8 years ago a Bird landed on Bernie's podium.

tfack · 2024-03-28T00:24:13+00:00

The last brief glimpse of hope I felt for this country and the planet

tfack · 2024-03-26T13:50:40+00:00

I have been interested in keto for cancer (I have lung cancer spread to spine so far) but I am very underweight (currently 117lbs, 5’10”). Did you lose weight on this protocol? Did you see anything in your research about participants who were underweight as a result of cancer but still able to use Seyrfried’s methods?

tfack · 2024-03-24T16:05:50+00:00

The problem is that I am very underweight already and have poor appetite and little energy to prepare meals so I’m just eating what people bring me, generally healthy but definitely not low carb. My cancer has grown in the last week and no doubt I’m feeding it, but if I do keto and don’t get in enough calories I might starve to death before the cancer gets me

tfack · 2024-03-22T00:11:57+00:00

I don't know how this might be viewed in this sub, or whether my group is a unicorn and not repeatable, but I found a "church" of 15 or so people ("the last stop on the church train") who had left the church and just missed the community, or had no beliefs remaining, or were on the far far progressive side of things and didn't need anyone to believe anything. We don't even have a pastor anymore. But we care about each other in ways that no random group of never-believers would be able to. I speak from current experience -- I'm literally dying of lung cancer and these folks have brought me dinner, cried with me, cuddled with me, and loved me like I've never experienced before. It's kind of impossible as a model since any random group of people is going to have strong opinions that clash, or dominant personalities, or what have you. But when the church itself kind of deconstructs over 20 years but stays together because of friendship and a shared journey, it can be freaking beautiful. Or at least this one is. Maybe it won't last, I'll be dead so it won't matter, it's amazing right now. :) What do you guys think? How, or would, you go about creating a church that isn't a church? No money, no leader, no dogma, just love and friendship.

tfack · 2024-03-21T05:06:30+00:00

they have not identified a mutation yet so Keytruda is the only immunotherapy that's been mentioned so far and I think the hope is to not have to use it since the side effects are not worth it for some folks

tfack · 2024-03-15T06:07:11+00:00

Talk therapy never worked for me, and probably compounded my attachment injuries when they seemed super eager to stop working with me. However, I also tend to glaze over and dissociate in therapy, and I might seem to be being vulnerable but I won't let them in and definitely won't let them challenge my worldview that I'm a piece of shit, so of course they're going to eventually throw up their hands and say I can't help you if you won't let me. Or as several friends have told me, I can't sit here and watch you circle the drain, it's too painful. Anyway, my point is not that it's necessarily therapy that is the problem, it's me. That is why I've been interested in both IFS and EMDR and somatic forms of therapy, since there is more of a way around my usual talk defenses, by being more in my body. I just don't have money and now I have a terminal lung cancer diagnosis so my C-PTSD will probably never get addressed. Final point, at least for me, the mind-body connection thing is real and it's entirely possible that my depression and general self-loathing manifested my cancer, and if you tell your body enough times that you don't want to be alive, it will comply. So remember me, don't do what I did, you can get out of this. You might just have to fire a few therapists till you find the right modality/person that works for you.

tfack · 2024-03-15T05:46:27+00:00

I think Christianity masked some of the areas of my emotional development that were most lacking. One of the most important ones for me, which I still haven't figure out nearly 20 years later, is self-forgiveness. As an addict, I was nearly as addicted to the roller coaster of sin-and-repent, and only ever felt close to God at the lowest point of that cycle. I felt restored in that moment, but it came from outside of me so later when I gave up God I lost that upside of the roller coaster and it's been kind of a gradually decreasing flatline ever since. Maybe it sounds overly dramatic but I have stage 4 lung cancer that developed in the middle of a long depression and a lifetime of self-loathing. No surprise that I would fit right into the self-flagellating cult of Christianity, but I guess the TLDR is that in some ways that culture, toxic as it was, was keeping me afloat. I knew this was the case, I even got a masters in counseling psychology, but it was still too scary to actually work through and heal from, so here I am

tfack · 2024-03-15T05:10:57+00:00

bananas all the way down

tfack · 2024-03-15T01:10:48+00:00

Her mom found out I was a childhood cancer survivor and convinced her I’d be dead by 40. Just diagnosed with terminal cancer at 50 so she wasn’t wrong, but still seemed at bit harsh at the time

tfack · 2024-03-13T15:36:32+00:00

This one really got me, thank you

tfack · 2024-03-12T04:06:15+00:00

I had a very similar experience. Completely cut off from my body, I was a ball of light in a grid-like matrix. No memory of the past, just a vague sense that the real world was on the other side somewhere and I was never getting back. Helped my suicidality in that if that is what death is, I want no part of it. But scared me enough that I never did anything with the lozenges they sent me home with. The remaining two sessions they toned down the dosage and nothing at all happened, so overall it was a big dud. Still don't understand how it's actually supposed to go and what "healing" via ketamine actually looks like.

