My one beef with the Bengston bioenergy healing method is the very real possibility that you can take a workshop, learn this wonderful thing that purportedly can be used to heal cancer, and then be set loose, with no follow-up and no supervision, to play. And chances are you won't have a clue what you are doing.
Bill reminds me of the man who used to own the keelboat sailing club where I was a member many years ago. This man had grown up around boats and everything about sailing was as easy and natural to him as walking or eating a sandwich. He just assumed that everyone else was the same way. We could do things with his boats no other owner would dream of allowing people to do. We took them out in storms, in fog, in six to ten foot waves. Heck, we were doing a sailing marathon the night the tail end of Hurricane Andrew came through town. We certainly learned how to sail in all conditions, but quite often we nearly killed ourselves doing it, and I recall at least one occasion where we almost sank a boat. At any rate, the reason Bill reminds me of this man is that healing comes so naturally to him that he imagines that once you learn his technique, it will be just as easy for you.
I would, however, like to put forward, ever so tentatively, the idea that it is not the same thing to go forth and play with boats as it is to go forth and play with cancer. Cancer is a teensy bit more serious than that. So a little bit of supervision would be good thing. Here in Toronto we have our monthly practice groups, which Bill for a while attended by speaker phone. This follow-up was very valuable. Now there are a number of us who know the method well enough to offer help or advice, but we could still use some supervision. I know of another location where there seems to be a similar kind of follow-up, but in another city they have set up "healing teams", which to me sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind. In the early days Bill was happy to offer his time to help or give advice, but I can see that as the workshops proliferate, this would be logistically more and more difficult to do.
The problem is that each and every one of us practicing the method has to reinvent the wheel. Things happen, and we have no clue what they mean, because we have never seen them before. Whereas if there were a body of learning, or evidence, that we could turn to, such as a textbook, we could say "aha, this is what this means -- this type of tumour often gets bigger before it becomes consumed." Or, "aha, this type of labtest result has been seen with this kind of cancer before". But instead, we grope around in the dark with no idea of what's happening.
For instance, with our pancreatic cancer patient, who had a ten week remission that included the reversal of most of the life threatening symptoms of his cancer, and a return to near-normal kidney and liver function (which is huge), we found that while he was getting better, which presumably meant that the cancer was going away, the tumours did not diminish at all -- in fact, they grew. So how is it possible that his body was behaving as if the cancer were in remission while it was still there? A skeptical MD acquaintance of mine, who followed the case, interpreted it like this: "That is amazing! The body is encapsulating the malignancy to protect itself!" There is a distinct possibility that what we are doing is counteracting the malignancy of the cancer by prompting the body recognize the tumour as something foreign and harmful, and barricade it for self-protection, so it can then deal with it in its own good time. Do we know this for a fact? No. Has anyone studied it? No. Does it need to be studied? You bet. Because when the patient then goes for a CT-scan or an MRI, all that will show is that the tumour has gotten bigger. But we will not know how the tumour has changed in composition, and what kind of tissue there is around it. There will just be a huge panic because clearly the tumour is growing, followed by loud calls for allopathic interventions such as radiation and chemo, and how can you blame anyone for reacting like that? What manner of reassurance can we offer, with no body of evidence to explain what's happening?
That is why I say we are dealing with something experimental here. A lot more work needs to be done. I hope someone comes forward to offer Bill the wherewithal to do the (many) experiments that need to be carried out. It might be also helpful for people from the various centres where there have been workshops to hook up to compare notes. That is one of the reasons for having this blog -- to give some of our experiences, and to hear back from others who also do the work.
In the meantime, if you go out to play on a boat in a windstorm, be careful, wear a life jacket, and have a good sail.
Here are some relevant links: Practical Challenges, Part 1, How effective is Bengston bioenergy?, Case study #2, Case study #1
Showing posts with label case study. Show all posts
Showing posts with label case study. Show all posts
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Dose response
We had some bad news yesterday. One of our clients has had some negative test results. This client has an aggressive cancer for which the only available treatment is palliative chemotherapy and radiation when the cancer gets bad enough to interfere with quality of life. So far our patient's quality life has been near-normal, but the test results gave us all a bit of a jolt.
This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.
This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?
Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.
Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).
Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.
Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.
