How I spend my day, Part 1

this post is for chris h, who lives in either ny city or jersey. (what's the diff?) at the start of my illness when i decided on alt med for my healing treatment, he shared with me his mom's story; how she was diagnosed for cancer when she was living in the u.s., how she got the best care from expert doctors bec his sister is also a doctor and they have a code of taking care of their own, how they kept trying different chemo drugs on her but her condition continued to deteriorate, until finally she died, suffering discomfort and pain. today, two sisters are treating themselves with alt med diets with positive and encouraging results.

the fact that this post is being uploaded today and not at a later date when i am more comfortable with it, is because of loy a's email asking about my diet, his wife has breast cancer and is undergoing traditional chemotherapy treatments. as i have said, any treatment should be able to cure us, as long as we believe that God is our Healer, and everyone else are His instruments. still, for what it's worth, i continue to espouse my alt med protocol.

there have also been a number of you who have asked about the protocol i'm following. i've given you teasers here and there of how my treatment goes, but here i will reveal all the dirty details. (as they say in the tabloids.) i've heard people say, 'what??!! raw pancreas? how can you eat that stuff.' it's not that difficult because it's not a delicacy; it's medicine for me.

i've also been asked, 'is eating any raw meat safe? what about bacteria?' in this update, i will explain to you why it's safe to eat the stuff i eat.

before i proceed, i must pay homage to the 2 persons at home who provide indispensable help in my treatments. there's melds, our cook, and former yaya of our eldest son, alfonso. she's been with cris and me since a week after we got married. she left us 9 years ago to start a family, but she came back 3 years later, with her family. melds buys food for us from the wet market and prepares my meals.

the other of course, is cris. she does two important things for me. she purchases my medicines, and pays for them, then sorts them out in these little pill boxes for my breakfast, lunch, and supper. the other thing she does, you'll soon find out.

without melds and cris, i would really have a very difficult time in following my protocol. i'm alive today because of their help.

now, tighten your seat belts for the ride. some of you might have tender sensibilities, so you're allowed to get off anytime you want. away we go.

i wake up everyday at around 4 or 5am. the actual time depends on whether i have to do things later in the day such as work a bit, or take the children to school and fetch them, or attend to my service in the parish, or something other than curing myself.

every 3 or 4 days, i try to keep track of my fasting blood sugar (fbs), so the first thing i do upon waking is to prick one of my fingers, get a drop of blood, and test it. the other time, it was 87, which was good considering the cheating on my food diet i've been doing these past celebratory weeks. the tests takes about 5 mins.

then, i do a bit of stretching exercise to ease the chronic pain in my lower back. dr jimmy taught me to bend over with my knees straight, slowly circling my arms, until gravity pulls my fingers down to the floor. i stay that way for about 20 – 30 seconds, then sit on my haunches before straightening up. i mustn't stand straight up from the bent-over position for it puts a strain on my back muscles. i can now touch the floor with my 2nd knuckles, and stay that way for up to 30 secs. not bad, huh?

after that, i take my first raw pork pancreas (rpp) serving for the day. i eat it with a clove of raw, crushed garlic, seasoning the rpp with natural rock salt, a bit of soy sauce, and chili flakes. eating this takes about 10 – 15 mins. if you ever need a quick 'waker-upper', try chewing on raw garlic and eating chili flakes upon getting up.

food preparation 101. first the rock salt. the salt i take cannot be the iodized table salt. according to dr jimmy, natural iodized salt is a redundancy. natural salt has all the necessary minerals for human consumption, including iodine. it's processed salt that needs iodine. and i can't take any processed food because of the chemicals added to them. they usually have carcinogenic food preservatives.

how do you know it's processed salt? take a small amount, drop it into water, hot or cold, it doesn't matter, and stir it. you will see the undissolved crystals.

but a word of warning. table salt isn't the only thing that's processed these days. they now produce processed rock salt. so always test the salt you're using. i just learned this morning that natural salt is no longer available in the wet market close to our house. the makati health services under the guidance of the the dept of health, has banned them. now, i'll have to look farther away to source my natural salt. i can always buy sea salt from the health food stores, but they cost a bundle. besides, why should i when the phils is a country of 7,000 islands, all surrounded by sea water? oh, for those who can afford expensive stuff, the other name for rock salt is sea salt. changing the name ups the price many times over.

