Don't Stop the Dance

This is Andrew's sister, Julie, again.  I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who joined us for the Celebration of Andrew's Life. For those of you who were attending in spirit, here are a few of the highlights of the day.

Andrew had been unable to eat for the last six months of his life, and as Tara told us, he really wanted us all to EAT. Oh, and there was an a abundance of food.

He'd selected a hauntingly beautiful version of Halleluja (by Jeff Buckley) and Lyle Lovett's Gospel-inspired "Since the Last Time" and encouraged us to mix and mingle and share memories of him with people we might not know. Tara led us in drumming, and meditation, and shared poignant and intimate details of their life together and Andrew's actual passing.

Martin spoke from his heart about their friendship, and gave us a slide show of pictures that brought back a rich tapestry of memories. 

 

 

A young man - a patron from the library (Jethro?) - read aloud a letter he had written to Tara and me about Andy and his generosity of time and spirit.

 

Tara and Andrew's friend Holly read the inspirational poem "The Invitation".

 

I spoke - a little too quickly, and didn't quite get in all the details - but here are my notes:

 

 

The week before Andy left us I was staying with Andy and Tara and offered to run an errand. Andy drew me a map –

It was a gorgeous September day, and I enjoyed a lovely walk through the neighbourhood, looking at all the beautiful houses.I dropped in to the North Perth Public Library, where I met Sherrie and Rebecca, and admired the architecture of the old section of the building.

When I got back to the house I told Andy that I’d visited *his* library – to which he replied:

“It’s a Carnegie Library”.

“Oh”

“He built 2500 libraries”

“OH”

“Did you know that he revolutionized the library system by allowing people to see and touch he books they wanted to borrow? That before that you had to go in – like at the old LCBO stores – and right down the name of the book and have a librarian fetch it for you?”

“Oh, no…I didn’t know that”

The whole exchange was such a wonderful example of Andy’s Fast Facts

We – as a family – used to tease him about his sometimes random outbursts of information. We called them: Andy’s Fast Facts

He had such diverse interests, and such a gift for retention – and then there was this uncontrollable impulse to share. It should have come as no surprise that he would become a talented writer, a gifted teacher, and avid blogger and Facebooker – and yes – that he would end up working in a library dispensing and recommending books.

September 1960 – my earliest memory

I’m on a train with my mother and my brand new baby brother Andrew John. We’re travelling from Kingston to join Dad in Cornwall – where he and another guy were building a bridge. I was two years old at the time, and what I remember most was the bassinet that Andy was in: red fabric, a metal frame, and white trim.

Fast Forward to September 1976

Andy and I are on train again. I’m eighteen and he would have just turned 16. We flew from Dharan, Saudi Arabia to Geneva, Switzerland and were taking the train to attend boarding school in the Swiss Alps.

In those intervening 16 years we moved around quite a bit as a family. I counted - and Andy’s not here to correct me:

6 significant moves
8 houses
3 countries

As a family, we shared many rich and sometimes exotic memories – and family stories that only we could find the humour in, like when Andy lost his passport in on the train in Dommodosola. You had to be there.

And yet…Tara, I remember coming to see you and Andy here in Listowel around Christmas one year. We got snowed in – and Andy got out the family slides, which putting up the bent screen, and loading carousel after carousel of typical family photos.  I say typical because I remember feeling a bit apologetic subjecting you to all that Epplett-ness, and you told me that you have the exact same pictures: of children’s birthday parties, of first days at school, of beloved family pets (in our case cats), and of kids jumping off the dock at the cottage. (Andy was a pretty awesome water-skier back in the day, BTW)

That Swiss train trip in 1976 was significant – though we didn’t know it at the time – as it marked the end of us all living together as a family, and the beginning our own mini-diaspora – with me moving back to Canada to attend Queen’s, Mike going to UBC, and Andy living in Minnesota, Peterborough, Calgary, Kuwait, Japan….Nelson. I’m being purposely vague now as I don’t have all the dates and places in my head – and if anyone could get the facts straight it – ironically - would be Andy. From now on I’m just going to make stuff up.

