the seconds as it rose between 38.7 and 39. I was almost going to call it quits about a dozen times except I had come a long way to do this – 1/2 way around the world, and paid a lot of money, and knew that this was going to play a significant roll in reducing my cancer in the prostate. When I got to 39 I asked the nurse what happens next and she said that we are going to hold the body temperature at 39 for one hour. Well I never thought I was going to make it. I had my iphone playing music, meditation music, I did internal imaging and relaxation and breathing exercises as this high fever was very uncomfortable and I wanted it to end. I was in the chamber for 2 hours and 25 minutes and then they turned off the heat and removed the aluminum foil. I lay there for another hour unable to move from exhaustion while my body slowly over that hour went back down to 37 degrees. I had the nurse wipe my head and forehead about 30 times with cold water just to tolerate the situation.
I found out that my heartbeat had risen from a resting beat of 66 to a peak of 110 while I was in the hyperthermia tent. The max for my age is 130 to 140. She said that about 1 in 20 people can’t stand the heat and get out and they have to be sedated in order to do the treatment. Afterwards the nurse walked me up to my room because I was wobbling and she did not let me climb any stairs so we rode the elevator for the first time. I was wiped out all afternoon and slept and only sort of came back to normal at dinner time.
okay this is what was left of my after 3 hours on the Gobi desert – notice the smile …
December 13 – I had an in depth appointment with Dr. Herzog and really appreciated his open and honest answers. For example he said that if you ask 10 doctors you will get 10 different opinions. This is certainly true, for example one doctor gave me injections of Vitamin D of 200,000 IU, another doctor has advised me to do 20,000 IU a day and Dr. Herzog said that I don’t need more than 2000 IU a day.
His approach is very intelligent, choosing the optimum treatment with minimal detrimental side effects and harm to the patient. He certainly agreed with me that radiation and chemo levels in North America do more harm than good for many patients and that more patients are dying from treatment related problems than cancer these days. He made some excellent suggestions for changes to my treatment.
Dec 12 – Today was my first real day of treatments. It was so interesting to me that my day was focused on increasing the strength of my body and its healing power. This is something that not one of the allopathic doctors ever even mentioned. Only my alternative healer (an allopathic physician and radical psychiatrist on Whidbey Island) and my naturopath Dr. Parmar have worked to strengthen my immune system and optimize my diet.
At the FachKlinic I started out with a massage then reflexology. Next I did magnetic therapy which does amazing things to optimize my immune system. I then did a local oncotherm treatment on my prostate and was given oxygen and Vitamin B intravenous.
Dec 11 – We are in Bad Salzhausen, a small town about an hour north of Frankfurt. Today Ilana and I got on the train and went to Frankfurt as it is Sunday and the Klinic is on holiday. We went to the 600 year old Christmas market and to see Goethe’s house and the museum attached. It was very cold and yet we got a real taste of the German people and the amazing age of the city compared to our 100 year old cities in western Canada.
Saturday I got my first tests and Vitamin C and B intravenous. They have to make sure that my heart, lungs and kidneys can take the whole body hyperthermia treatment which is scheduled for Wednesday. They put me in a chamber and heat my core body temperature up to 41 degrees C (normal body temperature is 37 C). Apparently doctors noticed time and again that people who had high fevers were often cured of cancer so they are duplicating a high fever. Cancer cells can not survive this temperature because they have poor blood supply but normal cells can. They hold my body at this temperature for one hour and apparently the body can not stand this temperature so they put me under anesthetic. This is the whole reason that I came to this clinic as they do not do this procedure in the US or Canada. In fact there are people from all over the world here for this treatment.
Dec 10 – The first day in the Klinic, we get the tour and are showed our room. It is a rambling three story building that stretches back into the property with treatment rooms, a dining hall and residency rooms. The doctors live in the building also.
Dec 9 – We fly 10.5 hours from Vancouver to Calgary to Frankfurt and are picked up at the airport and driven to Dr. Herzog’s clinic in Bad Salzhausen. (Salt house)
Dec 8 – We fly out of Vancouver on a short hop to Calgary. We board a Boeing 767 for a 9 hour flight to Frankfurt where we are picked up at the airport by the Klinic’s driver. The flight is like all flights long, cramped and the food is terrible and the possibility of sleep is challenging.
Dec 7 – Before I get in the car to drive to Vancouver I phone my doctor to get my latest PSA number. I am very hopeful that with my month or so of vegan eating and with all of my focus on herbs and vitamins that my PSA will have gone down from its climb to 51. Unfortunately it is now 74. Okay fine I am off to Vancouver. An uneventful and wonderful drive in my new vehicle – a 1997 Toyota 4Runner (with a sunroof – I have always wanted a sunroof.)
