Tim’s dinner, the night before he was hospitalized, was the missing portion of this piece of toast. Radiation fried his esophagus and chemotherapy killed his appetite and a whole lot of other things inside of his fragile body.
Chemotherapy, chemical therapy, a miracle drug!?, destroys everything in its path creating a ripe environment for things like bacteroides fragilis to thrive.
How we treat cancer is much like how we have treated our crops and highly manicured green spaces. We use chemicals to eradicate all but the certain variety of green we wish to grow. Then we engineer seeds that are genetically modified to survive exposure to these powerful chemicals.
The short term result is that one very specific plant thrives. Eventually, undesirable plants, tenacious and highly medicinal dandelions for example!, begin to thrive alongside of the desired ones, in spite of these chemicals. So then we add more chemicals. And then people like Tim, along with nearly 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women worldwide, get diagnosed with cancer. And then we do to their bodies what we did to the earth that caused their bodies to develop cancer in the first place. And then they become immunocompromised and highly susceptible to crazy powerful bacteria called ‘superbugs’.
In a healthy microbiome, these bugs are as beneficial to the body’s balanced ecosystem as dandelions are to the earth. But for someone like my husband, they can be deadly because the bacteria that would keep the superbugs in check exist no more. Powerful antibiotics are deployed to attack these ‘deadly’ creatures.
And as the saying goes, “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”.
With our help, these bugs have evolved and are a mighty force to reckon with.
It’s a terrible vicious cycle we are in. The systems we’ve created to grow our food, green our landscapes, and care for our sick are broken. And I’m not pointing fingers here…just acknowledging the reality of this brokenness from a whole new place.
I say ‘we’ intentionally because ownership feels important in these matters and pointing fingers feels counterproductive. Once upon a time I might have been prideful enough to think myself better than and above the need for the system that I have devoted the past 30 years to serving inside of as an occupational therapist, the system that has been my family’s bread and butter, and the system that is now responsible for extending my husband’s life so long as he is willing to stick to the grueling regimen and fight.
Observing and serving humans in their most frail state inspired me to pursue a clean lifestyle and optimum health lest I become the patient in the bed I’d been hovering over.
In his own way, Tim strived to do the same. He learned to meditate, pursued alternative therapies and healing modalities, lived a balanced lifestyle, grew and prepared food to reduce our family’s exposure to toxic chemicals that unbeknownst to us, had already had their way inside of his body years prior. His oncologist confirmed that his exposure to landscaping and woodworking chemicals in his late teens and early twenties were likely the culprit in his case of multiple myeloma.
Forever chemicals are just that…FOREVER.
I don’t have the answers for how to make things right. I’m strangely finding myself smack inside of and dependent upon a system I know full well is broken and needs to change.
Cancer has gifted me a front row seat to a movie I never wanted to attend, much less have the role of supporting actress in. I strangely don’t feel angry about it. Or perhaps I’m simply too numb or tired to feel it and find voicing what I observe and channeling my energy into action and advocacy to be more productive.
I am responding to an inner call to watch, witness, reflect, and record so that our experience and the insights we gain from them can be woven into a larger fabric contributing to a tapestry of human experiences that will somehow allow us to reconcile where we’ve come from and where we are at presently with where we want to go next. One thing I know for absolute certain is that for humans to thrive our planet must thrive too.
Thank you for being a part of our Cancer Journey. We appreciate you more than words can say😘
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