When Andy started his Transforming Cancer blog he chose not to use words like “fight” and “battle” – instead choosing to talk about re-directing energy, and “dancing” with Cancer.  As a dancer – I teach and sometimes compete – I loved the metaphor but had some difficulty seeing how to interpret Andy’s passing within that context.

When we coach beginner dance competitors on what the judges are looking for we warn against “out-dancing” your partner – that is, trying to be better than our partner, focusing on teamwork. I was thinking that Cancer had “out-danced” Andy.

And then I thought, no, Cancer wasn’t Andy’s “partner”; Cancer was the floor.  Believe it or not dancers find a way to blame the floor for a poor outcome – it was too fast/slippery, or slow and sticky….

But I still didn’t think this honoured Andy’s dance metaphor. So I started to think about a Jack & Jill contest. A Jack & Jill is a type of dance competition where you don’t know who you’re going to be dancing with – you are randomly partnered up – and you don’t know, or have any choice, as to what song you’re going to dance to – kind of like life. The universe chooses both your partner and your music and you’re responsible for creating something beautiful – no rehearsing, you just go for it.

Well Andy got lucky – he got an amazing “draw”, meaning the universe gave him the very, very best partner possible – and even though he only got to dance 1 ½ minutes of a three minute song – it was a wonderful dance - full of love, creativity, and an inspiration.  



 

Andrew's Dance with Cancer Coming to an End

I'm Andrew's sister, Julie.

Andy (as I call him) has given both me and his partner, Tara permission to post here in his place. These are my words, not his - as he's not up to even dictating. He has other priorities with his limited strength right now, but I think he does want me to post here and on Facebook to let people know what's going on. 

He's still here in his lovely Listowel home. A nurse comes by and checks in with him. In the last two days he's started using morphine, injected through a port in his arm, which
has helped significantly in the management of his pain, and allows him to get some much-needed sleep.  Nights are still difficult, though - for both him and Tara. 

Woke up late this morning and went downstairs to find “everyone” asleep in the living room: Andy on his recliner, Tara under a blanket on the couch, Angel perched on the back of the couch, and Grace curled up on the love-seat - sun streaming in through the windows and branches of the still-green trees outside….

Still green and they’re already losing their leaves. What’s up with that? It seems a rather cruel reminder of how (extra) fast time is passing.

 
Andy gave us a welcome laugh this morning. Tara had made the difficult call to the funeral home to discuss “arrangements”.  They recommended, in the interest of the loved one’s dignity, that clothing be worn for the cremation. She asked Andy what he wanted to wear, and when he replied “Jeans” she said “Will they still fit?” (since he’s lost so much weight). He said, “It doesn’t matter; I’ll be lying down.”  Cracked us all up.
 

 Andy and "Gracie"

 

Learn to Meditate and Help Me Transform Cancer

A few months ago I was diagnosed with Stage 4 esophageal cancer. Even with radiation and/or chemotherapy treatments the doctors offer me no hope for a cure.

Knowing that many people with similar diagnoses have used a variety of alternative therapies to defy their doctors' expectations, it was an easy choice to seek them out. I found a Doctor of Chinese Medicine specializing in cancer, and a local naturopath who could administer intravenous vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide treatments. My partner Tara treats me with acupuncture and BodyTalk, and two osteopaths, Paul and Dianne, have also provided invaluable care. With all these caring and competent people around me I feel truly blessed and have hope for a full recovery.

In the meantime, I have had to stop work. I had been unable to eat solid foods for some time but the tumour has grown so large I was eventually unable to swallow liquids and I lost an alarming 75 pounds. The surgical installation of a PEG tube which allows me to inject liquid nourishment directly into my stomach improved things, but recovering from the surgery has taken a lot out of me.

