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I have these compulsive obsessions. It's an annoying quality. I know this. It annoys me. I am a Taurus. I am an only child. I am focused. I am sometimes obsessively focused. A productive quality, yes. A healthy qualtiy, maybe not so much.
I fell in love with a boy in junior high school. We were best friends through junior high school, high school, and while he was in college and I was not. He fell out of love with me. I didn't fall out of love with him. My life went South (a.k.a. to hell) for a while and when I sought him out a decade or so later I was still in love with him and he knew this but he wasn't in love with me and he knew that too, but for some reason that decade lost that was tragic to me was a well of resentment with him. I can't explain it because I can't understand it. I just accept it because it is what it is. Regardless, we reconnected, and for the next two years he called every day and we would talk for 4 or 5 or 6 hours every day. He talked to me of buying houses and having babies and telling me things he knew I wanted to hear and things he did not want, not with me. But he left that part out.
So I met him at 12. We were inseparable best friends until we were 24, reconnected at 34, and at 36 we had one last long phone conversation where he confessed to having spent two years making a fool of me and what I fool I was. Maybe. Indeed.
It was a cruel and strange conversation with someone I believed I had known as well as myself and then realized maybe I had never known at all. It was more liberating than tragic but actually it was a good deal of both - all at once. It was an enormous amount of physical emotion and yet a weight was lifted from me that I didn't know existed and I didn't know why. But during that last conversation I felt a physical pounding a pulsing in my lower left abdomen that was painful and did not cease for several days. This was two and a half years ago.
I have compulsive obsessions. I became a vegetarian at the age of 5. I turned to the study and practice of herbal medicines at the age of 18. I am obsessively, compulsively a healthy lifestyle person. This boy, now man, that I had spent a lifetime being in love with knew this about me. And when we reconnected, his mother was in stage 5 ovarian cancer. It is a cancer with a 97% mortality rate and she had had the best of care that Western medicine could offer for 5 years without success. She was dying and she died before we had our final parting of ways. He had asked me what I knew about herbal medicine and ovarian cancer. I knew nothing. I believe and practice herbal medicine on myself and only myself but in all honesty, I've never had anything more wrong with me that allergies, the flu, and one stint with pneumonia. I had read everything I could find on herbs for years but of herbal healing related specifically to ovarian cancer, I knew nothing.
He is a curious and studious person and he is the person that got me reading and curious beyond my own borders myself. That is a lot of why I loved him the way I did and probably for so long. It is rare that someone will bring out the best in themselves to bring out the best in you. So I thank him for that because without having known him I would not be the person I am today but that's not why I'm writing this. He is curious, his mother is dying, and he is grasping at straws more than he is letting on. He called me on his cell phone from a health food store, "what do you know about col-loi-dal silver?" He enunciated it slowly because it was foreign to him. I had never heard of it. It was foreign to me too. "Well look it up on your computer and tell me what it says?" So I read web site after web site after web site.
"Scientifically", it was fascinating if what I was reading was accurate and I believed that it was. It basically said that it worked like Pac Man. The silver gets into the the system and sucks out all of the oxygen that allows any single celled organisms to live. It's a "wonder cure!" Or that was the jest of it on site after site after site. They quoted the Edgar Cayce readings. I had read Cayce extensively 20 years earlier so I must have read of it then. Maybe? I don't know. As far as it being a cure for his mothers stage 5, 97% mortality rate cancer, I doubted it but even I didn't realize the depth of despair he/they must have been experiencing at that moment. I was 3,000 miles away and I did not feel it the way I should have. Probably I was obsessing compulsing over my own life at that time - my own problems, my own dramas. I don't know, but I do know now that I should have been so much more aware of his emotions and logic at that time. I was not. And I let it go as soon as the phone call ended - or so I thought.
It's weird how your brain will catch something in passing and you think you never think of it again and then one day you realize it was just a seed for what is now a garden, forest, or swamp of your life. Such was this. I thought I never thought of it again and then here I am, two and a half years later.
That pounding, pulsing sensation I had in my lower left abdomen the night of our final conversation was a lump just a week later. At first it was smaller than a ping pong ball but before the next two years had passed it was the size of a large California lemon.
