Still here - June 2015!

I do need to qualify this a bit for this update however because I have just come through a health crisis of sorts - in the Fall of 2014 it was discovered that I had breast cancer *again* and it had spread to my bones and in fact scans that were taken had the doctors describing my thoracic spine, ribs and pelvis as "moth eaten" which is not a good thing at all.

Why did this happen you might wonder?  Well I started eating the normal American diet and stopped watching what I ate. I was eating sweets and lots of animal fats and I had gained weight - probably about 60-70 lbs. 

I started to feel not so good in the Fall of 2013 and it started with me having a limp and not feeling very strong when it came to lifting things.  This progressed to me feeling that gravity was not my friend and even a simple thing like getting out of the swimming pool was difficult for me to do.  It was not a muscle weakness but as it turned out, my bones were weak.

I ended up in the ER at the end of October 2014 and remained in the hospital for 5 days while they did tests.  They found the evidence of breast cancer metastasized to my bones on the CT scan and they biopsied my old breast lump - which was still sort of there - and said it had evidence of cancer again there.

I went home and vowed to switch my diet once again. In the hospital I'd been visited by a female oncologist and all the nurses said she was really good so I made every effort to become her patient on the outside. 

She told me she wanted me to go on a bone drug - Zometa - and chemo and that I should get the radiotherapy to areas of my bones where there was the most cancer.  She also wanted me on aromatase inhibitors, which blocked the formation of estrogen from other hormones. This is given only to women post menopause.

I told her - I would go on the bone drug only and I'd try the aromatase inhibitor but no chemo.

I will go into more detail in the next post - but after about 8 weeks sleeping in a recliner chair and needing a cane to walk  and taking two injections of Zometa (now monthly) I was finally able to sleep in my own bed again and walk without a cane.  I dropped about 50 lbs because of my restricted diet as well. 

I stopped the aromatase inhibitor because I didn't like the side effects, which for me were shortness of breath and I am talking severe shortness of breath.  Instead I started using natural progesterone cream, DIM and natural estriol cream.

At the beginning of 2015 they switched me to Xgeva because they had a really nice health insurance deductible co-pay deal and I have continued to improve on the monthly bone injections alone. 

I mostly stayed on the whole grains/vegetables/little animal protein diet but started to slip off it a little in the last month or so and of course my CA-27-29 numbers in my monthly blood tests have been steadily rising - so back on the no dairy and restricted animal protein diet I go again...

I also started taking low dose tamoxifen - 20 mg per week instead of per day.  I found studies which supported the use of low dose tamoxifen as being just as effective as the regular dose but without the bad side effects.

I do have one problem that may not resolve on its own and that is two spinal compression fractures which sound a lot worse than they really are.  No pain really from them but it pitches my spine a bit forward and makes it difficult for me to straighten up. I believe these compression fractures happened from a fall I had while my bones were weak - I slipped on a wet floor and fell on my back in a store. No I didn't want to sue them over it - it would have not made any difference to the outcome.

I just wanted anyone who might come upon this blog to know that a) I am still here and b) I almost wasn't still here because I became careless with my diet.  I am totally convinced now that a diet in whole grains, beans, vegetables and low animal protein is really the best diet for overall health for me and probably for most people.