I have received a tremendous amount of support from family and friends, and my practitioners have reduced or even waived their fees. I have applied for sickness benefits from EI and CPP but the financial realities - both regular bills and the cost of the alternative treatments - are starting to get ahead of me.

I know many people have launched internet campaigns to receive donations to help them out in similar situations, but I don't really want to ask people to just give me money. I would rather give people a fair exchange on something they can use than ask for a handout. So I came up with another idea.

For some time now I have made teaching meditation a personal mission. Daily meditation has improved my life immeasurably and for the past several years I have been offering classes locally. A few years ago I set up a website offering free instructions and last year I launched an iPhone/iPad/iPod app to help people make meditation part of their daily routine.

In order to address the challenges I now face I decided to invite people to visit my meditation website to purchase the app, or make use of the Instruction Pages (which are the same as those on the app) and express their appreciation using the PayPal 'Donate' button.

If you are interested in supporting me on my journey please pass this along to anyone you know who would like to be part of this.

Go to TamingtheMindMonkey.blogspot.ca or TransformingCancer.blogspot.ca to learn more and participate. A link to the app and to my PayPal account can be found on the right hand side of both webpages.

Thank you,

Andrew Epplett

It's called a 'PEG-tube'

 A little over three weeks ago, unable to swallow much more than water, I contacted the surgeon assigned to my case and asked him to install a feeding tube.

I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into, but the radiographer, Dr Gopal, mentioned that it was an option. I was still losing weight and I really couldn't afford to lose much more, being at least ten pounds lighter, maybe even twenty, than I probably should be.

Dr Kilmurray fit me into his schedule a few days later on Friday June 14. I now have what is known as a "PEG-tube" sticking into the top of my stomach. At night I use an electric pump provided through to feed myself liquid nourishment which is covered by public health care benefits and delivered to my door by the pharmacy free of charge.

All of this is coordinated by the Southwest Community Access Centre who have a dietician and a VON nurse visiting me weekly if I want to make sure I have everything I need. I feel pretty well taken care of by the system, even though my primary choice for treatment - hydrogen peroxide, Vitamin C and DMSO chelation - is not covered by OHIP. Maybe I should start a petition.

The PEG tube is designed for the pump I use as I sleep to give me highly processed liquid nourishment. During the day - every two hours or so - I use the Magic Bullet blender a friend generously gifted me to whip up concoctions and inject them into the PEG-tube using disposable 60cc syringes.

Here are main ingredients, both sustenance and medicine:
- VEGA protein powder
- whey protein isolate
- water and/or coconut water
- turmeric
- digestive enzymes
- Seroyal liquid vitamins
- concentrated liquid greens
- Dr Sherman Lai's Ai-Detox
- Free and Easy Wanderer Plus (aka Jia Wei Xiao Yao San)
- CandiBactin - BR

I can still drink fine liquids and have a Champion juicer another friend gave me I use mainly for carrot and lemon juice shots. But now that the body seems to be getting stronger and the reroot veggie boxes have started, I'll be doing as many local, seasonal raw greens as I can and getting more inventive with the Magic Bullet.

The surgery was more demanding on my personal healing powers than I was prepared for. I thought I would go back to work the following Wednesday, but in the days immediately after the surgery I was on pain medication, bruised, hungry and malnourished, and I had a tube sticking out of my belly. I was totally put off by the broths which sustained me prior to the surgery, and couldn't continue ingesting baking soda (everything tastes salty these days).

Needless to say, not only have I not been back to work since the surgery, but I am taking an indefinite medical leave of absence and applying for sickness benefits from EI and CPP.

Seven days after the surgery I started getting a lot of pain along the area of the diaphragm. By this time I had started depriving myself of the hydromorphone I had been prescribed for the pain because of the way it darkened my mood, so that may have helped, but pain is the sign of a problem and this wasn't an organ or even near the surgery site.

