The Witch of the Mexico City Buddhist Center

Chintamani shrine room

My hair is growing back, it is awesome. At this point it sorta looks like weird white fuzz in a bald man's hair pattern, but that's ok, I'll take it.

I'm in San Miguel de Allende sitting in my little enclosed patio. Kathy and I managed a skype call last night. She was wondering why I'm so anti-chemo (she didn't put it that way.) In case that is not clear to others: it is not that I am against getting more chemo per se, more that they had no idea whether or not the last one was going to work, and they will have no idea whether the next one will either. It is an educated craps shoot. And it's not like you just go get a shot that may or may not work. Your veins get hooked up to an infusion machine for a total of about...30 hours, and the whole treatment (which I will remind you, didn't do anything other than cause side effects!) took between five and six months. And you may have some of the side effects for the rest of your life. I guess Dr. Nelson will want to start chemo again if or when I start getting symptoms, and/or if the nodules get bigger. (Unless only ONE is getting bigger, which means they can use CyberKnife, a relatively painless kind of radiation.) In short, even though it's much better than it was 25 years ago, chemo still blows. When it doesn't work.

I have five full days here to focus on writing. I've started on the introduction. If I manage to get a draft, and I hope I do, I'll post it. It's ideal conditions EXCEPT for the food. White bread, no veg, and the fresh food you buy is used by Montezuma as a way to exact revenge. Eating the awesome food on retreat or of Maya's was much easier!...I bought some stuff at a grocery this morning, including carrots which I rinse with hot green tea...

I remembered I'm supposed to be getting an x-ray and wrote to Dr. Nelson about getting an appointment. Apparently it's drop-in for x-rays. A mistaken look at Wikipedia tells me, again, that scans increase cancer risk. Dr. Nelson had mentioned that an x-ray exposes you to 1/1000 the radiation of a CT scan. (By the way, x-rays are what we think of as a bone x-ray, but a CT scan, a PET scan, a bone scan are types of x-ray. The radiation treatments I got were also x-rays that can cause cancer in 10-15 years, just postponing it I guess.) Not inspiring though the number of scans I've gotten might not amount to much in the way of increased cancer risk. Anyway I should probably start worrying about the future when it's more likely that I will have one.

From the excellent
Museo Nacional de Anthropología

I wanted to write about the time I spent with Dayachandra on the retreat. I met her last time I was in Mexico, over a decade ago, I think her name was Cecilia then. She spoke no English and I spoke more Spanish than I do now. Somehow we loved each other as if we had always been friends. We are always delighted to see each other. Last time was at the Order reunion in the UK. Thankfully she had learned some English; my Spanish was complete crap.

Turns out she does a lot of what she calls "energy therapy." She seems to be something of a shaman. We had a wonderful conversation; we now both speak Spanglish! She told me to talk to my cells, that cells are intelligent. To ask them to revert to their healthy state. They will respond. They are my friend. She also drew a diagram involving two triangles and a human body (see reproduction, below) that I didn't understand at all.

But if my cells are healthy, how did they become cancerous? Did cancer hijack them? If so, do they get to choose? Although these kinds of questions are perhaps irrelevant to this kind of conversation, it's how I think, I can't help it. I need to have an angle on it that makes sense to me. So I've been doing it. I ask my cells to breathe, to go back to breathing. Dayachandra said she would do it also, from a distance. She also said I would be all right...

The drawing was
something like this 

I am motivated to use my mind to try to heal myself. Kathy mentioned a time when her four year old son had a virus that the doctor didn't understand. A friend advised her to put her hands on his knees and say silently, Heal Thyself. So I do that too. I ask my lungs to revert to their natural healthy state, which is a state of breathing, of transferring oxygen. I say, Heal Thyself, Heal Thyself.