10
As of now, I’m just past the halfway point of my radiation and chemo, and I have to say, I’m feeling pretty great. A big patch of hair is gone, about four inches to the right of where a normal bald guy’s bare area would be. And there’s a spot over my right ear that seems to be going. It’s sort of like watching a garden in reverse. At least I had the good timing to get a buzz cut when I first noticed it starting to go...no need to deal with clumps of hair on my pillow. I’ve even given some thought to shaving my head, but was afraid I’d look too much like Sebastian Janikowski (the Raiders’ bad-boy kicker). So I just wear my highlife musician’s mojo hat most of the time.

As an indication of how well I’m doing, yesterday I woke up feeling a little low-energy. I had an hour and a half between my radiation and an acupuncture appointment, so Ellen and I took a three mile walk. Later the same day I had made plans with my aunt, who I rarely see, to take a walk in China Camp. Which we did, to the tune of six miles. I did take a nap, but that works out to nine miles on a day when I didn’t feel that red hot. So life is great.

I had the good fortune to hook up with a Native American cranial sacral worker/medicine woman, who has been working on my brother in Utah. She was in the area for some workshops and to work on some horses, and we put her up for a couple of nights and she gave me a five-hour session of treatment. She feels the pulses in the body, and directs me in some visualizations, and unblocks places where my life energy is not flowing (mainly the fluid in the spinal column but electrical flows as well) and this facilitates my healing process. The effects are subtle, but to the extent that you can tune into your own body, you can feel the results as they happen. She has a whole kit of artifacts she works with (fossilized animal teeth, bear fur, obsidian knives and red-tailed hawk feathers) and I’m hoping to get to work with her again before she leaves the area. Obviously, I’m sticking to my strategy of doing anything that might possibly help.

And I have to say the results so far have been really encouraging. My energy is good, nausea from the chemo is pretty much non-existent (the thinking here is that my hippie lifestyle might have contributed enough THC to my body to provide a fortuitous health benefit). But what I think is helping the most is the love and prayers I have received from Ellen and all of you. On my walk with my aunt, who is a professor at USF in human development, we talked about the confluence of science and mysticism, and how scientists have conducted serious studies of patients receiving "external treatment" (i.e., prayers and love from others) versus patients that weren’t receiving the same energy. And despite the controls and double-blind studies and all the scientific protocol, the patients that were loved and prayed for did significantly better.

So I guess I owe my good fortune so far to you. Thank you, and please keep it up. It’s working.

Peace and love,
Dan

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