Whatever it was it was a localized and definable physical side-effect from the surgery where tension was being held and needed to be released through some sort of physical therapy. Tara helped me out as much as she could with acupuncture and BodyTalk, but it was a visit to an osteopath on Tuesday the 25 that was a major turning point.

I'm pretty fortunate to have Paul as an osteopath. Not only is he also trained in cranial-sacral therapy, but he also possesses gifts which I believe cannot be taught. He has helped me release some pretty deep stuff in the years I've been seeing him, but the biggest stuff is coming up now as I dance this part of the dance. The past session with him was pivotal in getting me to where I can actually sit at the computer and write for an extended period of time and finally finish this entry.

I have requested a PET scan for next month to see where I am, and in the meantime I'll be stepping up the tempo, resuming my baking soda doses and maybe even trying cannabis oil.

For me one of the most interesting things about my feeding tube is how late last year our male cat Angel went off his food and became dangerously ill. The vet put a similar feeding tube into the top of his esophagus and five times a day I had to feed and administer medicine to him using the exact same medical-issue 60cc syringes as I am using now. His life depended on it and at the time I had a very clear sense that there was something significant about the act of syringing food and crushed up pills, something beyond just keeping the cat alive. "There is something here for me," I said to Tara more than once during those weeks.

Cancer is NOT a Disease

Another very hopeful book has come my way: Cancer is NOT a Disease - It's a Survival Mechanism by Andreas Moritz

In the first part of the book, the author talks about cancer from a very different perspective while making a very strong case that chemotherapy and radiation should be avoided at all costs. In the second part, he catalogues the range of remedies people are using successfully to stop cancer from killing them.

I wrote of Dr. Tullio Simoncini before, about his perspective that cancer is a fungal growth that can be treated the way other fungal growths are treated. He actually injects a baking soda solution into the body adjacent to tumours. (I wonder if the tablet form of Canesten, the anti-candida treatment for women, might have an active ingredient or two which could be used to treat cancer this way.)

Interestingly, the conditions we associate with fungus are damp and dark, and the condition of the body where cancer flourishes is described as "dampness" in Chinese medicine.  Most of the foods I love and have chosen to sustain myself with for the better part of my life - as advertised on North American TV all day long - are an invitation to cancer to form in the first place: acid-forming (and dampness-forming) foods such as bread, cheese, tomato sauce, meat, and sugar.

One of the remedies in the book is the baking soda cure (see video in previous post), but instead of molasses you can use maple syrup. This is great because I live in maple syrup country, where Mennonite farmers are still selling it from the side of the road this time of year.

I was content to just drink 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda in a glass of water three times a day, but the author explains that the maple syrup-baking soda concoction is a way to supercharge the impact of baking soda on cancer.

Cancer likes to eat sugar to grow and spread. When you mix the baking soda with the maple syrup the cancer cells gobble up the syrup which, like a Trojan horse, delivers the baking soda directly to the site of the cancer, which is what Dr. Simoncini likes to do.

Even though the book suggests that a tablespoon three times a day for several months is enough on its own to tackle a tumour, I'm choosing to continue with my H2O2 treatments.

Hydrogen Peroxide and Baking Soda

After deciding to pursue hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) therapy, I went on a frantic search of the web to find out the closest place where I could do it. For all I knew it wasn't even available or legal in Canada, so I was half expecting to have to leave the country.

In the book 'Hydrogen Peroxide: Medical Miracle' by William Campbell Douglass II, MD there is a directory of practitioners, so I started there, first finding some naturopaths in BC. Searching the web, I eventually found some practitioners in Ontario - London, Toronto and Barrie -  but I was really hoping for someone closer.

When I mentioned to Tara that it seemed as though most of the people doing this kind of therapy in Canada are naturopaths, she suggested I contact a friend of ours, Jacinta Willems, a naturopath working in Stratford, to see if she could. Jacinta got back to me right away, telling me that she wasn't qualified to do any kind of intravenous therapy but suggested I contact John Pronk, a naturopath in Palmerston who does chelation therapy.

