Ayurvedicadventure

It is amazing how quickly the physical body heals. I had three surgeries over the summer about a month apart starting in June. By the time of the second surgery in July the actual physical wounds from the first had healed. The same with the surgery in August. However,  the part of healing that I neglected until recently was the emotional/psychological aspect of healing. Honestly I am not sure I was capable of addressing this aspect while on the interferon. I could barely motivate myself through the day!  Thinking clearly enough to understand what I needed to do on an emotional level was out of the realm of possibility.

Here at the clinic I am able to focus on multiple levels or modes of healing. First there is the physical aspect of treatments and the expunging of the toxins in my body. I had a new treatment today where I could really feel the physical effects. The treatment is similar to the back basti that I described earlier except that this time I am laying on my back and the dough is placed on my stomach. After the hot oil was placed inside the container that they create with the dough, I started to feel blood rushing to the area. Oddly,  it felt like my heart was in my abdominal area as I felt the blood pumping very strongly.

The second mode of healing are the herbs, both consumed and in the oils and liquids used in the treatments that ultimately seep into the body through the skin. A number of our modern medicines have medicinal plants as their active ingredient, so for me it is easy to believe that the Ayurvedic herbs can act in a positive way. That and the fact that the combination of herbs that they use have have been formulated over a few thousand years of the healing arts puts my mind at ease. I like to take the herbs I consume with some intention of what they are meant to do in the physical body. At this point I am taking  number of different herbs.

• Shoolagna Vati which acts as an anti-viral.
• Ananda Sidi Yog (which is mixed with milk) is meant to boost the immune system
• Abudari Kashayam , is focused on killing cancer cells
• Smriti is focused on helping the body to create healthy cells.
• Plus a number of herbs that are meant to help the body digest food more easily so that it does not become muck that sticks to the intestinal track.

The third mode of healing is the food. I was already familiar with the ayurvedic diet as Susan has been on the program a few times in preparation for her visits to Fairfield Iowa. I also had been moving my diet towards this philosophy over the past couple of months. In general  they believe that the food should be vegetarian and easy to digest. Breakfast and lunch should be the heavier meals and they prefer that one stays away from stimulants such as coffee and chocolate as well as alcohol. I must admit at home I have been imbibing in some fish,  a little dark chocolate and red wine…..for medicinal purposes of-course!  Here at the clinic I actually have been eating “double rations” for breakfast and lunch as Susan has given me the mandate that I do not lose any more weight. I am down about 20-25 lbs since last summer and I agree that I need to gain back some of the muscle I have lost.

The fourth mode of healing that is available here is energetic/spiritual. In the morning and again in the evening the clinic has two people come and chant prayers. The people are called Pundits and they are dressed in colorful robes (very much unlike the pundits in the west!) and they have been trained to chant healing prayers and offer blessings. The power behind this chanting, and really all chanting is the vibration it creates. When sitting close-by I can actually feel the vibrations in my body and know that they are having the intended effect. I have recorded some of the chanting but do not seem to be able to upload it to the blog. I will attempt this again at a later date.

I am very thankful for having the opportunity to be here and experience all these levels of healing. I look forward to a rejuvenated return to my family and friends!

I feel that my mind is constantly in motion. Thinking about work, family, my health issues, what to eat, what not to eat, plans for day, plans for the weekend etc. etc. It is hard honestly to calm the mind and let it settle into a state of no-thought. Sometimes the best I can do is remove “myself” enough to just be an observer of the thoughts passing by like water in a stream.

There are a lot of people that feel that in order to heal the body, you have to calm the mind. I tend to agree and as I mentioned earlier I started meditating again back in August. During the time I was on the interferon I was so fatigued that it was really hard to motivate myself to sit and meditate. However since I stopped taking the interferon I have been much more consistent about it. Here I have been mediating once in the morning and then again in the afternoon.

Currently I am using my afternoon time in the treatment room for mediation. For this treatment I lay on my back on with my head supported by a pillow but slightly tilted backward. The technicians then soak a couple of pieces of cotton in a very thin mixture of milk, herbs and water. They place the cotton on my eyes, which are closed, then put a heavier piece of gauze of cotton on top of that.  This effectively shuts out the light. They then pour that same milk, herb, water mixture into a brass container that is suspended just above my head. The container has a small nozzle on the bottom of it and the liquid comes out in a narrow stream that they direct to my forehead. What may sound like some sort of torture technique actually feels quite refreshing! The liquid is cool and on a hot afternoon feels great. After the stream starts flowing the technician then starts to slowly sweep the stream back and forth across my forehead, occasionally pausing in a single spot but mostly using the sweeping motion.

