disease – 500 Words A Day

500 Words – Day 029 – Why Cancer? And What is it? -577-

So why do we end up sitting in a doctor’s office with a cancer diagnosis?

First and foremost, we end up there because we know something is wrong. That message is simple and what is unfortunate is that most people don’t realize that our body has likely been telling us that there is something wrong for a long time, but we have missed those messages. Our body has spoken to us in such a manner that is so loud and clear that there is little chance that we cannot respond by any other means than approaching someone, a doctor, that can help us interpret what our body is trying to tell us.

How do we miss those messages?

We don’t know that our body is speaking to us much of the time. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t ever remember being taught or reading about how to interpret so-called body talk if that term can be applied here. Yet, after my run-in with an advanced state of dis-ease, I can now look back and see how many red flags(messages) I either missed or ignored with the help of pain medications or simple will.

In my own life, I imagine the alcohol I regularly consumed day after day helped me miss the messages that my body would have been otherwise able to communicate to me with clarity. The fatigue, headaches, and hangover feelings I associated with the drinking itself were likely my body trying to share with me the reality of what was going on beneath the surface. And what about all of the bottles of over-the-counter remedies consumed over a lifetime? Those too are not to blame but complicit in the dulling of our ability to understand that our body is likely continually communicating with us that something is not correct.

And what exactly is cancer as an entity within the body of the person, or any animal that it inhabits?

As I understand cancer, it is the endpoint of a body running out of balance for some time. Cancer does not simply creep up on anyone. It is like a tree that finally comes to its place in life where it can begin bearing fully ripe fruit of its growth and labor. Disease can be understood as a process that has many distinct states or stages along the way before it is finally diagnosed as cancer. Some would suggest that cancer is still within the intelligent control of the individual’s body, but I am not so sure that this is the case. My opinion is that it is a process that had its origins with the control of the immune system, but at some point broke free from its intelligent control mechanisms and has become an independent process that our immune system fights against like a foreign invader.

Is it productive or destructive?

This is a great question and still debatable in my mind. In one sense, it can be productive if it has not gone so far afield that the body can no longer keep it in check. However, it is always destructive because if left unchecked, it will likely be the last immune battle that a body fights before the ghost leaves the machine.

Ultimately, suppose someone diagnosed with cancer will resist a shortened span of life resulting from cancer. In that case, they will have to make a lot of changes in their lives and work towards a possible resolution.

500 Words – Day 023 – Conversation With a 12 Year Old Me -655-

I was doing some Uber driving the other day and someone asked me what I would tell a teenage me if I could go back. I kept it simple and told them that I would say 3 simple things that would be easy for any teenager to remember.

1. Eat only when the sun can shine on it. 6 am to 6 pm.
2. If you eat something one day, do not eat it the next.
3. Eat 100% whole-food/plant-based. No animal.

Of course, if I could do that and had thoroughly convinced that younger version of me to do these three things, I wouldn’t be here writing this today. I wouldn’t have had to suffer through the last 4.5 years of recovery from bad decisions that led me to an advanced state of disease.

If I could go back and convince that younger me to live life the way I do now I would have never learned the things that I have given me the life experience and subsequent knowledge that has the potential to help a world full of people do the same as I have. Recover their health just as I have mine.

“I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance.” A line from the 1990 song, The Dance by Garth Brooks. Never have any more true words been spoken as I write this short essay. I could have missed out on this pain, but then I would have never had the opportunity to become the person I am today, nor would I have the future that lay before me as a result of that experience.

So in that sense, I am in some way grateful for all of those decisions that ultimately led me to be the person I am today. And that brings me joy knowing that I can now speak from a place of experience that can help many more people than just a younger version of me. And who knows what kind of impact that will have.

Maybe it will be one of my children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren that I am able to help in the same way because of my experience. Maybe it will be a whole host of people from all around the world for many generations to come long after I have breathed my last breath. Maybe it will be you; whoever you are that is reading this.

I do believe that I am here for a purpose. I imagine that my existence alone is that purpose and that I am currently serving out that purpose even now as I am typing this short essay. Maybe that purpose is to scavenge the excess oxygen produced by organic plant life on Earth in contrast to the organic life on Earth that sequesters the carbon we exhale with every breath we take.

Of course, my self-esteem or sense of self-importance would like to think I am still just warming up for something greater that is yet to come. There’s just something about my personal identity that wants to believe I’m still yet to arrive at the plate to hit my grand slam out of the park. Until then I am just going to keep writing every day. I will keep banging away at this keyboard until I have mastered this form of communication. If it takes 10,000 hours then so be it. Maybe it will take less.

