FOUR: Faith healing

This writing project started out as a book, though I deliberately gave it a bloggy tone – casual, personal, even intimate, loosely structured. Then my ex-wife, a professional editor, read the first few chapters and said I had more of a blog than a book, so here we are. I like having immediate readers with a mechanism for their immediate reactions. Being a somewhat lazy writer, I don’t feel obliged to follow rigorous rules of structure. In the previous post, I was speaking of the practical aspects of dying. I’ll come back to that, but now I want to talk about cancer, and the practical aspects of surviving.

When I closed my eyes and clicked “post” for the first time a few days ago, and then announced the blog to my email list, I had forgotten that I had mentioned my prostate cancer, and also that I had vowed to tell as few people as possible about it. Oops. I wanted to avoid the reactions of horror that many people have. They aren’t helpful. And yes, I got of few of these reactions from the people reading my blog, thankfully not that many.

While of course I was upset upon first hearing the diagnosis, the prognosis has been excellent. If I wanted to scoop it out as my primary urologist strongly recommends – my sex chakra! – there is a 98% chance (so they say) of eliminating all traces of the cancer forever. There is also a 50% chance that I will henceforth be impotent and have continuing bouts of urinary dysfunction/incontinence. And almost a 100% chance that if (if?) I want to continue having sex, I will have to take Viagra.

So, I have been searching out alternatives to “radical prosectomy” as they so poetically put it. In researching the many different approaches and practitioners out there, I have concluded that they are ALL quacks, whether allopathic (medical), homeopathic, or naturopathic. This isn’t to say that they aren’t all well-meaning, sincere practitioners (most of them are), only that they claim to know more than they actually know. They justify this deception with the completely valid notion that part of their role is to keep the cancer patient hopeful. So of course they are going to exaggerate the efficacy of whatever treatment they recommend. Can’t blame them. Can’t fully trust them either.

And once you have severed your dependence on the at least nominally objective, “scientific” medical establishment, it’s a jungle out there. The struggle to find an approach that makes sense for you parallels – indeed, includes – the quest for a spiritual practice. You kind of have to go with what resonates for you as true, what inspires “faith.”

The approach I am currently using was recommended to my by my massage therapist, a woman who specializes in Afrocentric healing practices for men’s sexuality, in the form of a book called 90 Days to a Healthy Prostate, written by the unfortunately named Larry Clapp, a Phd., not an MD.

What I like about Clapp’s approach is that it is a comprehensive compendium of a number of alternative therapies, among which we are advised to choose those that make sense for us. The main aspects of his program are:

1. Doing an 8 day ultimate fast, drinking only lemonade with maple syrup

2. Eating fresh organic vegetables, with only a little (organic) meat and dairy, balancing pH toward a more alkaline than acid diet

3. Homeopathy

4. Dental hygiene

5. Exercise/yoga/massage

6. Emotional healing

7. Tantric sexuality

Most of these suggestions I’m following assiduously. I have a little trouble with homeopathy. Especially the “muscle testing” popular among homeopaths. The practitioner asks your body a question, and gets the answer by pressing down on your arm and assessing your resistance.

The biologic dentist Clapp sent me to at great expense (mine) tried this kind of test with me, and even got a couple of answers wrong. But then he asked me suddenly if I had ever been hit in the mouth. Why yes I have. 1973, or so at a demonstration against uniformed Nazis at the school board in San Francisco. Comrades of mine had secretly taken it upon themselves to physically eject these fellows from the meeting, and as the fight ensued, I saw some guy indiscriminately clubbing people. On impulse I grabbed his arm, got hit smartly in the mouth with his club, and was arrested for felony “assault on an officer.” The charges were later reduced to “disrupting a public meeting,” and I spent 3 long weekends in jail.

The dentist said that my lower front teeth were dead, their roots infected from this blow to the mouth, and that they were on the “prostate meridian” as described by acupuncturists. I can’t say I believe this, but the poetry of the idea that maybe that cop had “caused” my cancer was just too compelling. I let the dentist remove the teeth. Odd are the things that inspire faith.