Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
When Your Every Minute is Dedicated to Beating Cancer, Every Small Victory Matters
The daily battle against cancer demands every ounce of strength, every minute of attention, and unwavering determination. This raw, unfiltered update takes you through the rollercoaster of emotions and medical developments that have defined my past week.
What happens when conventional treatment plans hit unexpected roadblocks? After driving hours to see Dr. Castro, I discovered my vegan diet had left me severely zinc-deficient – a critical issue since zinc helps our immune system recognize tumor cells. Without adequate zinc, the chemotherapy I was eagerly awaiting would likely fail. Just as I processed this news, another blow: insurance coding errors postponed my port installation and subsequent treatment.
Yet amid these setbacks, promising developments have emerged. My aggressive topical applications of chlorine dioxide followed by DMSO have produced visible changes in the tumor. When the tumor site began weeping plasma and showing signs of immune activity, I cautiously intensified treatments with diluted food-grade hydrogen peroxide. The bubbling, weeping reaction suggests my immune system might finally be recognizing and attacking the cancer cells – especially as my zinc levels improve.
Meanwhile, my cousin and I have decoded the formula for internal chlorine dioxide treatment, and I've begun carefully implementing this protocol alongside my fasting-mimicking dietary approach. Every decision, from the water I use to the timing of my treatments, represents another potential path toward healing.
This journey reminds me daily that beating cancer isn't just about medical appointments – it's about the constant, exhausting vigilance between them. Your subscriptions and support make this fight possible, providing both the practical resources and emotional strength I need to keep moving forward. Have you found that sometimes the most unexpected setbacks lead to surprising opportunities for healing?
Intro for podcast
https://www.wcsblog.com/podcast-episodes
Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and if you're listening to this, that means you have subscribed to this podcast and you're listening to some special content. And before we get started, I definitely want to thank everybody who has subscribed. It makes a difference. You've made it so that we're able to elevate the quality of this podcast and the reach. It's helping it to expand and build the community that I have set in mind and it will hopefully help to defray some of these medical costs that I'm building up as well. So this is just going to be an update. I haven't updated anybody for about a week and it's been a roller coaster ride of a week. So I'll try to recap.
Speaker 1:Last Thursday I was at Dr Castro's in LA and you know it's abouta two-hour drive there and maybe a three-hour drive home, and this time it was about a two-hour drive there and maybe a three-hour drive home, and this time it was about a 10-minute consultation. And during the consultation, of course you know he looks at me and he's like, well, you still haven't gotten anything done yet. And I says listen, I've been working this whole month trying to get dental clearance and I told them about that. I got this neoadjuvant chemo protocol approved and I was supposed to be getting a port the next day and starting chemo this last Monday and he was okay with that and he had ordered a genetic work of my tumor from a lab in Boston and it's supposedly one of the best labs around. But the way I understood it, it's going to cost me $10,000. But I know that this particular genetic work can offer some of the answers to my lifetime of being cancer-free or at least recognizing you know levels that I could head off at the pass if it was to start to rise again, and so I'm walking in faith right now. So if, if there's something I think that's going to work and I don't know how I'm going to pay for it, I'm going to still go forward and we'll figure it out. Worst case scenario I get clobbered with more bills. And best case scenario we find the answers we're looking for.
Speaker 1:Then he looks and says, well, I'm looking at your blood work that we did last time and it looks like you're zinc deficient. And I says, okay, I didn't think about that. And it turns out, with this restrictive diet that I've been on, I don't eat any meat or cheese or dairy or poultry or eggs or any of that stuff. It's pretty much a vegan diet. Not pretty much poultry or eggs or any of that stuff. It's pretty much a vegan diet Not pretty much. It's a very vegan diet.
Speaker 1:And, as it turns out, zinc is primarily found in protein sources, so that's been reduced out of my body and it turns out that zinc causes your immune system to recognize tumor cells. Zinc causes your immune system to recognize tumor cells. And he says if you were to go forward with this chemotherapy as it is, it would probably not work very well. He says, great. So he prescribes me this really expensive zinc supplement but it's really quick absorbing. So I says, okay, let's go forward with that.
Speaker 1:So now we're driving home and got this long drive home and I'm still excited because I'm going to be getting this port installed and we're going to get knocking this thing back and I never thought in a million years I'd be excited to get chemotherapy. But man, this is, this is arduous right now. And yeah, just remember that while you guys are going on about your life, my daily regimen, every minute of every day, is involved in beating this thing, whether it's frequency therapy, whether it's supplements that I'm taking, whether it's an exercise, whether it's mental, whether it's research, whatever it is, I am literally every minute of every day working on beating this thing and it takes a gigantic toll. And so I have, you know, mostly my spirit's high, but sometimes you have moments and it's been a rough ride. So I'm driving home and I get a phone call from UCI Medical Center and that's you know, I was hoping for good news and they said well, mr Grumbine, it turns out there's been an error with your insurance and we're not going to be able to install the port tomorrow. We got to get the right code from insurance and I'm like, oh Jesus. So I was completely deflated and I'm just sitting there, just, basically, just in disbelief, the whole way home.
Speaker 1:But over the course of the next couple hours I received unsolicited calls from a number of people that are supporting my efforts. And you know, by that I don't mean I see you once a month and you say, hey, how's it going, I mean the people that are checking with me daily, every other day, a couple of days, but people that are regularly tapped into the pulse, and there's not a lot of them, but there's enough that are making the difference and so that really raised my spirits. Then I did an episode with Dr Hoffman and that raised my spirits and we kept going and I kept being reassured that this was okay and gotten this thing done and started chemo on Monday. It probably wouldn't have been as effective and now that I've got the time to absorb this zinc I'm watching things happen and feeling things happen, that I think now I'm in a situation where I'll get that effectiveness that I'm looking for and, I don't know, hopefully the insurance will come through soon. It still hasn't. It's now a week later and I'm still going through this roller coaster ride. So Friday comes and goes.