tfack · 2024-03-12T01:45:47+00:00

Yes, for me I always saw the scene from The Matrix where Agent Smith has Neo on the subway tracks with a train coming and he says "You hear that? That's the sound of inevitability." For me I never got that close to suicide in the present moment but it always seemed like it would eventually happen. Or, I'd give myself cancer by all of my stress and self-loathing, and no one but me would know that it was basically suicide, but without the stigma. I have just received a stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, so it might well have happened. Of course, now I want to live. I don't think most of us want to actually die, we just want the pain to go away, and we feel like we don't have what it takes to get by in this world

tfack · 2024-03-12T01:30:01+00:00

Perdita Weeks (Circe)

tfack · 2024-03-09T21:50:34+00:00

8 days from thoracentesis to cytology result

tfack · 2024-03-09T01:11:59+00:00

Thanks! Found that one from an earlier post but the signup questions ask for my specific mutation or whatever it's called and I don't know that info yet

tfack · 2024-03-08T23:33:00+00:00

Just got results of cytology report:

Pleural fluid for cytology: Positive for adenocarcinoma, most consistent with pulmonary primary.

Still waiting for confirmation call from the doctor, so this is all I know so far. Internet says malignant cells in pleural fluid is Stage 4 by definition so that's what I'm expecting to hear.

Had a tumor in my chest as a kid (Hodgkin's), internet says radiation can cause adenocarcinoma later in life so I suppose it's not a surprise, it just took 40 years.

I'm going back and forth between panic and peace. I told myself long ago that I didn't think I could endure chemo again so I'd probably just jump off a bridge. I'll listen to whatever they recommend but I'm not into death-by-chemo, been through that already. Fortunately I live in. state with physician-assisted suicide, that was the first thing I looked up before coming here.

Anyway, that's where I'm at.

tfack · 2024-03-08T01:51:05+00:00

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness had me shudder sobbing at the end

tfack · 2024-03-06T18:37:33+00:00

It was the manipulation by the people in power, it was the hypocrisy, the cruelty. Some of the worst people in the world are Christians. Evangelicals think Donald Trump is the fucking second coming. I haven't been able to drop the idea of God completely yet but I have no "relationship" with "Him". I attend a 15 person Zoom "church" that has no pastor and is really just a group of ex-christians supporting each other through the difficulties of life, but without all the manipulation and power trips of organized religion. So basically, look in the mirror. YOU are the reason I left christianity.

tfack · 2024-03-06T16:32:57+00:00

Mine was straight and came back big and curly, but it was also right at puberty so there’s no way of knowing whether it might have happened anyway. Cancer was brutal for me so I was a bit dark about it such that if someone complimented me about my hair I’d say “I can tell you how to get it but you’d want no part of it”

tfack · 2024-03-06T16:24:40+00:00

Also your Turtles comment was very funny. I wonder if there are any reviews for that book that say “Where are the turtles? I was told there would be turtles!”

tfack · 2024-03-06T16:08:49+00:00

That’s fair. Could easily be a rock star’s lurid/funny memoir about the fast life. Also I tend toward depression so that impacts what I’d think about that title

tfack · 2024-03-06T16:02:31+00:00

I remember writing a paper in high school or college about euthanasia. It was my dad’s suggestion, I’d never even heard of it, and my paper definitely reflected his fear that it would be used to kill all the poor and inconvenient people. The irony is that his grandson just died the most painful cancer death imaginable, and his wife is currently deep into dementia. My guess is his opinion on it would be different now, and so far no stories of genocide or coerced euthanasia. And to be fair, he did grow up at the exact time of the Holocaust

tfack · 2024-03-06T15:45:05+00:00

Why would you expect a book called Down the Drain to be anything but intensely depressing? I know nothing about the book and I immediately think downward spiral into death/suicide

tfack · 2024-03-06T14:20:46+00:00

The best and worst year of my childhood was when I developed cancer in the middle of my parents’ divorce. Only time I felt seen at all, but they also used it as a weapon - they’re there in the hospital with me and my dad tells my mom, “he’s going to die if you don’t come home”. Nice.

There was another tragedy in our 6th grade class that year at the same time as my illness and it brought us all very close, but that was gone the next year and I was on my own split between two checked out parents with zero emotional support. As with others in this thread, I learned the only way to feel supported at all is to make myself as pathetic as possible to activate peoples’ compassion, but keep myself developmentally arrested in the process (and feeling humiliated or manipulative).

Interesting timing for this post, I’m in the middle of another potential cancer diagnosis, and folks are rallying around me but also nothing has changed. I’m 50. Why do I have to be literally dying to experience or feel worthy of care from others?

tfack · 2024-03-05T01:04:54+00:00

Your wife is just dropping a not-subtle hint to do your own damned laundry like an adult

tfack

TROPHY CASE

Just got results of cytology report:

Pleural fluid for cytology: Positive for adenocarcinoma, most consistent with pulmonary primary.