Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Part Seven: Thank You Dr. Steven Eisen & Pushing Lucky Too Hard

Post First Originally Published On Tuesday, July 9th, 2013, 7:02 PM


On Wednesday, October 10th, 2012, I bought a book called “Dog Cancer: The Holistic Answer” by Dr. Steven Eisen. I wanted an already walked path, a path with a role model who had obtained the outcome that I wanted. I wanted a natural method, with no side effects to give Lucky the longest survival time with the best quality of life. None of that bullshit survival timeline of chemotherapy and traditional cancer patients where the survival time and the money the hospitals gain from the patient’s sickness are all that’s truly cared about. This book and the knowledge and resources it provided me were the foundation and backbone of what Lucky’s treatments were. It also gave me the foundation for my knowledge to naturally treat cancer, what causes it, and what can be done. Up to this point, we would walk her every day, but she would be limping every where she went. I hated how everyone who drove by all turned their heads and looked. It infuriated me that people would look out of curiosity. I get why people look. But each time someone looked, only negative thoughts and feelings came to mind. Thoughts that either reminded me of the predicament Lucky was in, thoughts of looking at Lucky as if she was some deformed monster, or thoughts of myself as a bad owner would fire up my temper. In my mind, I was thinking, “what the fuck are you looking at?!!” I hated seeing a car come down the road because I would see them looking and turning their heads as they drove by. I despised it so much because of the pity people would show. Pity and sympathy can be heart-warming, but when everyone starts looking at your dog as if, “oh, poor girl”, their pity boils my blood. I mean every time I see someone looking, I start feeling this way. It’s a matter if enough people look during that walk, that’s enraging. Intellectually I understand why they look, but when enough people look again and again and again, it’s equivalent to one person staring, and staring is rude! Why is staring rude? I don’t know and in my cantankerous state of mind right now, it does not matter! I just wanted to be treated normally. Even all the attention is not ill-minded or ill-hearted, when it comes to a handicap, everyone just wants to be treated normally because the extra, special attention that is placed, even if well-intentioned, constantly reminds them that they are different! If it’s attention for something that is positive and makes them be more respected and admired, then of course people would love that attention, but if it’s negative, that well-minded attention has the reverse effects! I wished for Lucky to be healthy again, just so I could walk and play with Lucky free of this feeling of being in an abnormal predicament. Before this her diagnosis, I was lazy to walk Lucky and disliked it because it felt like a chore. Now I appreciated the exercise she would get for the effort she would give, even when she was tired and resting every few steps, but with a glaring face staring my way as they would drive by. I wanted Lucky to enjoy the time she had outside, but I loathed it when someone was coming my way.

My brother and I were walking Lucky. It was drizzling and started to rain harder. With Lucky’s three healthy legs, you’d imagine that walking mediocre distances that she used to be able to do would be somewhat of a challenge. I did not know at the time that training her left hind leg by going long-distance was not a favorable action or training methodology to undertake to strengthen that hind leg. I found out later that there are certain programs out there that help train three-legged dogs adapt and gain strength back. So there we were trying to get Lucky to move faster due to the increasing pouring rain, and from our actions of rushing her, in hindsight, we may have pushed her too hard, as when she reached our gate, she collapsed and just rested there. We covered her up with our rain coats, went inside to fetch an umbrella, and opened it over her. She was spent, evidently. I do not know if that just tired her psychologically or actually impacted her physically, but on days afterwards, her walks would be a lot shorter and most of the time just consisted of her sitting down and resting on a grassy sidewalk or on a patch of some neighbor’s lawn. And as you can guess, it resulted in often times, us explaining to the neighbors who would come out, about Lucky’s condition. Not fun. I found it tiring how I had to repeat the type of cancer it was and telling others details that I’ve had to repeat multiple times over. There was even one time I ended up explaining to a neighbor who got mad that I was not taking Lucky to the vet after I told him several days before that “she just hurt her leg”. Not fun at all feeling like others are judging me as a bad owner for not wanting to explain to others whom I have no connection with about all the details of her cancer and unknown status. Again, just another case where I understand why they ask and are concerned but emotionally, felt irritated by others constantly reminding me of this “incurable” disease that she had. I certainly was not going to be telling them about my spiritual beliefs or what I’ve learned from Bruce Lipton to justify the decisions I’ve made for her treatment protocol-wise. I would tell them about Dr. Steven Eisen and his book but I was not going to go in depth in discussing something that at the time had no real conclusion to yet. This is one of the reasons I did not write about this on my blog prior. Until there was a conclusion with Lucky’s situation, I did not want to write about it, because anything I write is pure speculation of how it would turn out. Second, I did not want to subject myself to all the possibilities of what may occur without anything actually occurring. Why subject myself to that torture? Thirdly, if I was to actually write about it, every day, my mind could have wandered into a very dark place, which is something I could not afford, being in Nursing School and having the toughest semester, Junior Two, coming up.

As I said previously, and even more after really going on walks, she spent a lot more time outside in the backyard than she would prior to her diagnosis. I couldn’t help but feel like things were, although surface wise seemed alright, things were gradually going downhill. To be honest with myself, things were not going uphill in terms of getting better, and with Lucky becoming less mobile, the quantum touch session, the session with Dell Morris, the session with Chi Gong Master Hong Liu, with what I learned from the Past Life Regression, and with a long-standing belief since I was a kid that deep down, been worrying about Lucky, my intuition told me that I was running out of options.

To clarify this last part about “a long-standing belief since I was a kid that deep down, I worried about Lucky”, I remember as a kid in middle school worrying and being somewhat OCD about Lucky. This will sound a bit silly, but it’s very true nonetheless. Our television always had a channel that was blocked out and would yield in static if selected to that channel. It was channel 11. Channel 9 and 10 were KQED, which I watched, channel 12 was either the CW or the television guide – I can’t remember which – and channel 13 was the WB, I believe. I’m not here to recount the channels I grew up with in correct order, but I know that there was one channel in between these channels that I watched that was not receivable and yielded static. For some reason, I took this as something negative that would happen with the year or number 11. I know, it has no scientific value whatsoever, and I could have interpreted the drop in the series of television show as something completely otherwise, but I did not have a good feeling about that growing up. This is one example of me, deep down, worrying about her. The fact that I would worry about her when she was living in the backyard day and night is another example.   




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