This being a serious cancer, we were seeing the patient 4 to 5 times a week up until mid-December, when holidays and inclement weather began to cut into the frequency of the treatments. The November test results were still fine, so I have to assume that cutting down on the frequency of treatments was the reason for the deterioration.
This brings up the issue of "dose response". Just how much treatment do you need?
Although Bill says in the workshops that serious, metastasized cancers need a lot of treatment, up to even hours a day, one can still manage to come away thinking that this somehow ought to be fast and easy. At the beginning I was wildly optimistic about treatment time. Now I am more realistic, but I still don't know how much is enough.
Last summer I was treating someone for lymphoma once a week. I had a sense that the weekly session was the bare minimum, but the patient was not ready to commit to more. Sure enough when we skipped a week the lymphoma "acted up". The patient then terminated treatment because it "didn't work", even though test results showed that the lymphoma had gone from "grade 2" to "grade 1" (for some reason the improvement was dismissed as a fluke).
Bill has done experiments with mice on dose response. He has found that with weekly distance treatments 40% of the mice still survive. (Here is a link to a brief commentary on the study by one of the researchers, providing a few more details.) In Bill's initial experiments the mice received one hour of treatment a day for about 35 days. The speed of remission was found to be a function of metabolic rate: the larger the animal, the slower the remission. People are a lot bigger than mice. Once you start treating someone, chances are you'll be treating them for a long time.
Since I've been thinking of this method in terms of "standard of care", the sheer amount of treatment time needed seems to be an obstacle. With today's treatment methods, patients get hooked up to IV-lines dispensing chemo, and little manpower is needed to monitor them (I am assuming, rightly or wrongly, that one oncology nurse can monitor 3 or 4 patients -- please correct me if I'm wrong). Sometimes chemo is just a question of popping a little pill. In contrast, with Bill's method treaters would need to spend hours providing one-on-one care. On the upside, however, we might be dispensing with the need for the kind of care where hours are spent with multiple professionals dealing with a single patient, such as in surgery, or where expensive equipment is needed to provide treatment, such as with radiation. The biggest upside, of course, would be an improvement in the patient's quality of life instead of the dreadful side effects of radiation and chemo. But it's early days yet: so far I'm only dreaming.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Love, bioenergy, and miracles
The problem with all the cases presented below is that none of them constitute proof of anything.
These are the strange ones, the cases where things happen that ought not be happening and for which there is (or so we believe anyway) no current scientific explanation.
The allopathic take on these cases would be "nothing was really wrong in the first place, therefore nothing really happened."
Case one, multiple tumours disappearing between the MRI and the follow-up pre-biopsy ultrasound. The multiple tumours were confirmed by MRI (and were believed to be a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been treated with surgery), but after treatment by us, could no longer be detected. There was one single treatment event.
Case two, the "get-well blanket". In this case the very elderly parent of someone I know was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer. There had been severe weight loss, which prompted the medical team to look for some kind of cancer, which then was found through a CT-scan and then confirmed by an X-ray. A second opinion was sought, which corroborated the initial diagnosis. When I first heard about this situation, it was through a group of women who were knitting what they called a "get-well blanket" for the afflicted parent. Everyone was supposed to knit a few rows and put their good wishes and prayers into their efforts. I was asked to "do my stuff" on the blanket in addition to knitting a few rows. I did "my stuff" with no conviction that it would work. (This is called "healing by proxy". Experiments have shown that substances such as water, cotton and wood shavings hold healing energy and can be used instead of direct hands-on treatment. This blanket was acrylic, so I had no high hopes for it.) The parent went for surgery and the lung was excised, but the subsequent biopsy found no trace of cancer. After the surgery to remove the non-cancerous lung, the weight-loss that had caused the suspicion of cancer in the first place reversed. Was this a tragic medical error, or a medical miracle?
Case three, Bo, the miracle dog. Twice Bo was on his "death bed". Twice he was treated, twice he recovered (the first time after bleeding through the nose for two days). He is still fine. There was no diagnosis, but there were symptoms of severe illness (refusal to eat, severe weight loss, weakness, and the second time, inability to get up). There were two single hands-on treatments, five months apart, and no treatment of any other kind.
Case four, the incredible exploding suspected melanoma. Melanoma was suspected, a biopsy scheduled, three treatments given (in which the recipient felt energy and pain). After the third treatment the melanoma swelled, exploded, drained "ugly black stuff", then healed over. By the time the scheduled biopsy was to be done, there was nothing there to biopsy. The medical take on the "ugly black stuff" draining was that it was simply "not possible".
