Going a little crazy

A few months ago, I felt pretty strongly that I didn’t have cancer, even though I’d found a lump in my breast.  I was scared, but I felt healthy. I’d been doing all the right things: eating well, exercising and meditating.

When I learned that it was cancer,  I thought I might have to do more. A friend referred me to a resource called The Budwig Center. Dr. Budwig, it turned out, was a German pharmacologist, chemist and physicist with a doctorate in physics, and fifty years of experience treating cancer with her protocol, which includes diet and sunshine.

“Jack, I’m going to the Budwig Center, in Spain,” I announced after a quick glance at the website. “Am I’m not going to eat seafood, or any pork products. That means no more hot dogs or bacon.” One of Jack’s favorite meals is a BLT. “You can have the bacon if you want,” I said, but didn’t mean it. How could I stand to smell bacon cooking and not eat it?

“I’m also going to quit ice cream and sugar.” It has been my habit for more years than I can remember to eat ice cream every night. The three things I never run out of are red wine, cream for my coffee, and ice cream.

Jack said little, despite what he may have been thinking. I left the computer and began following him around the kitchen. “We’re going to have to make our own tomato sauce,” I said. “I don’t want to eat anything out of a can again, ever.  And no plastic.”

I began to catalog the plastic products in the kitchen: wrap, bags of every size and strength, faux Tupperware containers. Inside the refrigerator, several styrofoam containers lurked around food packaged at the supermarket. In the vegetable drawer, everything nestled in a plastic bag. How the hell can we give up plastic?

Earlier this year another friend had told me never to re-use plastic water bottles, because of a link to breast cancer.  Hoax-Slayer considered the link to be false.  Snopes said, “A mixture of true and false information.” What’s true, they admit, is that plastic bottles shouldn’t be re-used, or consumed after having been left in a hot car.  Breastcancer.org convinced me. It might take some time, but I’m going to cut down as much as possible on plastics.

Once my doctor said there hadn’t been any cancer cells except the tumor, and I didn’t need radiation, I began to re-think all of the diet changes I needed to make. “I went a bit crazy,” I said to friends.

But then I began reading The China Study, written by T. Colin Campbell, an eminent and staggeringly qualified scientist, and his son, Thomas M. Campbell, on the effects of animal protein on cancer, heart disease, and a host of other health issues.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but Jack and I have decided we’re going to eat the meat we have in the freezer, then begin on a new regimen of plant-based protein. Oh, and I’m cutting my wine consumption to one glass a day. Some people will do anything to stay healthy in old age, I guess.