My goal at this point is to author a whole series of books on how to avoid diseases of any kind. A series of books that will be understandable by young and old alike. A series that will keep people from having to suffer the same fate that I did. Words that will move people to action. To a life of more sober-minded decisions that will ultimately change our future generations of life here on Earth without having to depend on pills or technology.

A simple life. A life of ease, rather than disease.

500 Words – Day 014 – What Disease? -1049-

From this day forward, I will proclaim that there is no such thing as disease. That is not to say that there aren’t disorders of function(disfunction) within the human experience. Surely there is and we have all experienced disorders to one degree or another.

In other words, I am going to do my best to remove the term disease from my linguistic arsenal because I believe it to be problematic. Problematic in that it allows for a continued building up of ideas and language that takes us further away from the truth of what disease really is. An advanced state of aging. A problem that is a result of our body lacking the vital energies needed to repair or replace the components that we are wearing out. To say it another way, we are using up our body’s resources faster than they can be replenished.

And so in some sense, the word disease becomes an expensive paywall that prevents us from understanding what is really going on. And this disease is simply the first paywall or locked door that keeps us from really understanding what is really going on. Once you are convinced that you have a disease and you have gone through that door, it is further separated out into many other doorways and dim passages by which the initial problem becomes even more confused, obscured, blurred, and specialized into other, even scarier sounding disorders and diseases that become even more difficult to understand.

This then ultimately leads us down the road to needing a doctor to guide us as blind people through the perilous straights of murky medical terminology. By the time the common man gets to this point they simply don’t know what to do. And in many cases, their doctor’s primary care doctors know little more. From this point, specialists who hold the keys of knowledge hidden behind the doors of specialties and specific diagnoses aren’t really able to help us better understand what is going on simply because they lack the time or skills needed to easily teach us in plain language what is really going on within our body.

And thus we simply trust them in their decision-making processes that landed us in their care in the first place. And once most people get to this point there is little they can do other than simply say okay, submitting ourselves to a course of treatment that isn’t necessarily going to get us back to a state of homeostasis. To a place of normalcy where our body can once again be in its default state of organic and biological flow where everything is working with ease.

And this then leads us back to life…

There is only life and life exists regardless of our consciousness of it. We get to participate in it for a period of time. A span. A spectrum of existence that begins with what we humans call birth, and that existence has a temporal ending that we call death. Metaphorically speaking, we are simply an act if you will. A scene in a movie or play that makes up the whole of our individual lives. Our act or scene is a story that has many stages in between its temporal beginning and end. One story; yet two natures. One that is physical and the other that is spiritual. One is the story of our physical body and the other is that which we call our consciousness. Yet, both are a part of the same individual story that makes up each individual human life. And it is all an animated existence powered by electrical energy.

Our physical body is an organic, carbon-based life form that has been drawn up, gathered together, animated, and electrified as a utilitarian, beneficial, and necessary part of life here on Earth. We are here for a reason. In some sense acting as a counterbalance to another factor that exists within the realm of life on Earth.

So where does disease fit into all of this talk of man’s nature? What if I told you that disease is simply a metaphor for aging that has been used as a marketing tool in some sense? Well, that’s exactly what it is. The marketing of an idea that at the very least implies that there is something going on in our body that is out of our control that needs some form of external input, whether by ourselves or the hands of another.

So let’s just remove the word disease from our common use of language and just call it what it is then. Simply aging.

Beginning somewhere between conception and birth, Aging has been defined as a steady decline or reduction of physiological function that leads to increased susceptibility to diseases that will ultimately end in biological death.

Beginning –> Aging/Disease –> Death/End

When compared to other mammals, humans have what appears on the surface to be a longer lifespan. Approximately 120 years according to what humans have defined as a solar year consisting of 365 1/4 days.

Sidenote: I would like to argue that all mammals within their individual context from their own perspective experience the same amount of perceptible time known as a lifespan regardless of how humans define time. The idea that a day to a human would be something like a week to a dog, as an example. This might explain why a dog is so happy to see its human that has been gone on a two-week vacation. To us humans, it has only been two weeks, but to that dog, perhaps, it has been something akin to us having been gone for almost 2 months time.

Standard evolutionary models of aging are explained as the full potential of our body’s ability to repair or replace cells that would allow for continued existence. The idea is that over time, what we call natural selection through a process called senescence, or the deterioration of age begins to exert less effort in the removal of our spent cells. Our body simply loses its will to take out the trash if you will.

This brings me back to what we have classically called disease. And this is the basis by which I would like to suggest that we stop using this negative, pejorative term for what is simply the process of aging.