the water i drink. we used to buy processed water. you know the kind that is filtered, reverse-osmosisfied (a new word i coined), and processed? they're supposed to be free of dirt and contaminants. well, they're also free of the minerals the body needs.

the rationale again of natural healing is that water naturally attracts minerals to itself. when the water is processed and stripped of its minerals, once it enters our bodies, it gathers the minerals in us and passes them out in our urine. we are left with too little of the minerals we need.

we now drink nawasa water. eeuukk! you say? well, first we filter it with a very good filter that takes away the dirt and contaminants, but not the natural minerals. i can't tell you the brand since i'm not getting anything to advertise them anyway. but it's german (or one of the nordic countries) and not too expensive. to take away the chlorine, we just leave the water standing in an open container for at least 30 minutes for the chlorine to evaporate. so then, we're drinking mineral water.

if i buy bottled water outside, i choose the mineral water. there are only 2 or 3 brands around. one of them is evian, which must be the most expensive water in the world, aside from perrier. (is perrier mineral or distilled?) i've only taken evian once, when ate nonette gave me a bottle, courtesy of the airlines she flies in. sosy, my aunt, no?

melds buys the raw pork pancreas (lapay) and raw beef liver(atay) from the wet market early in the morning to make sure it's from freshly slaughtered animals. she washes them well to remove grime and dirt. then soaks them for 10 – 15 mins in a small basin of mineral water with a cup of rock salt. she then wipes them off with a paper towel, wraps them individually in aluminum foil and places them in the freezer.

when it's time to eat them, we take a piece out of the freezer and chop off the portion i'm to take. it's 2 tablespoons of raw pork pancreas for every serving; and 3 tablespoons of raw beef liver. the crushed raw garlic i eat with the raw pancreas contains allicin which kills bacteria. with the proper preparation and cleaning, and the raw garlic, i'm safe from germs and bacteria. the only thing i have to watch out for are the bits of aluminum foil that cling to the frozen pancreas. they can stick to the space between my teeth, or worse get swallowed. i don't think my gastric juices are able to dissolve aluminum foil. i'd hate to have glitter in my stool.

here's the alt med rationale for the raw pork pancreas and the raw beef liver. according to dr william kelley, whose metabolic medicine protocol dr jimmy follows, we all produce cancer cells. they are a natural part of our body’s cell repair and regeneration, though they mutate to become killer cells. normally, our digestive enzymes and immune system are strong enough to kill these mutated cells so they don't do our bodies any harm. it's when our organs lose their effectiveness that we get into trouble. our pancreas may no longer produce enough enzymes, or the enzymes produced aren't potent enough to digest the mutated cells, and/or our natural killer cells are too few or too ineffective and thus unable to kill the cancer cells; either because the pathways are clogged or we're not getting enough nutrients from the food we eat.

cancer cells are born from germ cells or stem cells which are spread throughout our body to aid in cell repair and regeneration. germ cells are activated when a part of the body has had tissue damaged and needs to be repaired. cancer cells are activated germ cells gone awry – their cells are like placenta that grew outside the womb. similar to the placenta (i.e. the baby’s source of nutrition inside the mother’s womb), the cells multiply and grow very fast, and are self-sustaining, getting their food directly from the blood stream. cancer cells are wrapped in a protein-based cover which has negative ions, similar to the natural killer cells, thus, they are not detected by the body and identified as “enemy cells”, and continue to grow unhampered and largely undetected. the protein cover is very difficult to strip off unless you have sufficient potent enzymes.

a healthy pancreas produces enough enzymes to digest the food in the stomach, as well as travel through the blood stream to reach other parts of our body where they search for and digest excess/abnormal proteins. when they strip the protein cover off the cancer cells, the immune system within us targets them for elimination by the natural killer cells.

my pancreas doesn't produce enough potent enzymes so i need the pork pancreas which is loaded with live enzymes. how did my pancreas become so inefficient? too much rich fatty foods, and not enough vitamins from green leafy vegetables. and sometimes, even if we eat the right foods, we tend to overcook them such that their natural enzymes are killed off.

a healthy immune system produces natural killer cells which are potent (as opposed to lazy and ineffective). mine no longer is. that's where the raw beef liver comes in. raw beef liver is a rich source of nutrients, chock-full of vitamins, minerals, and other goodies our immune system needs. i'm sure you've all heard of athletes throwing together milk, yoghurt, celery sticks, tomato juice, and raw liver in a blender and drinking the concoction to give them strength and stamina. well, that's why i take the raw beef liver – it is a superfood for my immune system.

