Past #6 6/6/2019

It has been a week now since Spirit completed the radiation treatments, 18 in all, taking up most of the month of May. He is feeling lousy, the worst since this all began.

I administer anti –inflammatory medicine once per day (in his afternoon meal) along with pain medication three times a day, once with a small morning meal, again with his evening meal and again at bedtime so he can sleep peacefully through the night. Each one pretty much knocks him out, causing him to sleep/doze/in a stupor for hours.

I can see the pain killer does two good things – helps alleviate the pain but also gives him the healing gift of rest, allowing him to sleep more peacefully, day and night.

These are hours he has little interest in aggravating his leg or jaw wounds, locations where the radiation killed not only cancer cells but did significant healthy tissue damage that now has to heal.

Any regrets?

I look at him as I pet him, his eyes closed, and it breaks my heart to see him like this. His normal self is unbounded energy and enthusiasm.

But, no, no regrets.

The radiation did its job of killing off localized cancer tumors that were going to metastasize if left untreated.

So, this will be his pathway to complete healing, to the possibility of having a normal, healthy life.

Radiation treatment is very expensive ($9000 for treating both sites with each treatment), and very time consuming. But what is money and time (if we are lucky enough to have it) for if not to help those we love?

 

I have started giving him CBD oil twice a day; the wild west here, but the natural chemotherapy treatment I have opted for, hopefully helping his own immune system kill off whatever cancer cells still exist in his body.

Does it have any efficacy for this purpose? There is a very thin amount of science out there that suggests CBD oil kills cancer cells. Dosing is still a mystery.

Still, I decided I would not put Spirit through conventional chemotherapy.

I watched my wife deal with it, and she could tell the doctor when and how it hurt, about the multiple and sometimes horrendous side effects. But, dogs can’t talk. And, like any animal, they instinctively hide pain as a defense mechanism, a survival tool. Spirit is, therefore, incredibly stoic.

So, my gut feeling is not to put him through it.

So, I will take the more benign, totally painless, and possibly effective approach of CBD instead. Another benefit that is better known is it tends to reduce anxiety, so a good thing, whatever other benefits it may offer.

If I can spend thousands of dollars on radiation, what is a few hundred more to possibly help with a cure. Only up side, no down side I can see at all.

I will never know of course, no matter how things turn out. Not running a double blind study here with a statistically significant number of patients.

 

I also give him 300 mg of milk thistle with his meals to help his liver get rid of the chemicals I am putting into his body. Does this help? Again, cannot hurt, will never know. I would do it for me is all I know for sure. So I will do it for him.

I apply pure aloe vera to his leg wound four times/day (happen to have a plant and learned how to extract the aloe from the leaves). He seems to appreciate how it feels as I dab it on with a bit of cotton ball. He won’t let me touch his jaw, where most of the pain he is feeling exists.

The tech’s at the radiation center suggested using Aquaphor for this but also liked the idea of aloe. But will have to stop cutting leaves if I am not to kill the plant, so ordered pure aloe vera but may have to use Aquafor while waiting for it to arrive.

I can apply this right now to his leg but he won’t let me touch his jaw. Obviously he is in a lot of pain there. When the pure, organic aloe vera I ordered shows up, am going to whip it up with an immersion mixer, then see if I can put it in a spray bottle so I can spray his mutilated jaw area without having to touch him. Not sure how this is going to work

Spirit, even when he is totally well, is almost miraculously calmed by soothing music, played at a very low volume. I do this as much as I can, filling the house with barely audible (to me) Enya, the more delicate pieces of classical or new age music, almost meditation music. (He gets as far away as he can from loud sounds, TV or radio, as he can – really bothers him.

So, these days we are using the healing power of music as well.

 

Here is my boy:

 

 

 

IMG_0015

Spirit at Rest

 

Spirit in half light

Spirit in half light

Just came back from a quiet hour walk in the woods with a misty rain falling, Canada geese complaining out on Grassy Lake, Sandhill Cranes echoing their guttural calls across the lake or maybe even one lake over from where we are ….couldn’t see them …. doesn’t matter …. just so good to be there.

Spirit is up to 83 pounds, so strong and overflowing with energy, so much he doesn’t know what to do with it all so he runs and runs and runs. Such joy.

Can this old man keep up with this young dog?

Fun trying anyway.

None of this matters either. Just being is enough for now.

Spirit is the teacher and I just try to pay attention.  🙂

 

Spirit out there

Spirit Out There

 

Dianna’s Way is now available at www.diannasway.com, Amazon, and, soon, at Barnes & Noble – or you can order it through your local bookstore. Fairly soon, it will be available as an eBook as well.

This book is a very personal and inspirational story about an ordinary woman who chose to live an extraordinary life. She also happened to choose me as her husband. Lucky me.

When I look back on my life with her, I can see I may have taught Dianna a bit about the world as it is but she taught me, by example, so much more about how it could be. It also occurs to me she offers a template for living that opens the possibility for creating an extraordinary country.