The common thread in all four cases was that there had been no biopsy to confirm the cancer. This would lead some people to say that there had been no cancer in the first place. But other people, including some physicists, have different thoughts on the subject. Anyone who has seen the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? will be familiar with the concept of quantum possibilities. Physicist Russell Targ (following William Braud) suggests that healers can go back in time to the "seed moment" of when a disease manifests and alter the pathway of the disease. The more "set in reality" the disease is, the more difficult it is to affect it. Richard Bartlett of Matrix Energetics speaks of the difficulty of going against "consensus reality" and his own reluctance to take on cancer because of the weight of "consensus reality" around it. A positive biopsy sets the cancer in stone and makes it more difficult to treat. But until such time as it is "set in stone", quantum possibilities continue to exist.
These are the strange ones, the cases where things happen that ought not be happening and for which there is (or so we believe anyway) no current scientific explanation.
The allopathic take on these cases would be "nothing was really wrong in the first place, therefore nothing really happened."
Case one, multiple tumours disappearing between the MRI and the follow-up pre-biopsy ultrasound. The multiple tumours were confirmed by MRI (and were believed to be a recurrence of a previous cancer that had been treated with surgery), but after treatment by us, could no longer be detected. There was one single treatment event.
Case two, the "get-well blanket". In this case the very elderly parent of someone I know was diagnosed with a virulent form of lung cancer. There had been severe weight loss, which prompted the medical team to look for some kind of cancer, which then was found through a CT-scan and then confirmed by an X-ray. A second opinion was sought, which corroborated the initial diagnosis. When I first heard about this situation, it was through a group of women who were knitting what they called a "get-well blanket" for the afflicted parent. Everyone was supposed to knit a few rows and put their good wishes and prayers into their efforts. I was asked to "do my stuff" on the blanket in addition to knitting a few rows. I did "my stuff" with no conviction that it would work. (This is called "healing by proxy". Experiments have shown that substances such as water, cotton and wood shavings hold healing energy and can be used instead of direct hands-on treatment. This blanket was acrylic, so I had no high hopes for it.) The parent went for surgery and the lung was excised, but the subsequent biopsy found no trace of cancer. After the surgery to remove the non-cancerous lung, the weight-loss that had caused the suspicion of cancer in the first place reversed. Was this a tragic medical error, or a medical miracle?
Case three, Bo, the miracle dog. Twice Bo was on his "death bed". Twice he was treated, twice he recovered (the first time after bleeding through the nose for two days). He is still fine. There was no diagnosis, but there were symptoms of severe illness (refusal to eat, severe weight loss, weakness, and the second time, inability to get up). There were two single hands-on treatments, five months apart, and no treatment of any other kind.
Case four, the incredible exploding suspected melanoma. Melanoma was suspected, a biopsy scheduled, three treatments given (in which the recipient felt energy and pain). After the third treatment the melanoma swelled, exploded, drained "ugly black stuff", then healed over. By the time the scheduled biopsy was to be done, there was nothing there to biopsy. The medical take on the "ugly black stuff" draining was that it was simply "not possible".
The common thread in all four cases was that there had been no biopsy to confirm the cancer. This would lead some people to say that there had been no cancer in the first place. But other people, including some physicists, have different thoughts on the subject. Anyone who has seen the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? will be familiar with the concept of quantum possibilities. Physicist Russell Targ (following William Braud) suggests that healers can go back in time to the "seed moment" of when a disease manifests and alter the pathway of the disease. The more "set in reality" the disease is, the more difficult it is to affect it. Richard Bartlett of Matrix Energetics speaks of the difficulty of going against "consensus reality" and his own reluctance to take on cancer because of the weight of "consensus reality" around it. A positive biopsy sets the cancer in stone and makes it more difficult to treat. But until such time as it is "set in stone", quantum possibilities continue to exist.
Friday, December 19, 2008
It's still not about what you want -- case study #2
(Remember: personal details have been changed to protect people's identity.)
Mischa was too young to be dying of pancreatic cancer. Unlike Mileni, he had a loving family around him, who were devastated to be told that he had only days to live. Pancreatic cancer is invariably fatal, but often the end can be delayed with chemo; in his case it came on so fast, and so unexpectedly, that chemo was not really even a viable option, though it was still tried, then quickly abandoned as hopeless. We found out about Mischa through the friend of a friend of someone who came to one of Bill's workshops, and we rushed to his bedside.