I do believe that cancer is often times created by emotions that are left un-dealt with and manifest themselves physically in the body because we never let them go. I do believe that many illnesses find their root in emotions. I have believed this for many years - decades, actually. I had loved him too long, too unhealthily - I had known this for many many years as well. I sought him out to sort this out for myself but I had pinned my hopes on a fairy tale; and although I knew it was perhaps illogical I did not carry myself into two more years of false hope alone. This was his entertainment or his spite. But I was the fool and there is no denying that.
As you know from my last post, I don't have health insurance. I'm not sure I would have pursued a western course of treatment for this if I had but it wasn't an option so it was never a question. When I found the lump I read everything I could. It was frustrating. I had never even had cramp and had never had any reason at all to explore gynecological health issues. What I found was medical site after medical site with the same list of symptoms leading to the same un-ending list of potential problems. Could it be ovarian cancer? Well, the lump was directly on an ovary, that was certain.
Symptoms:
heavy or light bleeding
fever or no fever
swelling or no swelling
.......that's just a sample but you get the idea. The symptoms list was followed by a list of possible ailments - everything from pelvic inflammatory disease (which can be caused by dozens of things)to cancer or hypochondria, or nothing. Gynecology is a vague and frustrating, not to mention seriously underfunded and under studied, branch of medicine.
After weeks and months, and thousands of hours of reading and searching, I finally narrowed it down to either a cyst or a tumor. I was playing the odds at this point. Ovarian cancer has a 97% mortality rate and is found in only about 1% of potential patients. By my own sense of reasoning and deduction, God knew I could not afford cancer so it would just be a cyst. If I had had the resources to do otherwise, I don't necessarily think I would have wanted to know for sure. And it's weird because it's a question that people who know me well have asked, "if you ever had cancer would you use herbal medicines or would you go with traditional western medicine?" It's not a question I've ever been able to answer other than to say that I live my life in such a way that I hope to never have the need to make a choice like that.
Chinese medicine has used herbal treatments for tumors for centuries and I located a recipe that seemed suited for my situation. I am not a doctor and I will not divulge details of the herbs that I used but for the next 18 months or so I drank "nasty tea". A gawd aweful tea made from a combination of 14 herbs designed to shrink tumors, fight infection, and replenish ovarian health. It was disgusting.
From everything I had read, if this was a cyst it was a record breaker. It was larger than acceptable, it stayed longer than long, it seemed unresponsive for several months. Even by everything I had read from medical texts, it was a beast of a cyst if it was a cyst. It wasn't a record breaker though. After about 22 months it dissolved but it left an oozy gooey sensation inside of me that I eventually deduced to be infection. It's leaving also revealed two smaller, golf ball sized lumps beneath the original lemon sized one. Now I had two "cysts" and an infection and a whole new course of herbal treatment ahead. We were nearing the beginning of year 3 at this point. It's a very long time to be unwell.
Finally, after a couple of months, both of the smaller cysts left. My personal opinion is that they left more on their own than from my tea concoction simply because of the relief of the first, larger one, finally being gone. My greater problem now was the infection that was left behind. At this point I might have gone to a gynecologist. I could have afforded a visit - I wasn't facing self funding cancer treatment. I was however, living still in Los Angeles. My only experience with medical treatment in L.A. was frightening. I had broken my arm and gone to the emergency room of a privately funded hospital near my home in the downtown area. To check into the emergency room we had to park 4 blocks away and pay $12 for parking. We walked to the hospital entrance where we had to pass the Los Angeles Police screening to get into the waiting room to register. The waiting room was full of Skid Row junkies looking for a fix and signs hanging everywhere "this is a narcotic free zone". After 11 hours the nurse called me in a shoved a thermometer in my mouth as I was asking if it had been sterilized. Not an unfair question, the place was filthier than any truck stop bathroom. It was truly gross! The nurses answer, "Sterile? Nothing is sterile. We just do the best that we can." and then he proceeded to show me the disposable plastic cover that is dispensed automatically over the thermometer. So anyway, going to an L.A. health care facility to treat an infection was just out of the question. I would treat it with herbs and worst case scenario, we would be moving soon. I would find a doctor when we moved away. That was January of this year.
It was April before we moved and my financial situation was less optimistic. Again, I put off finding a doctor. By July I had ordered the colloidal silver and this is where my last post left off. Now my obsessing compulsing has morphed into yet another realm of this same saga.
