Friends and Family,
It’s another beautiful day to be alive!
Genevieve and I went to San Diego yesterday to meet with my oncologist, and get the latest CT scan results. I had new, contradictory reasons to both excitedly hope for some shrinkage of the cancer, and to fear that it would start growing again.
After announcing two weeks ago that I had eliminated dairy from my diet, based on cancer research, a friend (Laura Greco, whom I wrote about HERE) sent me a link to a research article that shows that casein, the major protein in milk, suppresses lung cancer tumor growth. This left me completely confused. Now I had contradictory evidence that drinking milk would either stop any tumors from growing – or maybe even shrink them – or it could be feeding the cancer.
I immediately emailed my oncologist, who emailed back that “it’s probably fine to continue drinking milk.”
WHAT? I’m betting my life on this decision, and I get a weak answer like this? It sounded like he didn’t want to bother looking at the article. What do you do with THAT response, when your life may depend on it?
Without any real answers, I decided that I should start drinking milk again, since what I have been doing has been working for me for the past twelve years (YEAH!). Of course, THEN I worried that maybe the cancer might have started growing again, since I had been off milk for a month.
At the same time, I was excited to see if being off milk for a month might have caused the cancer to SHRINK.
Finally, our San Diego day came, and we got the big results. Drumroll please……
No change! The cancer is still not growing!
Now that I had my oncologist in person, I pressed him much harder. He said that he had just been in meetings with other oncologists about this very topic, and the consensus was… that there is no consensus. “There is a lot of information out there, but a lot of it doesn’t rise to a scientific standard. The “signal to noise ratio’ is out of whack.”
In short, there’s too much wheat, and not enough chaff, to know what’s scientifically true. I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s what he believes. So what do I do now???
I can’t draw any conclusions from my own one-month experiment, so until I get a more definitive answer, I’m not going to change what is working. Hello, mochas and ice cream! It’s great to see you again!
I’m going to put this question out to my online lung cancer groups, and see if anyone else has a more solid base for decision-making. Passions run deep on this issue, so my suspicion is that it will be a hot debate, which will produce a lot of heat, but very little light.
I’ll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I hope you are making the most of every moment you have on this earth. It’s a gift worth treasuring.
Love,
Dann
NOTE: It's not too late to join the Lung Love Run/Walk! It's coming up this Saturday, June 23rd at Laurelhurst Park in Portland. We are raising awareness, and funding for lung cancer research.
Click here to join my team, Live Lung and Prosper.