I used to have a huge phobia about hospitals and dying, but my earlier experience with Mileni acted as a kind of shock treatment for it, so I had no second thoughts about walking into Mischa's room on the oncology floor of a local hospital. But Mischa's appearance still shocked me. He was yellow and skeletal, and so drugged with painkillers that he was barely conscious. I had to wait for him to be conscious enough to understand me before I could ask for his permission to treat him.
Mischa had stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver and was in a state of imminent liver failure. He had so many tumours on his liver that the word used by his doctor to describe them was "innumerable". Bill told us that he himself had not treated anyone with stage-4 pancreatic cancer (because by the time treatment could be arranged they were usually gone) and that our biggest challenge would be that anyone in Mischa's state would likely have already given himself up for dead. We would be, figuratively speaking, dragging him back from the edge of the grave, and psychologically that could be quite a challenge for him.
Once again we had three treaters, and this time everyone stuck with it. We took turns treating him singly or in pairs, so he received at least an hour and a half of hands-on treatment every day. We also had a "Greek chorus" of people offering distance treatments, with a standing date at 10:00 p.m. as everyone in the group who could take the time joined in to send energy to Mischa. The very first night he woke up, looked at his sister sitting next to him, and said "I feel all this energy -- what do I do with it?"
His body's response was almost immediate. By the very next day something had changed. His legs seemed less swollen and the rash on them began to heal. He became more conscious. By the weekend he was able to stand and eat. He became less yellow and needed less pain medication -- in fact five days after we started treating him he stopped needing pain medication altogether. By then he was also able to walk short distances without assistance. Eight days after we started treatment he was released to go home, and his doctor told him that she considered his survival a miracle.
Upon his return home Mischa continued to improve. Eventually there were walks to the park and back, then trips to the mall, then weekends at the cottage. Six weeks after the beginning of treatment he had bloodtests done and was told that his blood values were all normal or near normal. His jaundice was gone. He was putting on weight. His doctor told him that he had normal liver and kidney function. About two weeks later the medi-port for the delivery of chemo was surgically removed as no longer necessary.
We were ecstatic. We kept telling him that he was making history, and that he would get to go on Oprah to tell his story. Bill followed his improvement with great interest. We were making history, too, validating his technique. We would all go on Oprah together! It was a great to have done this, to have gone into the hospital room of someone beyond hope and brought him back from the brink. The future looked rosy.
But there were signs that all was not well. Mischa started having pain around one of his kidneys. Tests were done for a kidney infection or kidney failure, but all the results came back normal. Then the pain moved to his lower back. Then he became listless and tired and unwilling to eat. We suspected some other kind of infection and suggested the possibility, but because he had no fever that was not taken seriously (energy healers generally speaking are not taken very seriously anyway, and certainly not allowed to diagnose). We were surprised that we could not affect the pain, as often pain relief is one of the first outcomes of our treatment, even when the pain is significant. (In fact the chief reason we suspected an infection was that we had already observed that when it comes to infections, we are not all that effective.)
Mischa died quite suddenly, ten weeks after he had been told he had days to live. He did have an undiagnosed infection. Was it a case of massive bad luck, or a case of us trying to argue with something bigger than ourselves and losing? Was he meant die, and did we interfere with a larger purpose by treating him? If the infection had been discovered sooner and he had been treated with antibiotics in time, would he have survived to full remission? Unfortunately we will never know.
Postscript I had the opportunity to present Mischa's case to a group of oncologists in 2009. When I told them that Mischa had not died of cancer, they looked at me and said, almost in unison, "no cancer patient dies of the cancer". They die of complications their weakened bodies cannot fight off. So maybe Mischa dying of something other than his cancer was not as significant as I thought, but his ten-week remission remains an extraordinary event.
Mischa was too young to be dying of pancreatic cancer. Unlike Mileni, he had a loving family around him, who were devastated to be told that he had only days to live. Pancreatic cancer is invariably fatal, but often the end can be delayed with chemo; in his case it came on so fast, and so unexpectedly, that chemo was not really even a viable option, though it was still tried, then quickly abandoned as hopeless. We found out about Mischa through the friend of a friend of someone who came to one of Bill's workshops, and we rushed to his bedside.
