Velcade round two and thoughts on those herbs

Received my second shot of velcade today. Once again fairly uneventful, except for the following: white count is down to 2.4 today--from 3.8 on Monday. Neutrophils also dropped. Nurse says its due to the velcade most likely. Could it be due to not taking the herbs? no one can answer that and I'll comment more on that later. I did have a discussion with one of the nurses about my returning to the office for a few hours each day this week. She was a bit upset, and reminded once again that stressful environments for patients with myeloma are "toxic". I assured her I was trying to stay away from the stress, such as not interacting with clients or opposing lawyers and only going in for a few hours. She generally is not in favor of my return to the law firm environment. I, on the other hand, feel I need to do something on those days when I have more energy and hope that I can stay out of the fray when i go into the office. We'll see how it goes.--While I had pretty good energy this week, today I am quite tired, and in fact when I got home from the clinic had to take a nap. Not much threat of reestablishing a law practice with this kind of work ethic!

And now about those herbs. First, please understand that I love my doctor and think very highly of him and his knowledge and experience in the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM). While I can appreciate those of you who endorse more traditional medicine, I must say that my experience these past months, at least with this disease,makes me feel like a guinea pig. THe treatments have really not made much progress against the disease, but they certainly have hit me hard in other ways--such as wiping out my immune system and putting a strain on my kidneys. When I came down with the "crud", i.e., RSV, the baby virus, I got angry, as I know that I got that because of my compromised immune system, which is a direct result of my chemo. There have been times when I have certainly felt that the cure was going to get me before the disease did. I now understand the comments made by a couple of my doctors, that you have to be strong to survive this disease. What they meant is you have to be strong enough to endure the treatment regimes.

We all know that our bodies can heal themselves--witness the broken bones that have mended and the gaping flesh wounds that have healed. The same process can occur within my blood stream. Admittedly the herbal treatments don't have a lot of scientfic backup, but I blame the medical establishment for much of that. Linus Pauling is a great example. For those who are not familiar with him, he was a chemist, who won two nobel prizes--one for chemistry and one for peace. He did much research on megadoses of Vit. C as a treatment for cancer. He documented his results, presented it to numerous clinics, hospitals and med schools, and generally met with rejection and often ridicule. Having read a couple of his books, I believe he has legitimate scientific backup for his conclusions, but the medical community just doesn't want to believe it. (I did talk to my doctor about megadosing Vit. C, and although he did not discount its potential to help me, he thought it would be too hard on my kidneys--which are hit by my MM--but then so did most of the chemo he gave me.) I use this as an example and admit that most herbs don't have the scientific backup. That being said, there are MM survivors who have rejected traditional treatment and beaten the disease--my friend who referred me to the herbalist as well as another who wrote a book about his naturalisitic approach--"Medical Mutiny". The other problem is that most herbal approaches are taken only as a last resort--when all else has failed. One wonders what the results would be if it were a treatment of first resort. I started trying to figure out what nutrition could do for me in this struggle about 2 1/2 months ago and became very frustrated. For every wholistic approach, there was a harsh critic from the medical community and vice versa. I wish they would work more closely together instead of trying to trump one another. Simplistically, I feel that since my immune system is currently incapable of eradicating this cancer, herbs that can enhance my immune system function might present the possibility of increasing my body's ability to fight the cancer.

So, how do I answer my dilemna? I have decided to forgo the herbs for the first velcade cycle (2 weeks) to see what my numbers are while solely on velcade. Depending on the results, I may, or may not, restart the herbs. I will tell my doctor what I am doing. I am going to continue to take one of the products, which is a pulverized rice grain powder, as it really isn't an herb, but made from a natural food source. So, thanks for all the input and I'll keep you all informed. I really enjoyed all the thoughts and comments. What an interesting group you are! (and Arlene, thanks for the PDR reference, I am on it!) Love to all, Dan