Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #14: Encouragement During Holidays

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

I remember the first holiday during my wife’s recovery – the double mastectomy had been in March; chemotherapy had taken most of the summer. Then the holidays were upon us.

I didn’t write about ANYTHING having to do with them. I certainly don’t remember what we did, but my guess is that family time was curtailed and we likely spent that time at home.

The significant thing was that I DIDN’T WRITE ABOUT IT.

If you take a moment and notice the nearly 500 posts I’ve done since March of 2011, you can imagine the significance of that. I was writing about different kinds of cancers as well as describing the origins and effects of the various drugs she’d endured during chemotherapy.

I was NOT talking about either her feelings or my feelings during the holidays. There are no comments on Thanksgiving or the first day of school or any other significant days during that time. Everything was focused on CANCER. DEFEATING CANCER. My “Christmas Message” in 2012 was “Chemo Killed Colds?” How meaningful.

Maybe I was mad still? My daughter certainly was.

Finally, in 2013, I dealt with it. Below you’ll find the post I managed to write then…

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Random, huh?

Whew! Talk about random! Why would thoughts of death intrude on this holy time of year when we celebrate Santa Claus, children, “Ho, ho, ho!”, RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER…

Oh, and the Birth of the Christ Child.

I think about how Target and Walmart and Kay Jewelers and Marshall’s have coopted the season. And Christians fight back with pictures of Santa kneeling at the Manger.

My wife and daughter and I watched one of our season’s favorites the other night, Joyeux Noël (a 2005 French film about the World War I Christmas truce of December 1914, depicted through the eyes of French, Scottish and German soldiers…written and directed by Christian Carion…creened out of competition at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival…nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 78th Academy Awards. The film was one of Ian Richardson's last appearances before his death on 9 February 2007.)

The one Christian Holy Day Wall Street has never been able to coopt is Easter, because Easter is secularly speaking, about a gruesome, governmental execution. For Christians it’s about sacrifice and Resurrection – much like the film, Joyeux Noël.

Much like life in the shadow of death that breast cancer brings to everyone who experiences it, or loves someone who experiences it, or works with those who experience it.

This holiday season is somewhat sober for me for many reasons. Yet somehow that has created in me a deeper appreciation for the joy of this same season – a profound thankfulness for many, many things. This thankfulness isn’t like the Christmas play in MERRY CHRISTMAS, CHARLIE BROWN! Rather it’s like the thankfulness of Linus’ recitation of Luke 2: 1-14 – calm, peaceful, fully aware of what he is saying.

May your Holy Day Season be the same.

[An interesting side-story, from Wikipedia: "Carion's youth was spent in his parent's farm fields in Northern France, where he was constantly reminded of World War I as the family often found dangerous, unexploded shells left over from the conflicts in the fields. He had also heard of the stories in which French soldiers would leave their trenches at night to meet with their wives in the surrounding German-occupied towns and return to fight the next morning. Carion stated that he'd never heard of the actual Christmas truce incidents while growing up in France, as the French Army and authorities suppressed them, having been viewed as an act of disobedience. He was introduced to the stories via a historian who showed him photos and documents archived in France, Great Britain, and Germany, and became fascinated. He tried to portray all of the soldiers with equal sympathy, as "the people on the frontline can understand each other because they are living the same life and suffering the same way", so he could understand how the truce could have come about.^[5] He endeavored to stay true to the real stories, but one of the things he had to change was the fate of the cat that crossed into various trenches. In reality, the cat was accused of spying, arrested by the French Army and then shot by a firing squad, as an actual traitor would have been. The extras in the movie refused to participate in this scene, so it was amended to have the cat imprisoned."]

Image: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2080/2146696283_afc861ff00_o.jpg

ENCORE #149! – (Plus an update!)) The YOUNGEST Breast Cancer Survivor…

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men I knew. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following entry first appeared in December of 2015 (and updated today!)…

As breast cancer affects men as well as women, sometimes we forget that not only are there young women who are diagnosed, there is also the YOUNGEST woman diagnosed with breast cancer.

Here’s the PEOPLE Magazine article with an embedded short video:
https://people.com/health/chrissy-turner-10-year-old-breast-cancer-survivor-embraces-life/

Here’s a standard news report Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bI16iVGrUA

Watch them and weep; then allow yourself to be inspired.

The picture above is from October 11, 2020 and from her FB page: https://www.facebook.com/ChrissysAlliance/

Image: https://scontent.ffcm1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p526x296/120934901_3638598799485518_7457514108760293322_o.jpg?_nc_cat=110&ccb=2&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=XeoMn1J-KxAAX_JTC5g&_nc_ht=scontent.ffcm1-1.fna&tp=6&oh=a8e9c63853828ee98de697fdd82e96a6&oe=5FFB8ABC

ALZHEIMER’S RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #11: NEW Biomarkers Discovered THAT CAN ACCURATELY PREDICT ALZHEIMER’S (Possibly Up To) EIGHT YEARS BEFORE ONSET!!!!!

From the first moment I discovered my dad had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it seemed like I was alone in this ugly place. Even ones who had loved ones suffering in this way; even though people TALKED about the disease, it felt for me like they did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I added a section to this blog… 

Every month, I’ll be highlighting Alzheimer’s research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: A Tau-protein that helps DIAGNOSE Alzheimer’s!

It’s well understood today that finding amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain remains the gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. We can do that because we now have tools that are highly sensitive to the plaques and tangles that is done using a combination of taking a sample of a patient’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and doing a PET scan (like a CAT scan only aided by injection of a special fluid).

The big problem is that to get CSF, you have to puncture the SPINAL column with a huge needle. And while CAT scanners are pretty common things, a PET scanner is something else again – both expensive to buy and REALLY expensive to operate because the injection is radioactive and has to be “made” on site, so in order to DO a PET scan, you have to live in a rich country and live near a HUGE city…or get to one.

Right now, there are two main ways of figuring out if someone has Alzheimer’s – the PET scan and the spinal puncture. These are called “core AD biomarkers”, are widely used in both clinical and research settings.

The increases in a specific kind of a protein called “p-tau” – one of the “core AD biomarkers” – provides new insight into the biological and clinical development of Alzheimer's disease – BEFORE there are cognitive changes like increasing loss of memory and the other symptoms associated with Alzheimer’s Disease, sometimes as much as EIGHT YEARS BEFORE a person dies from the accumulating effects of AD.

But there’s been a new development! Where the old standard practice involved spinal taps and PET scans, doctors in Spain, France, and Slovenia have developed a test that is a SIMPLE BLOOD TEST! One of the participating doctors noted that “The practical challenge…is that…very tiny initial changes [in the amounts of p-tau] and are incredibly difficult to measure reliably. This compromises our chances to identify and recruit preclinical AD patients for clinical trials.”

An extended series of blood tests that look for increase in the p-tau molecule are conducted on people who MAY have a predisposition to Alzheimer’s – people like me who had a parents who was diagnosed with AD. Another participating doctor said, “A possible way to improve the chances of future therapies is to test them on people in the very early stages of the disease with elusive biological changes but lacking clinical symptoms including memory failings.”

While the treatment is NOT AVAILABLE yet, and this is NOT a cure, but rather a way to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, it’s a long step forward in the fight to make Alzheimer’s “one more condition” to treat long before it gets out of control.

Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201201203937.htm
(the original study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-020-02195-x)
Image: https://www.meduniwien.ac.at/web/fileadmin/_processed_/e/1/csm_shutterstock_142671010_4683b6bf13.jpg