I used to have a huge phobia about hospitals and dying, but my earlier experience with Mileni acted as a kind of shock treatment for it, so I had no second thoughts about walking into Mischa's room on the oncology floor of a local hospital. But Mischa's appearance still shocked me. He was yellow and skeletal, and so drugged with painkillers that he was barely conscious. I had to wait for him to be conscious enough to understand me before I could ask for his permission to treat him.
Mischa had stage-4 pancreatic cancer with metastases to the liver and was in a state of imminent liver failure. He had so many tumours on his liver that the word used by his doctor to describe them was "innumerable". Bill told us that he himself had not treated anyone with stage-4 pancreatic cancer (because by the time treatment could be arranged they were usually gone) and that our biggest challenge would be that anyone in Mischa's state would likely have already given himself up for dead. We would be, figuratively speaking, dragging him back from the edge of the grave, and psychologically that could be quite a challenge for him.
Once again we had three treaters, and this time everyone stuck with it. We took turns treating him singly or in pairs, so he received at least an hour and a half of hands-on treatment every day. We also had a "Greek chorus" of people offering distance treatments, with a standing date at 10:00 p.m. as everyone in the group who could take the time joined in to send energy to Mischa. The very first night he woke up, looked at his sister sitting next to him, and said "I feel all this energy -- what do I do with it?"
His body's response was almost immediate. By the very next day something had changed. His legs seemed less swollen and the rash on them began to heal. He became more conscious. By the weekend he was able to stand and eat. He became less yellow and needed less pain medication -- in fact five days after we started treating him he stopped needing pain medication altogether. By then he was also able to walk short distances without assistance. Eight days after we started treatment he was released to go home, and his doctor told him that she considered his survival a miracle.
Upon his return home Mischa continued to improve. Eventually there were walks to the park and back, then trips to the mall, then weekends at the cottage. Six weeks after the beginning of treatment he had bloodtests done and was told that his blood values were all normal or near normal. His jaundice was gone. He was putting on weight. His doctor told him that he had normal liver and kidney function. About two weeks later the medi-port for the delivery of chemo was surgically removed as no longer necessary.
We were ecstatic. We kept telling him that he was making history, and that he would get to go on Oprah to tell his story. Bill followed his improvement with great interest. We were making history, too, validating his technique. We would all go on Oprah together! It was a great to have done this, to have gone into the hospital room of someone beyond hope and brought him back from the brink. The future looked rosy.
But there were signs that all was not well. Mischa started having pain around one of his kidneys. Tests were done for a kidney infection or kidney failure, but all the results came back normal. Then the pain moved to his lower back. Then he became listless and tired and unwilling to eat. We suspected some other kind of infection and suggested the possibility, but because he had no fever that was not taken seriously (energy healers generally speaking are not taken very seriously anyway, and certainly not allowed to diagnose). We were surprised that we could not affect the pain, as often pain relief is one of the first outcomes of our treatment, even when the pain is significant. (In fact the chief reason we suspected an infection was that we had already observed that when it comes to infections, we are not all that effective.)
Mischa died quite suddenly, ten weeks after he had been told he had days to live. He did have an undiagnosed infection. Was it a case of massive bad luck, or a case of us trying to argue with something bigger than ourselves and losing? Was he meant die, and did we interfere with a larger purpose by treating him? If the infection had been discovered sooner and he had been treated with antibiotics in time, would he have survived to full remission? Unfortunately we will never know.
Postscript I had the opportunity to present Mischa's case to a group of oncologists in 2009. When I told them that Mischa had not died of cancer, they looked at me and said, almost in unison, "no cancer patient dies of the cancer". They die of complications their weakened bodies cannot fight off. So maybe Mischa dying of something other than his cancer was not as significant as I thought, but his ten-week remission remains an extraordinary event.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Getting it wrong before getting it right - case study #1
(NB: The personal details of the people in all case studies have been changed to protect their identity.)
Mileni came to us with acute myelogenous leukemia. She had no family here, no husband, no children, only a solicitous group of concerned friends who were quite prepared to help her get through chemo. But Mileni didn't want chemo. She looked at her odds, and having been told by her oncologist that she would need the absolutely most aggressive kind of chemo possible and would likely end up intubated in intensive care for weeks on end, she decided that the odds were not worth it (the 5-year survival rate for her cancer with chemo was 10%, but without chemo, 0%). She was fatalistic: she was willing to try what we did and if it didn't work, she would settle for death with dignity.
