Immune system

The hippest thing to hit Switzerland next year, according to the magazine our grocery store sends us every week, will be switchel, a drink that has already taken New York by storm and, in all likelihood, fallen out of favor there by now, replaced by the latest fad.  Does anyone still remember the cronut?Switchel is a mix of apple vinegar, lemon juice, ginger and maple syrup.  Claims to hipness are one thing.  Switzerland doesn’t do it very well.  It’s a profoundly unhip country and isn’t much bothered by it.  Maple syrup...

Fasting and feasting

The other day, a friend passed on some tricks on how to beat cancer.  According to Russian scientists that are largely ignored in the west, fasting is key.  The reason is this:  When cells are starved, their membrane permeability changes, which protects them from the assault of chemotherapeutic toxins.  Cancer cells, which proliferate no matter what, have no such safeguards and receive the full force of chemotherapy (*).I’m grateful...

Merry Christmas

As I lie in my hospital bed, waiting for the toxins of the fifth session of chemotherapy to make their way into my body, there’s time for one last post before Christmas.  This year’s festivities will obviously be different from the past’s.  The Christmas of my childhood is long gone.  I’ve  written about it at length in my other blog (e.g. Christmas Revisited).For the last four years, I’ve developed my own tradition.  This tradition of my family and children has involved flights to Argentina, by way of Frankfurt or London,...

Week in review

We spent last weekend in Germany.  It was my dad’s 75th birthday.  My sister had arranged everything.  She found the hotel, a castle above a city that we had chosen because it was located such that the drive was about the same for each of us.  She had booked a package with an excursion to town, tea one afternoon and a big celebratory dinner the night before the birthday.  The lot wasn’t cheap, but we had a lot of fun and...

Going away

On Monday, I had my fourth chemotherapy session.  Each one starts the same, with a blood test and a consultation with the oncologist.  This one was nevertheless a bit different.The blood test was ok.  My numbers are good.  My red blood cell count is towards the lower end of the physiological range, but that's not surprising.  The only old blood test that I found in my documents showed virtually the same numbers. That was when I was living in Grenoble and cycling the Alps every weekend.  It's a wonder I managed to get...

Side note

Not much continues to happen.  This is good for my well-being and my sanity, but it doesn’t make for good reading.  I’m reminded of the cancer only when I’m in the hospital for therapy and during the two days afterwards when I carry the balloon pump with me.  In between two sessions, I ignore it.  This has two immediate effects.  The good thing is that I’m relaxed and free of worries.  The bad thing is that I don’t think and read about it nearly enough.  I don’t know much more about colon cancer than I did before...