could i also take it blended? yeah, i suppose, but i'm used to eating and chewing it. you see, God did a wonderful job of preparing me for so many things in my protocol. He taught me to love strange, exotic foods early on. here's a favorite story, but if you're a rabid animal lover or possess a queasy stomach, maybe you better skip it and just go to the last paragraph.

when i was 7 years old, my uncle totoy or toots, as i called him, took me to his farm in the province. (i already lived in the province, but in the capital town. he took me to the boondocks, about 3 hrs drive away in those days.) it was a fiesta and since he was the rich landowner in the place, he had people all over the farm slaughtering pigs and chickens and goats and cooking them. one item that was never absent in his preparations was dog meat, THE local delicacy.

they butchered the dog by (close your ears if you can't stand 'cruelty' to animals.) tying it securely to a bamboo pole. with a sharp knife, they made a deep gash in it's throat, and caught the warm blood in a bowl. they transferred some of the blood in a glass and mixed in some gin so it wouldn't coagulate very quickly. as is the custom, they offer it to the big man around, my uncle totoy.

he looks at me, smiles, and says, 'give it to my nephew. let him drink it.' so all the guys around looked at me and smiled at the thought of a 7-year old child drinking the concoction, the man who had the glass of blood offered it to me. i looked at my uncle, and he told me to drink it so i'd grow up to be a brave man. i realized then that it was a rite of manhood. everyone expected me to turn it down, but half-hoped, for the sake of my uncle, that i wouldn't. when i hesitated, they said i had better drink it quickly before the blood turned cold and hardened.

i wanted to be brave, and i desperately wanted their approval. most of all, i wanted my uncle's approval. i took the glass of blood and drained it down in one go. the gin improved the taste of warm blood. that whole day, i strutted around like the cock on the walk, pleased with myself for what i had done. i ate anything they placed in front of me – pig's intestines & entrails cooked in blood (dinuguan), raw goat's and dog's meat (kilawin), animal brain made into an omelet, anything.

in my later years, i would eat balut, raw fish (kinilaw or sashimi, sushi), frog's legs, grasshoppers, beetles, freshly-caught eels, raw eggs chickens and birds, and fried ants and ant eggs. my mother herself, bless her soul, introduced me to two filipino delicacies; pampanga's camarro, which is fried larvae dug up from the ground, then deep fried, and the ilocos region's jumping salad. that's raw shrimp soaked in vinegar with salt, chopped garlic, and red and green chillies. why 'jumping'? because they're alive and they hop around in the deep dish they are served in. you put them in your mouth and feel them squirming inside before you chomp down on them with your molars and taste their sweet juicy flesh. hmm, delicious!

raw pork pancreas and raw beef liver? bring them on!

that's part 1 of this post, and we've only reached my first serving of raw pork pancreas. we still haven't even gotten to breakfast yet. as larry henares says, 'more tomorrow.'

A day I'm glad to have

it's my birthday anniversary today. i'm 59, and alive! ain't that great? for awhile back there, i worried i wouldn't see this day. so i'm very glad to have it to enjoy life.

3 weeks ago, i went to see my alt med doctor, dr jimmy, concerned about the cancer in my left lung and the osseous metastasis in my right bone structure. he asked me sit down, then suddenly stopped, looked at me and asked, 'but how do you feel?' i couldn't suppress a wide smile because the previous day i had done 16 laps and felt pretty good. so i told him. he proceeded to do his muscle testing on me (one day, i'll explain what muscle testing is, but not now.)

when he'd finished, he looked down at me (he's not a tall guy, but he was on his feet and i was seated), and said, 'no, i don't detect any cancer anymore. you're fine.' i was floored. i didn't know if i would jump up and give him a great big hug (nope. i didn't. i'm a bit homophobic.); or break down in tears (neither. i was brought up learning big boys don't cry.); or just dance around the room (not that either. michael had just died so everyone was reprising their moonwalking skills, but i never had any to start with). so, i just sat there and tried to take in the various levels of meanings of his pronouncement.

no more fear? no more worrying? no more raw pancreas and raw liver? well, not that. he quickly disabused me of any notion of giving up those delicacies. he said i have to continue with the protocol for the entire 6 months (3 more months to go) and for the rest of my life, still take them on a reduced frequency so that the cancer doesn't come back.