Dec 1 – 6 – I am arranging by Skype phone and email a trip to Germany for a whole body hyperthermia treatment and make arrangements to fly with my older daughter Ilana on Dec 9th for 10 days.
November 2011 – Qi Gong and Chinese medicine
October 2011 – Budwig Diet
September 2011 – The third major bad news event.
I found myself in the office of a very kind and considerate man. He carefully took my history and asked many questions. He did a prostate exam and said that yes he could feel a cancer bulge on the right side of my prostate. He called a colleague to discuss whether I should have radiation first or have chemo first then came back into the room to offer a course of treatment. He said that he would be able to offer me a month of radiation starting in one week and that I should begin right away, time if of the essence he said. He then suggested that I should recover for a couple of months before starting about another month of chemo therapy. I then asked him if he thought that these treatments would kill off the cancer and buy me a few more good years of life. He looked down to the floor and pursed his lips – he said that these things are very difficult to predict and that he would not be prepared to do so but he suggested that in my weakened condition that the metastatic cancer would probably spread and that things can get very difficult. He said he realized that this is a difficult decision and suggested that I think about if for a week and then get back to him and that I should then arrange to come to Vancouver for about a month. He said that the first two weeks would go okay and then that the second two weeks would be rough and that I might want to have someone come to drive me to and from the clinic. Upon leaving he introduced me to someone who offered to set up an appointment for me with a grief counsellor. I informed her that that would not be necessary and left. I thought that I handled that whole situation quite well but then once outside I realized that I could not remember which parking lot I had parked in and then realized that I could not remember what the vehicle I had borrowed looked like. I realized that I was in shock. I eventually found the vehicle (it took about an hour) and drove to Capers to get some carrot juice. While I was waiting I was standing staring at the strawberries and I began to cry with such great sadness for myself in the realization how beautifully red the strawberries are and how much I would miss them. I managed to get home and I sat down at the studio and there was Gnetahn. He looked both very tired and very earnest. I explained what had happened at the doctors office and we sat there looking at each other. He said that he had been up all night researching, as he had been all week, and that he had found a book that he wanted me to read. He insisted that I read chapter 5 and gave me a stick to transfer the downloaded book onto my computer.
I read chapter 5 and I got so excited I just about burst. The book was by Bill Henderson and it is called Cancer Free. His wife had died of cancer some 30 years ago and in his distress and seeing what dying of cancer is like at the hands of traditional medicine he was determined to find another answer. He found many answers, hundreds of them and thousands of stories of people who had figured out how cancer grows and why it grows in the human body and how, if you address the cause, you can reverse the process. He had researched 400 different treatments and had picked the best 5 to offer to the readers of his book. I got very excited and realized that I was going to turn down Dr. Pickles offer of radiation treatment.
I flew back to Nelson and met my devastated wife who was still reeling from the news the day before. I came home excited and she was more than confused. I sat down in the living room with River, Barbarah Nicoll, Michael Maser and my dear old friend Eroca Ryan and shared my excitement with them about what I had learned and about what I was planning to do. I began his protocol that day and ordered the products that I did not yet have in the US and had them shipped to our US post office box.
By the next day my aches and pains that were a result of the hormone treatment that has immediate and long term debilitating effects stopped. Within a couple of days the dull ache in my pelvic bone went away and I began to feel energetic again rather than always tired and worn out. I began eating far more vegetables and salads and less meat and fried food. With the cold weather I found it hard to just eat raw vegetables and tried to have a soup and steamed vegetables with dinner. My breakfast became Bill Henderson’s rendition of Dr. Budwig’s cottage cheese and flax seed oil mixture. The two ingredients are blended together until smoothie then blueberries, pineapple, strawberries or raspberries are added (or two of them are added) to make the mixture something someone can eat with some pleasure.
June 2011 – I got my PSA tested and to my delight it had dropped down to 4, which is the upper limit of what a PSA score should be. This means that the hormone treatment (androgen deprivation therapy) is working and I am buying time.