Perhaps transforming America begins with transforming ourselves via an inner, individual process but I would not rule out interacting in concert with others by “feeding” each other. Some do best playing solo while others are at their finest in an orchestra. The music is no less beautiful or moving.

No matter our pathway, our creations still emanate from self with a willingness to be responsible for self.

Responsibility: literally, the ability to respond appropriately [to life].  What I learned from Dianna is the only appropriate response to life is to practice being a context of Love.

Self: Careful about the definition of self. Not what we normally think it is. Something to be explore later.

So, I find myself being guided on an odyssey into the wider social implications of living in “Dianna’s Way”. I have tentatively titled this journey A New Age American Dream (NAAD).

From a social perspective, a fair starting point is look at where we are now, which is becoming, for too many of us, living a new age American nightmare.

Why do we, as a nation, seem to be headed in the wrong direction? What can we do about it? Is there any hope for a better way forward? Is there any way to knit together a deeply divided nation into a sane, workable whole, pulling in the same direction?

Frankly, I don’t know.

It doesn’t have to turn out well. It isn’t going to turn out well unless we do create a better way forward.

I do know I am not much interested in generating a laundry list of our problems – we already know what they are even if we may not agree on why or how we have created them – nor am I keenly interested in a different laundry list of nice little remedies. All of this is in the realm of what we can call the content of our lives – and the society we live in.

So, while I may begin with a broad overview of what works and what doesn’t in our society, this is merely a description of that content – many others have already done a fine job of detailing all that stuff.

I am much more interested in the context all this content thrives in.

As Einstein once so famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

True.  

For my purposes, I would say it this way:  we cannot change the content of our lives – or our society – while trapped in the same context that creates the dysfunction we find ourselves already immersed in. We will have to step outside the box (the current context we live in).

So, first, some definitions:

Content: Everything that shows up in our lives as our experience, individually and collectively.

Context: Where we come from when we act and experience the acts of others.

“Where we come from”: What we believe is true and, even more deeply, who we believe ourselves to be, whether consciously acknowledged or not.

In Dianna’s Way, I describe my own discovery process that led me to appreciate I need both Light (consciousness) and Love (not love as we normally think of it but Love, the energy emanating from God, Spirit, from the All That Is). Only then could I comprehend how this incredibly powerful woman was able to live her life the way she did – and realize these same tools can be used to create a society that somewhere inside ourselves we have all dreamed but not yet successfully created.

Dianna supplied me and others, consistently, seemingly effortlessly, with a model for expressing our selves when and where it matters – in the practical, day to day life that greets us each morning.  

She supplied us with a Context that works.

Not a bad place to begin.

 

Ironically, I have had the idea to write a book called the NAAD for at least 40 years. But, until Dianna cracked open my heart without saying a word, silently pointing the way toward surrender, toward trusting in Spirit, it was a book I was totally ill equipped to write.

Perhaps now I can.

You and I can certainly have a conversation about all this as I think out loud on this blog.

I welcome your participation.

 

For the past two weeks, my blog has been dead in the water as I was getting about ~1000 spams per day and just had to delete everything coming in, probably deleting a few legitmate comments along with the river of spam.

Sorry if anyone was swept up in the tsunami.

Think I have the problem solved.Unfortunately the cost has been to require anyone wanting to comment to sign in with their name and email address, then type in a password provided when you do this. I know this is inconvenient and apologize for it but, so far, seems to be the only way to allow comments at all, which I sincerely want from anyone interested in doing so.

I also added a feature that allows an RSS feed so that might be of interest to some visitors. See the sidebar to use it.

Again, thank you for putting up with all my rookie mistakes.

I can now return to doing what I originally wanted to do – start a conversation with you about things of mutual interest, Even if no one is interested, I will continue to use this site to look into dogs, what they have to teach us, spirituality (what is this reality about) and, down the road, post excerpts from my upcoming book, Dianna’s Way, which I hope you will enjoy. Should be out sometime this early summer.

Hope this day works for you.

John

For any of you serious readers out there, I have had to do two things I did not want to do but …………… did it.

1. I have placed all incoming comments in moderation, meaning they do not get posted unless I approve them first. So, if you have made a legitimate comment and do not see it show up, this is why.

2, I have destroyed (marked as spam and trashed) ALL comments coming into my blog for the past two weeks because this site is being bombed with spam, mostly from Russia and eastern Europe and I have received over 5,000 “comments” in the past two weeks and just do not have the time to sort through them all to save the “real comments” so am just deleting all of them for now.

3. I will get some help with this problem – there surely are plug ins that will stop most of this – just have to find the time to research it.

Sorry for this – just my rookie mistakes and still on a learning curve about it all. One thing I have learned though – if you are going to start a blog, set it up with all comments going to moderation until you are sure you have spam under control – otherwise your site will be cluttered with garbage.

Hope your day goes well.