Speaker 1:Saturday we went out to Sylmar to spend time with our new community, our new family, and really had a beautiful, beautiful day and spent time with my new sister, florina, and Salvador and we stayed looking at the fire and eating and just sharing beautiful conversation until late at night. We didn't get home till almost midnight and I stayed awake. The stayed home, I stayed awake. The way home, I says I've got to get a sleep. I had been three weeks since I've had a decent night's sleep and I'm sleeping in fits and starts and waking up in pain and uh, it's, it's dragging on me. I don't feel, I feel like my strength is weakening. And that night, saturday night, I got the first night sleep. I probably slept six hours almost straight through, and I woke up rejuvenated, for the first time in I can't remember when and or Saturday night, yeah, and then Sunday we had some volunteers over and I spent most of the day outside, and so I've been going up and down with the energy level. I'm still waking up every hour, hour and a half, but I'm going back to sleep easier, and so, even though my sleep is not uninterrupted, I'm still waking up fairly refreshed. So I feel like I'm making progress there.
Speaker 1:So, with the zinc going down, as you know, I've been spraying on the tumor directly chlorine dioxide at 300 parts per million, chlorine dioxide at 300 parts per million, which I did finally test, and then following that up with 30% DMSO, and I've noticed after a while it started to create some little white patches that looked almost like an infection or a whitehead, but it wasn't. It didn't seem to be filled with fluid, it just seemed like something was rising to the surface and then it would sort of peel away. It was an interesting reaction, but it seems like, as I'm getting more zinc into my system. This is happening more and so I'm getting a little more aggressive with it and spraying it on more often. And I'm documenting it, taking a lot of pictures, and so I've got a. I have a full slideshow of its progression. And then it's getting.
Speaker 1:I wake up and somewhere, somehow in the night, I had ruptured the skin and there was a small, two small ruptured areas where one had a little bit of blood and the other one was oozing out a little bit of what looked like plasma. So you know, know, plasma is like the clear part of your blood. And so I said, all right, well, you want to come out, let's hit you with some peroxide. So I have this 12% food grade peroxide I've been using to nebulize and oxygenate. I reduced it down to about 4% and started aggressively spraying it on and spraying it and spraying it and it was just weeping and weeping and weeping and a couple of times it bled and I thought, well, a tumor is trying to be inactive and cold and do you create an environment for an anaerobic reaction so that it can create its fuel? And so, if I can get blood flowing and plasma moving and anything happening there. Even the pain I feel is uncharacteristic for a tumor. Usually there's not a lot of sensation to a tumor and well, I just all day yesterday was just flooding it with this four percent solution. It's bubbling, and bubbling, and bubbling, and dripping off, and dripping off and finally at the end of the day I did my sauna and I kind of baked it, and still weeping a little bit and I says, well, I'm gonna just try to sleep on my back in a sort of semi-upright position and hopefully it'll stop.
Speaker 1:I woke up this morning and it seemed like it was crusted over a little bit. It looked like it had bled a little bit during the night and wept a little bit. So I hit it just lightly this morning with some peroxide and it all of a sudden started weeping more, like more pus, like now. And I thought to myself wow, I think that's my immune system attacking the tumor. Because if you think about it, what is that? You know, it's white blood cells, and when the white blood cells attack something, it turns into this pus, and so I don't know. I feel like I'm onto something. I'm being cautiously optimistic and I'm being very cautious because I don't want this thing to get out of control and start bleeding profusely or anything like that. But I think we got it under control, keeping it in check, and I feel cautiously optimistic that that's working.
Speaker 1:And the next piece of the puzzle is my cousin came back out and we decoded the chlorine dioxide formula, working from raw ingredients, and we did the calculations. Now I have a copper still that is on its way, or hopefully on its way and we're going to distill water from the Creek so that it's water that's never touched plastic, hasn't touched plastic pipes, hasn't been corrupted, it's just water right out of the ground and we're going to distill that in copper and the water that we get from that we're going to make this chlorine dioxide. But after listening to the videos from Dr Kalker I realized it wasn't quite so sensitive as that and we had made out of just a pellet and caps or pill and distilled water, the solution that I was using topically. But I, after watching this video, I says you know what? I feel strongly that this chlorine dioxide in my system is going to get in and do more. It's going to add to the glycerin that I'm doing, it's going to increase the oxidative effect and disrupt this tumor. And so I said, I just got to start and so I started with 10 mils in about 100 mils of water, and you're supposed to do that about eight to ten times a day, and I did it once it didn't taste bad at all, but then afterward I got this aftertaste, sort of like the peroxide, pretty nasty.
Speaker 1:But so I did it only once one day and then yesterday I did it a few times and this morning I started the morning first thing. I got up about 5 30 and the first thing that hit my stomach was chlorine dioxide water and I feel like I'm on track. So hopefully the insurance clears us out in the next day or two. This thing is still moving around and we're still going back and forth. I'm still in a fasting, mimicking state, but I've been just maintaining my weight. That's where I'm at right now. Once I get the date I'll go back to a hard fast two days prior to the chemo and one day after to maximize its effectiveness. But I feel like right now I'm trying to make sure that my body is not consuming protein, it's not consuming its own muscle, because that will unlock methionine that will turn around and feed the cancer. So that's pretty much the update for now and I want to thank everybody once again for supporting the show. Talk soon.