as i walked out the gate, i remembered to say a quiet prayer of thanks to my Healer. in the excitement, i had temporarily forgotten about Him. but i'm getting better, in the BC days (before cancer), i would have probably reached home in makati from la vista before i would remember.

by the time i got home, the doubts had creeped in. what if dr jimmy was mistaken? what if he's just a quack? what if i'm not healed? so i started to agonize until i remembered who the real Healer is. God said he'd take care of me and i have to keep my faith in His word.

anyway, cris and i decided it's time to use my oncologist's request for another ct scan. i'm still holding off on the request for the mri. the contrast dye they use for ct scans and mri's scares me. i've read that it has bad affects on the kidneys. until i find a compatible kidney donor, who will cheerfully donate his/her kidney to me without cost, i'm taking very good care of my one remaining kidney.

but i recall how inconclusive either of those tests can be. the findings in my left lung were basically disregarded bec they were too faint to definitely indicate cancer cells. the osseous metastasis (i've learned to like the sound of that phrase. it's sooo alliterative. is that the word i want? it glides off the tongue so smoothly, masking its lethal connotation,) was not conclusively cancer either. it could be 1) very bad arthritis, 2) severe trauma, 3) severerer osteoporosis, or 3) severest osseous metastasis. take your pick. you'd have a 25% chance of being right.

so why the hell go through the exercise at all? well, bec it would be so pleasant to hear that the results don't indicate any cancer at all. and it would be sooo ssweeeett to see the face of my oncologist when he reads that report. i wouldn't feel i would have to comfort him anymore. or maybe on second thought, i'd have to comfort him even more when he realizes all their high-tech machinery and expensive education didn't help me at all. (snicker. snicker. snicker.)

and then, another problem reared its head. so, i'm well? what if i was never really sick? what if i didn't have cancer at all? i just said those tests were all inconclusive, didn't i? then all these prayers from friends were a waste of effort? all my blog posts had no meaning? in the words of the bard, were they 'all full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?' will people say i just wasted their sympathy? will my friends now abandon me and label me a fraidy cat, a boy who cried wolf?

oh! the shame! the humiliation! it's almost too much for someone with my inflated ego to bear. good thing my ego is inflated enough to handle it.

the other indicators my oncologist warned me to look out for, are not evident either. he said to watch out for cysts in the lymph nodes around the neck and in the crotch; negative. pain in the affected bones, specifically my right arm; negative. pain in the lower back; positive, but then i've felt pain there for some time, besides, they're more like muscle pains. they go away when i do stretching exercises.

this morning i took my fbs, and it registered at 74. first time i ever went below 84. the only irritating indicator is my weight. i looked at the scales earlier and i'm down to 156 lbs. i had been holding on to 160 for around 3 weeks. but i kind of expected the weight loss bec i've been missing the brown rice part of my meals these past 2 weeks. not everyday, but often enough to make me suspect i'd lose weight.

so for those of you who want to slim down, i highly recommend a vegan diet, guaranteed to help you lose those pounds or kilos or tons. of course the crucial thing is motivation; you just want to lose weight, i don't want to lose my life. it's like someone stuck a loaded gun to your face and said, 'your meat dishes or your life?' no contest, really.

so anyway, a day after seeing dr jimmy, i hied off to the Blessed Sacrament again, sat down, and asked God a direct question, 'am i healed? am i well? am i cancer free?' actually, those were 3 questions.

His response was a simple, 'how do you feel? d'you feel sick? are you weak, tired, debilitated? do you suffer from nausea? vomiting? how do you FEEL?'

sheepishly, i answered, 'to tell You the truth, i feel fine. i feel pretty good, in fact.'

and He said, 'well, what more do you want? church bells ringing? fireworks going off? singing and dancing in the streets?' not in exactly those words, but that was the feeling i got.

and no, those were not what i expected. i wanted reassurance that i was ok. but the sense i also got from Him was, 'that's all the reassurance you'll get, or need. you feel fine, and you are fine. so don't fret over it. say 'thank you' and enjoy your blessings.'

so, thank you, Lord. thank you, cris. thank you, kids, thank you to my family, and thank you to all of you, my friends. you are all blessings to me. oh, and don't go away. it's nice having you around.

and that's life with benjie, on another day i'm glad i have.