So far we haven’t seen an Oncologist and we’re feeling way confused. We started digging on the web for some answers and turned up a relatively small number of items when it comes to Hepatocellular Carcinoma. Transplant, T.A.C.E., Chemo-embolization, etc...I also started thinking about angles of approach and knew that it was important for me to put together an alternative team who would help me work on releasing this cancer from my body.
I decided that open mindedness, would be crucial and to try my hardest not to judge—prior to research. I knew acupuncture, yoga, diet, massage and meditation would be my foundation and luckily had a number of years experience with yoga, meditation and acupuncture. The kind of yoga I had been doing, a fairly strenuous Iyengar routine, wasn’t going to mix well with my pain levels. A Restorative yoga teacher was what I needed. I found Cynthia Friedman, who happened to be a licensed family therapist too! She provided a great foundation for this prop-oriented, more gentle style of yoga, and some very good therapy sessions. Very respectful of my new limitations and super attuned to my Qi.
The last great acupuncturist I’d had still practiced, but all the way over in Santa Rosa, so I started with one in Berkeley. Soon heard about Dr. Rossman in Marin and switched. Dr. Rossman is also an M.D. who started acupuncturing people over thirty years ago in Marin, and his breadth and wealth of knowledge, sensitivity and caring are abundant in every aspect of his practice. And, lucky me again, he also specializes in the mind-body connection, which back in my pre-yoga/meditation years made me a little squinty, but now had my full attention.
And introducing Michelle “Manos Del Oro Solido” Gonzalez. LET’S GET READY TO RRREEEEEEEEELAX! This has been an hour a week where I can be content with just focusing on the beauty of the ability to inhale and exhale...Michelle has an innate ability to not only feel where the stress is stored in your body, but to also apply the proper pressure and movement to help that stress disappear. Sometimes we also do whacky Manga-style tumor annihilation visualizations.
Diet? I went as organic as possible, with the emphasis on veggies, legumes and grains, and meats. I bought a good water filter and doubled the amount of water I was drinking. I checked out food/cancer books from the library and started making lists. I also got a juicer. Red or purple grapes, beets, and a few dandelion leaves I called the cancer crusher.
Meditation always followed yoga for me and I stuck to that routine. It took Ha and I a while to get all this together and then work with it when my schedule started filling in with western medicine oncology madness.
Oh yeah, I forgot, I wrote to the Medicine Man who married us and asked him for help. Two weeks later I got a medicine bag with stuff in it and he said that we could add more, and to wear it around my neck, and a letter telling us that we would be in the sweat lodge prayers. Ha and I did a sweat lodge with Ricky and Andrew and part of their tribe before our wedding. I was deeply moved by the fact that all they ask for is mercy. The night we did the sweat I dreamt of my father, a man with whom I had a very tumultuous and complex relationship, we were driving around with me at the wheel and I was making him laugh. When I saw Ricky at the wedding and told him, he said “It’s not uncommon to dream after; I hope you guys worked it out.”
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