I like to use the sweeping motion as a signal to clear my mind. To sweep away the thoughts and let my mind relax. I am not sure exactly how long the treatment lasts. I would guess that it is a half-hour or so. But let me tell you…..it goes by all too quickly.

Like the traffic in the streets the schedule here is pretty fluid. Since the first day I have had about 2 hours of treatments in the morning and about a hour in the afternoon. While that has been consistent, the timing of those treatments have changed a number of times so I have to vary my schedule accordingly. That said, the treatments themselves and the things I do each day have been relatively consistent.

So at this point my day usually goes as follows. I wake up around 5:30 or 6:00,  depending on when the chorus of dog barking and bird singing starts! I am in the middle of reading a few different books so I start out with half-hour or so of reading.  One of the books recommended by Carl Jerome that I am reading is called Trust In Mind by Mu Soeng. It is commentary on a sixth-century Buddhist enlightenment poem called the Xinxinming. The poem itself speaks about how to eliminate dis-ease and stress in one’s life. I usually read this one in the morning and then sit for mediation.  By the time I am finished Dr. Raju is starting to see patients and I go and queue up to see him.

Dr. Raju’s Clinic

While waiting I have access to email so I can read and respond to those and often attempt to call home via Skype. Communication has been a little challenging, which Susan will attest to! It is a combination of not having internet access in my room, and the wireless I have access to at the clinic is quite a bit slower and intermittent. However, I did connect with internet shop where I can get a wired connection. Probably not a bad thing to unplug a little.  The way the time zones work is that when it is morning here it is eleven and one-half hours earlier in Chicago. So for example,  if I make a call at 7:30am here it is 8:00pm in Chicago the previous day. It is a little confusing but I have gotten used to it.

After seeing Dr Raju I come back to my flat for breakfast and if my first treatment is later, say 11:00am, I write a blog entry or at least part of one (as I am doing now) and then do some yoga exercises to set the mood for my treatments. I started doing yoga last summer while the kids were away at camp. Susan and I would wake up early and go to a 6:00 am class in the “Flow” style. I am just starting to do yoga again after taking a long break during the interferon treatments and the recovery from those treatments. At this point I just do some of the poses and stretching I learned over the summer, more of a restorative type yoga. Focusing on the breath puts me in a good place for the treatments.

If the treatment is early, say 9:00, then I just have breakfast and take a nice walk to a local business center where they give the treatments. Then do my Yoga practice and a little reading and writing in the afternoon.

In the morning it is very pleasant, about 70 degrees F, but by afternoon it reaches the 90s and at that point I am really thankful for the sun hats that I brought with me! Most of the shops in the local business center are open for a few hours in the morning, then they close until the late afternoon. They open again around 4 or 5 and then stay open until 9:00 or so at night. I had to copy some documents and it took me a couple of trips to center to figure out the shop hours.

At this point I am receiving 3 or 4 different treatments. In the morning there are multiple treatments and they all blend together so I am not exactly sure of the distinct number. The morning session begins with sitting on a table and the technician anointing my body with oil in different places with particular attention paid to the hands and the feet. This is followed by a mesmerizing head massage! They have a special oil that they use exclusively for the head and the technician spends 15 minutes or so standing on a stool in front of me and working on the head and neck. I like to supplement the work the technicians are doing with some visualization techniques, so for this part of the treatment I think of the lymph system in my head and how the massage is helping the lymph to flow freely. Due to all of the surgery I had this summer, no doubt the lymph system on my head is quite compromised, so I see this massage as helping to help move any lymph that may have stagnated.

After the head massage I lie on my back and a second technician comes into the room. They stand on either side of the table and spread sesame oil completely over my body. Then in unison they massage the chest and stomach in a circular motion. With my eyes closed it is hard to tell that there are two people, it just feels like this giant pair of hands working on me. After that, again in unison, they make quick long vertical strokes that start at the waist, go up the body and then down the arms and then back to the waist. After many sequences of that I can really start to feel the heat build up under their hands.

They then move to the legs and go through a similar process. After the legs have been warmed up they then go through a series of strokes that go from the feet, up the legs, up the body, down the arms and then back again. In my mind I envision that the sets that work on the mid, upper and lower body separately are loosing the waste materials that have built up in my skin, then when they do the complete body strokes they are moving those materials up (or down) and out through the hands (and feet). They finish the whole process by quickly scrubbing the hands and feet . Next they have me flip over on my back and they bring in these gauze bags that are filled with herbs and warmed on a oiled and sizzling skillet. Similar to the long body strokes they pound the bags of herbs starting at the hands, up the arms, then down the body to the feet and then back up to the hands. After each “round” they go and get another set of bags that I assume have been sitting on the skillet. They do this three times each with a new set of bags then do the long total body massage strokes again. Flip over……repeat.