Full of confidence after our first seminar with Bill, we decided to treat Mileni. Bill had told us that aggressive cancers remitted quickly, and as acute myelogenous leukemia is one of the most aggressive kinds, we were secretly hopeful for Mileni's speedy recovery. We told her that the treatment was experimental and that because we could not guarantee results we could not accept payment. At first there were three of us treating her, but then it became just me. She received treatment first once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week. In spite of this her blood count continued to worsen, although the treatments seemed to slow her deterioration. About three months after her treatment began, however, her doctor announced that her white blood cell count was now "gravely concerning". This meant that she could at any moment develop a fatal brain haemorrhage. When she left his consulting room to use the bathroom, he made baleful eyes at me and told me that "leukemia patients die in horrible ways". He wanted me to convince her to agree to have chemo.
By this time Mileni had stopped talking to her friends because of their solicitous insistence that they would help her through chemo. She would not hear of it. The very mention of the word "chemo" made her angry and anger made her condition noticeably worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I took her to see Bill, who graciously agreed to see us. After a few days of treatments from Bill she seemed to perk up, and could even be seen doing the occasional pirouette on the lawn. But upon her return home she crashed, and her white blood cell count sky-rocketed. The numbers went from "gravely concerning" to astronomical ("astronomical" was almost five times "gravely concerning"). The numbers would now only rise, we were told, and the white blood cells would spill over into her lymph nodes and her brain. She had bruises because her platelet count was low and a constant fever. I was treating her daily but with little hope.
Then suddenly something happened. One day during treatment I felt something different accompanied by a sudden sense that I had just "got it". And sure enough, the next time Mileni went for her blood test, the white blood cell count was down. Her doctor said it was a lab error. There was another blip up the time after, but then the count decidedly reversed. She was having two bloodtests a week, and with each one the number would go down 15 to 20 per cent. People at the hospital who did not know her history would ask her what kind of chemotherapy she was on, because her body was behaving as if she had been receiving chemo. But unfortunately along with the white blood cells her red blood cells and platelets were also falling. She began receiving transfusions, which only worked for a while, as her body began to react to the blood as if it were a foreign substance. It became a race against time. I had the idea that if all the bad white blood cells were to go, her body would start manufacturing healthy blood cells -- just as with chemo. Mileni by this point had settled for death with dignity but allowed me to have my delusions, and to keep treating her, so long as I kept her company.
When the final crash came I went with her to emergency, where a young doctor shouted at her, as if she were hard of hearing, that she needed to contact her family because she was dying. He helpfully assured her that she would not survive the weekend. But survive she did, with hours of treatment, and then my next act as her healer was to negotiate with the social worker to have her transferred into palliative care. I continued to treat her and I continued to remain hopeful. Surely a miracle would happen and Mileni would walk out of the hospital on her own two feet. On her last day I sat with her until 11 p.m. She died peacefully in her sleep at 2 a.m. Her last blood test the day before showed her white blood cell count as "normal".
Discussion
I was devastated by Mileni's death. I had clearly become too involved with her in the course of her treatment, but I do not know at what point it would have been possible for me to walk away and still be at peace with my conscience. Some people comforted me by saying that I had done something beautiful by sticking with Mileni to the end, and that even though I hadn't cured her, important healing had taken place. There was a big debate in our group about the value of "healing" versus "curing" with the conclusion that without healing no curing could take place. A number of the group who think beyond matters of the body in this life felt that in cosmic terms healing the whole being was far more important than curing the physical body.
From the perspective of practicing Bill's technique my over-involvement with Mileni was not a good thing. It is an important part of the technique for the practitioner to be detached from the outcome. If you care too much, you get in the way. Also, it is not a good idea to treat someone who desires death with dignity. The best candidates for Bill's technique are people who passionately want to live. I think Mileni wanted someone with her who would not pressure her into treatment. I was chiefly there to hold her hand and to ease the process of her dying. It's not what I wanted to happen. The lesson Mileni taught was "it's not about what you want." I am still not sure how well I learned it.