January 2011 – shifting my inner dialogue
August and September 2010
I was in Dallas Texas at the annual Rethinking Everything conference giving a number of talks with a team from SelfDesign. While I was there my ability to urinate was becoming more and more difficult each day. I was urinating often and with urgency. At one point I thought that it was going to stop altogether. I phoned up to Dr. Parmar and he suggested that I come home to Canada right away because the solution was an operation called a TURP and that I did not want to have to pay for one in the US. I left home and got back to Canada. I did not get a TURP right away because I was hoping that the treatment that I was going to begin the end of the first week in September was going to fix the problem. The treatment with Dr. Gurdev is called local hyperthermia with an Oncotherm machine made in Germany. This is the first machine in North America and I was on the list for treatment. After two weeks of treatment my urination difficulties were worse and Gurdev said that I had to get a TURP. Parker had some connections and got me in to see a Dr. Black at the Vancouver General. After a complete examination Dr. Black instructed me to go over to Emergency and book myself in as his patient stating that I could not urinate. I was admitted Friday evening, spent Saturday in the hospital with my first catheter – not my favorite experience to say the least. I ended up on the operating table at midnight on Saturday night. The operation consists of inserting a tube up my urethera, a tube that contains a camera, a flashlight, a cutting or boring tool and a cauterizing tool. The idea is to start at the bladder and work backwards digging a tunnel through the prostate so that there is a big enough channel to allow urine flow. Check out an anatomy book if you need some graphics. Sunday morning I was dismissed and headed home to the studio. It was an example in my mind of the amazing aspects of allopathic medicine – they are great mechanics with amazing tools – loved the anesthetic and the fact that the whole experience was painless – if not daunting.
a picture of me taken by Gnetahn at 3 am after my TURP operation
by the way, looking at this picture I remember not being able to feel or move my legs from the hips down for 2 hours
June 2010
Upon the suggestion of Dr. Parmar, who said that I needed to get on some treatment plans right away, I was introduced to Dr. Brad Weeks on Widbey Island in Washington, USA. I arranged to go down and begin treatments right away. His particular treatment was called IPT – Insulin Potentiated Therapy. I did 12 treatments with him 3 per week which was low dose chemotherapy and Vitamin C. I had to quit at that time because each treatment cost me $1500 and in one month I had racked up a bill of over $25,000. I was on the right track however, because I was feeling pretty good and my PSA had dropped to 71.
May 2010 – Second bad news
I was in New York with Parker Cook giving a talk to a group organized by a friend of mine that I had met at the Rethinking Education conference in Dallas Texas. My daughter Ilana was feeling that I was not watching my PSA carefully enough and did some research on doctors in New York. She found a prostate specialist on Park Avenue and booked an appointment for me. The day after we had a boat tour of the Statue of Liberty I went to see the prostate doctor. He used a sonogram to picture my prostate from inside my rectum and found that I had several small spots of cancer and then he found one that he was concerned about because it looked like it was on the edge of the prostate gland. He insisted that I go next door for an MRI. I did and then I bought a large quantity of his special herbal products to treat the cancer. I had the MRI and then joined up with Parker. That evening after dinner we were standing in Times Square when I got a phone call from the doctor. He had analyzed my MRI scans and said that the cancer had metastasized outside my prostate and was showing up in the pubic bone to the left and in the lymph node to the right side of my prostate. He said that this is very serious and that I should see my doctor in Canada right away. I got to Canada and found out that my PSA was 117.
2008 -2009
In the summer of 2008 we moved into the house in Sirdar. All this time I was taking my vitamins and herbs and waiting – I was not always taking my full amounts and was not really changing my lifestyle because I was counting on the 70% of people who have the slow growing kind of prostate cancer.
2007 – 2008
In 2007 – 2008 River, Lia and I moved to Nelson, BC in order to begin working on the house in Sirdar in order to move in there after a year in Nelson.
In the spring of 2008 I began finishing the interior of the house, kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom and bedrooms, including an addition.
2006 – 2007
In 2006 – 2007 I was living again in Vancouver down on False Creek and was feeling reasonably good. I did not have any symptoms and carried on with my lifestyle, working hard, eating pretty much as I had been, and was drinking a glass of wine or two each evening either at home or out at a restaurant.
March 2006 – First bad news.
I am living in Boulder, Colorado and it is a cold spring day with the wind blowing in the bright winter sun. I have been to a naturopath to work with me about my ongoing chest problems and congestion. He decides that we should start with a complete blood analysis. About 4 days later I get a phone call in the evening from the doctor saying that everything is okay, but that I have an elevated PSA of 16. At that moment I did not know what a PSA was or that it was an indicator of problems with the prostate. I found out that the PSA should be between 0 and 4. He told me that I had better find a doctor and look into the situation. I planned to visit a doctor on my next trip back up to Canada.