Chelation therapy is the use of intravenous infusions for a variety of conditions but is so unknown in the mainstream that the spell-check of this blog has underlined it in red. Not surprisingly, most of the Wikipedia entry on chelation is quite dismissive of it value.

I contacted John, who confirmed he is able to offer me intravenous H2O2 treatments, so I booked an appointment. 

Palmerston is a ten-minute drive from my front door. John is someone I met through some friends years ago when he allowed a small group of people to tour his straw bale house, which was then still under construction. John shares the building where his practice is with the local midwifery practice, and it was one of the midwives we knew socially who included us in the house tour.

I don't know about you, but I have always been fascinated by how the universe brings people together with Jungian synchronicity. To find someone so close to where I live - someone I have actually met - who can offer these treatments, has given Tara and I an even greater sense of optimism about this whole situation.

At my first appointment, John took some drops of blood from one of my fingers and put them under a microscope. The LED screen beside the scope showed my blood cells in full colour. John pointed at the condition of my blood which indicated how dehydrated I was, how my blood was full of yeast (candida overgrowth), and how my blood cells looked like they were not producing enough hydrogen peroxide!

Then I remembered the line in Dr Douglass' book saying that 'maybe cancer is actually a hydrogen peroxide deficiency'.

In addition to the H2O2 infusions, John recommended I start taking turmeric, some Candibactin to deal with the candida, and prescribed a glass of water with a half teaspoon of baking soda first thing in the morning.

Dr. Tullio Simoncini is the author of a book on treating cancer with baking soda called 'Cancer is a Fungus'. My cousin Neva recommended a link to a You Tube video (see below) about using baking soda to kill cancer, but at the time I was so overwhelmed by people's recommendations I ignored it. Apparently he injects baking soda adjacent to tumours and has been getting really good results.

So I've started drinking a glass of baking soda solution before meals, and yesterday I had my first H2O2 chelation treatment. It took a couple of hours so I did some reading, meditation and Qigong while I sat in a nice big comfy chair in a room in the basement of John's clinic where the midwives have their practice. One of the midwives, my friend Cathy, was in clinic at the same time. She came in and gave me a hug and a kiss, making me feel even more the sense of  being 'on the right path.'

After the treatment, I was singing and dancing for the rest of the day.

The Next Step

Whenever I share my diagnosis with someone, two things usually happen:

Either the person I am talking to or someone they know has gone through the same thing and they are now cancer free by despite being given a death sentence by their doctors(s);

They recommend a treatment besides chemotherapy or radiation.

The other day when I wrote about hydrogen peroxide therapy, a student of mine whose father has cancer contacted me and gave me the book 'Hydrogen Peroxide: Medical Miracle' by William Campbell Douglass II, MD. Once I started reading it, I realized this is the therapy I want to try before I go the radiation route.

Up until now I have been doing a bio-oxidative therapy similar to hydrogen peroxide therapy. It's called Miracle Mineral Solution and, taken orally once a day, is said to have the same result as taking hydrogen peroxide orally three times a day.

The book 'Hydrogen Peroxide: Medical Miracle' is an account of the successes Dr Douglass and other doctors have had treating a variety of 'terminal' and/or 'incurable' diseases such as cancer, HIV, sarcoidosis, MS, lupus, emphysema, etc. by administering hydrogen peroxide as an intravenous infusion. He is adamant that someone with my diagnosis cannot hope to transform their condition through oral bio-oxidative treatments alone.

The task I now face is finding someone nearby who offers this kind of treatment. I have been googling for practitioners all weekend and have found several in Toronto and Barrie, but would like someone closer. Someone in Guelph, Stratford or Kitchener/Waterloo would be nice.

Wish me luck.