Mileni came to us with acute myelogenous leukemia. She had no family here, no husband, no children, only a solicitous group of concerned friends who were quite prepared to help her get through chemo. But Mileni didn't want chemo. She looked at her odds, and having been told by her oncologist that she would need the absolutely most aggressive kind of chemo possible and would likely end up intubated in intensive care for weeks on end, she decided that the odds were not worth it (the 5-year survival rate for her cancer with chemo was 10%, but without chemo, 0%). She was fatalistic: she was willing to try what we did and if it didn't work, she would settle for death with dignity.
Full of confidence after our first seminar with Bill, we decided to treat Mileni. Bill had told us that aggressive cancers remitted quickly, and as acute myelogenous leukemia is one of the most aggressive kinds, we were secretly hopeful for Mileni's speedy recovery. We told her that the treatment was experimental and that because we could not guarantee results we could not accept payment. At first there were three of us treating her, but then it became just me. She received treatment first once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week. In spite of this her blood count continued to worsen, although the treatments seemed to slow her deterioration. About three months after her treatment began, however, her doctor announced that her white blood cell count was now "gravely concerning". This meant that she could at any moment develop a fatal brain haemorrhage. When she left his consulting room to use the bathroom, he made baleful eyes at me and told me that "leukemia patients die in horrible ways". He wanted me to convince her to agree to have chemo.
By this time Mileni had stopped talking to her friends because of their solicitous insistence that they would help her through chemo. She would not hear of it. The very mention of the word "chemo" made her angry and anger made her condition noticeably worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I took her to see Bill, who graciously agreed to see us. After a few days of treatments from Bill she seemed to perk up, and could even be seen doing the occasional pirouette on the lawn. But upon her return home she crashed, and her white blood cell count sky-rocketed. The numbers went from "gravely concerning" to astronomical ("astronomical" was almost five times "gravely concerning"). The numbers would now only rise, we were told, and the white blood cells would spill over into her lymph nodes and her brain. She had bruises because her platelet count was low and a constant fever. I was treating her daily but with little hope.
Then suddenly something happened. One day during treatment I felt something different accompanied by a sudden sense that I had just "got it". And sure enough, the next time Mileni went for her blood test, the white blood cell count was down. Her doctor said it was a lab error. There was another blip up the time after, but then the count decidedly reversed. She was having two bloodtests a week, and with each one the number would go down 15 to 20 per cent. People at the hospital who did not know her history would ask her what kind of chemotherapy she was on, because her body was behaving as if she had been receiving chemo. But unfortunately along with the white blood cells her red blood cells and platelets were also falling. She began receiving transfusions, which only worked for a while, as her body began to react to the blood as if it were a foreign substance. It became a race against time. I had the idea that if all the bad white blood cells were to go, her body would start manufacturing healthy blood cells -- just as with chemo. Mileni by this point had settled for death with dignity but allowed me to have my delusions, and to keep treating her, so long as I kept her company.
When the final crash came I went with her to emergency, where a young doctor shouted at her, as if she were hard of hearing, that she needed to contact her family because she was dying. He helpfully assured her that she would not survive the weekend. But survive she did, with hours of treatment, and then my next act as her healer was to negotiate with the social worker to have her transferred into palliative care. I continued to treat her and I continued to remain hopeful. Surely a miracle would happen and Mileni would walk out of the hospital on her own two feet. On her last day I sat with her until 11 p.m. She died peacefully in her sleep at 2 a.m. Her last blood test the day before showed her white blood cell count as "normal".
Discussion
I was devastated by Mileni's death. I had clearly become too involved with her in the course of her treatment, but I do not know at what point it would have been possible for me to walk away and still be at peace with my conscience. Some people comforted me by saying that I had done something beautiful by sticking with Mileni to the end, and that even though I hadn't cured her, important healing had taken place. There was a big debate in our group about the value of "healing" versus "curing" with the conclusion that without healing no curing could take place. A number of the group who think beyond matters of the body in this life felt that in cosmic terms healing the whole being was far more important than curing the physical body.
From the perspective of practicing Bill's technique my over-involvement with Mileni was not a good thing. It is an important part of the technique for the practitioner to be detached from the outcome. If you care too much, you get in the way. Also, it is not a good idea to treat someone who desires death with dignity. The best candidates for Bill's technique are people who passionately want to live. I think Mileni wanted someone with her who would not pressure her into treatment. I was chiefly there to hold her hand and to ease the process of her dying. It's not what I wanted to happen. The lesson Mileni taught was "it's not about what you want." I am still not sure how well I learned it.
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