This is not going to be the colloidal silver blog. This is not going to be a blog of nagging health complaints from a once youthful, now aging individual. This is just life and blogging but I do think there is something worth sharing in this experience because surely I am not the only one who let their emotions get the best of them, let their health get away from them, let their senses run with the foolish winds of hope and stupidity.
What I know about colloidal silver now that I didn't know when I used it was that I shouldn't have made assumptions:
*I shouldn't have assumed that the "companies" that produce this stuff are regulated. I should have considered that they might be a couple of red neck guys living in a trailer out in the woods somewhere with two fish tanks, swamp water, and a silver chain hooked up to a generator.
* I shouldn't have assumed that all colloidal silvers are the same.
* I shouldn't have assumed that that guy who turned himself blue and then went on Oprah was the only idiot in the universe and that guys like him don't make and sell this stuff.
*I shouldn't have assumed that all of the "scientific" information I found online wasn't produced by the people who make and sell this product.
*I shouldn't have assumed that it would have been taken off the market if it were really THAT dangerous.
* I shouldn't have assumed so much more.
Yes, I am obsessing compulsing now about this. There is very little valid medical or scientic reference information regarding argyria - the condition that causes the skin to turn blue after ingesting silver. Hopefully higher levels of silver than I have ingested.
What I have found:
*it can take 4 months to 1 year for silver to settle into the skin.
*there is no available test for it - not by any lab that my doctor can locate.
*there are no clinical studies on humans
*clinical studies on rats are extremely limited
*the FDA does not endorse silver products
*there is no cure for it.
*chelating is not known to work at all.
*it will give you nightmares.
So I have nights that I wake up my mother with a flash light in her face and a mirror. Do my eyes look gray? Is that a dark spot on my skin? Or just screaming nightmares. No, I'm not kidding.
Then I developed a dark spot but it turned out to be an anti-infection caused from the combination of penicillin (prescribed by my doctor to cure the infection left from the cyst) and the colloidal silver I ingested before I finally went to the doctor. It may take months for my body to balance itself out to cure that. And yes, I'm still hoping that scientist that told me, "you have a better chance of being bitten by a shark in your shower than developing argyria from the amount of silver you ingested" is right and that I truly am the obsessive, compulsive, idiot that people like him believe I am. Right now, that is all I aspire to be.
Back to my doctors visit. I arrived with a plastic bag full of everything I had taken and my mother in tow as a witness to both my stupidity and my sanity. The nurse looked at us curiously going in and then her jaw dropped and I caught her catching herself from fainting as I told her my story, showed her the jug of colloidal silver, the bag, the herbs, and my mother reassuring her that she had felt the lumps and I wasn't exaggerating them. She gasped at the time frame, over two years. And the vast expanse of my "hypochondria". I believe that she believed at that moment that I was a nut case. She disappeared saying, "this may take a while. The doctor will need to look all of this over before he comes in. You may be waiting for some time." I wasn't surprised. It was quite a while.
He emerged from his office with a computer and desk across the hall and into my exam room - suave, sophisticated, poker faced. He introduced himself. I confessed everything again, holding no cards. He proceeded with the exam and he didn't believe me but he tried not to let on. I think he believed the products since I had them with me but I don't think he believed the lumps, they "cysts". I think he thought I was a classic case of hypochondria that should be headed for the psych ward. I got the lecture as he was conducting a pelvic exam: "well, first off, you can't feel a cyst. I can't even feel one without an internal exam and even then it's hard for me and I'm trained to do this." He went on. Then he found it. It wasn't there anymore but he found where it had been. He pressed again and I reassured him. He found the other two smaller ones. He went back to the larger one - scar tissue now. He looked at my mother, "could it have been a lymph node?" She shrugged.
So now he's ruled out hypochondria and ordered tests for cancer. He found scar tissue but all of the tests came back negative for cancer. Whatever it had been was now gone. I did have an infection in spite of the fact that he said I would have no way of knowing that.
I guess with all life experiences there are lessons and sometimes just reminders.
My body is a temple and I shall treat it as one.
Prayer is talking to God. Meditation is listening to God.
Not everything we do is for us.
Life is the journey - not the destination.
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