The final treatment of the morning is what they call a back basti. They take two rings made out of dough and place them on the upper and lower back. They use water to seal the rings to the body and then fill up the rings with warm oil. I am not sure if they are using chakra points or what but I usually doze off pretty quickly. They refill the rings two more times before the morning treatment is complete and it is time for a shower.

I find the treatments to be very powerful. I physically feel tired afterwards and usually go back to my room to snooze or read until lunch. This effect has seemed to build over the past few days. However, usually after lunch and a drinking a lot of water I feel good and I am ready for the afternoon.

2/13/2011

Susan had been to Fairfield Iowa to the Vedic City for Ayurvedic Pancha Karma treatments a couple of times prior to my diagnosis. Ayurveda, which translates to “the science of life” is probably over 3000 years old. It is a system of health that sees the build-up of impurities in the body as the cause for disease and uses a combination of the Pancha Karma treatments and herbs to build the immune system and clean the body of impurities.

I had seen these treatments work well for Susan and what really piqued my interest was the immune system support that was an integral part of the science. The whole idea of the interferon was to boost my immune system and I thought that Ayurveda could be a good substitute. After a lot of research, and speaking to someone in Fairfield who connected me with Dr. Raju here in HyderabadI I had to decide if I was going to take the plunge and come to India. It was going to be a huge commitment for me and my family as Dr. Raju had thought that 40 days was needed. Finally by the end of the first week of December my family and I  had decided I was going to come, and I put the wheels in motion to set up the trip. Although there were a lot of pieces to the puzzle that had to be taken care of quickly: new passport, visa, applying for short-term disability etc, everything fell into place and I showed up here on the morning of February 11th!

The clinic had setup a driver to pick me up at the airport which was really a blessing. Not having slept very well the last two nights it was nice to just stumble off the airplane and look for driver holding up the sign with my name on it! It did not take me long to commit my first cultural faux paux, upon entering the car I took off my hat and tossed it onto the dash of the car. I had not noticed but the dash of the car had been made into an alter with a number of deities  and the buddha. In the process I knock around a few of the flowers on the alter. From the look I received I knew I had screwed up so I quickly moved my hat! After apologies everything was fine and off we went into the chaos that is driving in India. Cars, scooters, trucks and people all jockeying for position in a dance that to me seemed a little frightening. The cars here are mostly much smaller that we have in the states. Sub-compacts with I think two cylinder diesel engines seem to be the norm. Not a lot a protection in my mind for playing chicken with an oncoming bus! After about a 45 minute ride through alternating commerce centers and agricultural areas (all considered Hyderabad) we arrived in a guarded multi-block community with a combination of houses and apartment buildings. I was shown to my room which is in flat 103 of block 1.

The flat has three bed rooms and one common area which has a breakfast table and chairs. The flat felt a little bare at first but I have quickly come to consider it home. The biggest issue I have had so far is that I do not have an internet connection in my room! If I walk the block down to the clinic then I can get to intermittent wi-fi. The good news is that today(Sunday) I found an internet shop in the business center which is close-by. For 10 Rupees(about $.25) an hour I  should be able to access the internet via a hard-wired connection!  More on that later….

I arrived today in Hyderabad India.  Although the travel time was only 30 hours or so, the journey to Hyderabad actually started last summer. Last year,  during the first week of June,  my family received two huge set backs. First my mother-in-law passed away and then the very same week I was diagnosed with melanoma skin cancer. My mother-in-law had been sick for a number of years so her passing was somewhat expected. Obviously my diagnosis was not.

I had noticed a soft bump on my head when I was giving myself a haircut in April. In May it had grown in height enough that my hair trimmer clipped it. Being that it was growing so quickly I went to the dermatologist to have it checked out. The biopsy came back in June as positive for malignant melanoma.To say I was shocked is an understatement. Reeling is probably a better way to describe how I felt. I have never experienced anything like the emotions that came up after that diagnosis. Quite frankly I saw the diagnosis as a death sentence and I was very angry about it. I could not understand why this was happening, I was in a really dark place and I am sure I made life miserable for Susan and the kids. At one point in June, Susan had had enough and suggested I make an appointment with a Reiki healer that she knows. Although it took a few appointments over the summer, the energy work I did with Michael Fitzgerald did allow me to release that anger/fear and get myself back on track.

Soon after the diagnosis I had an appointment with a surgical oncologist and was on his schedule for surgery later that month. So in June the surgeon excised the lesion and performed a biopsy on the sentinel lymph nodes. Of the four nodes they took out, one turned out to be microscopically positive for melanoma.

At this point I had a decision to make. I could either take a wait and see attitude and have the oncologist monitor the lymph nodes in my neck for changes or have all of the lymph nodes in that region of the neck removed and biopsied. I chose the more aggressive approach and scheduled a surgery for the later half of July that would do what they called a level 5( this refers to a particular area) neck dissection. Susan and I sent the kids off to camp in mid-July and soon after I had the neck dissection. That surgery actually went quite easily.

2/12/2011

In August I was on my way to recovering from the surgery in July and had had an appointment with the medical oncologist to talk about interferon treatment. Interferon makes your body think it has the flu and causes the body to boost its immune system. The idea is that the immune system would then knock off any stray melanoma cells that might be roaming around in the blood.

Then, in about the second week of August I noticed that I had another bump on my head that was right next to the incision left by the first surgery. It had that same squishy feel as the first lesion which had me very concerned. I called my surgeon the very next day and he was able to get me in that day….perhaps he heard the panic in my voice??? Well, they extracted the bump and took another biopsy which came back again, as melanoma. It appeared that melanoma cells had been trapped in the lymph channels and with the channel system disrupted and all of the lymph nodes in my neck taken out….they had no where to go so they started popping out on my head. This meant a third surgery was needed to excise more skin on my head around the metastasis. I scheduled the surgery for August 23rd and was just starting to settle down from the new diagnosis when more of the pumps started popping up. Ultimately I ended up with 5 more of the things and they were growing quickly.  At this point I was a little frantic and of course my surgeon was out of town….so I  that plastic surgeon that assisted during June who was nice enough to extract the bumps and have them biopsied. Turns out that all of these new bumps were sub-dermal and considered in-transit metastasis.  This took my cancer staging all the way down to 3c, the last stop before stage 4.

While all of this was going on I felt like I needed something I could do on a daily basis that would help me relax. My thoughts were going around in circles and I was finding it hard to sleep at night. Susan had been to Fairfield Iowa a couple of times at this point and she was meditating frequently, I started thinking back to my college days when I took a Zen Philosophy class and how I really enjoyed the Zen Meditation we were doing as part of that class. I found a Japanese Zen Temple in the city and I attended a couple of meditation services. That didn’t really click for me so I purchased some cushions and starting sitting at home in the mornings. I kept looking for another temple but instead found Carl Jerome and the North Shore Meditation and Dharma center.  I sit with Carl a couple of times a week in the early morning and he has been giving me a good list of books and articles to read to move my practice forward, but more on that later. I found the meditation to be really helpful as I could feel the calming effects throughout the day.

I had the surgery and thankfully they finally excised all of the cancer cells from my head. After I healed I started the interferon treatments. The standard interferon treatment is a one month induction phase where a visit to the hospital is required five days a week. Then eleven months of a reduced dose which is self administered via an injection. Each day during the induction phase I received an infusion of the interferon as well as plenty of saline. The whole process process took about 1.5 hours and I could feel the affects of the medication almost immediately. As I mentioned before, the interferon causes your body to put its immune system into overdrive. The only problem is that in the process I constantly felt like I had a serious case of the flu. Deep chills, high fever, foggy brain, fatigue…..all of it.  I made it through induction phase but had to rest for one week in the middle due to high levels of liver enzymes. After that I started the low dose phase and gave myself injections 3 times a week. The fever and chills were most prevalent in the induction phase but the fatigue seemed to build through the induction phase and just kept on rising during the self-admin. After two months of feeling like I was climbing Mt. Everest without an oxygen tank I started noticing that I had a blurry spot in the lower part of my vision through the right eye. I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist and he found that I had interferon related retinopathy. In short the interferon was killing cells on my retina. This is a known but relatively rare side effect of the interferon and given that I was experiencing it after only two months it was recommended that I stop the treatment.

Stop taking a drug that is making you feel horrible, sounds like an easy decision. In actuality I was torn. I had put so much hope in the fact that the interferon was going to stop the recurrence of the cancer that it actually was a hard decision. My oncologist said that the risk/reward balance of the treatment had shifted and that it was really too high of risk to continue. My last dose of the interferon was the Monday before Thanksgiving.

So now what. I had a type of cancer that has a high rate of recurrence and I could not take the only treatment considered by the oncologist to reduce that rate. I needed another plan and I needed to put it in action quickly. That is when I started seriously considering Ayurveda.

Welcome, I will start blogging shortly.

Alan