S**t Hit The Fan

Cycle 12 Day 7. Sunday, April 12th, 9:58 in the morning.So as I’m lying here in bed, I’m looking back on another weird night.This episode is going to be quite self-revealing, unfortunately. But in the name of transparency, in the name of raw originality, in the name of exposing my full self and the full spectrum of my emotions and experiences going through this odyssey, it needs to be revisited.Whether you want to keep listening or not, that’s up to you.Whether you want to judge me for exposing this physical flaw that I’ve been forced to have, that’s on you.Because I don’t care.So here we go.Refeeding Into InstabilityWhat happened tonight needs a bit of background first.As you should know by now, I’ve just gone through my third reretreatment round, and my twelfth treatment round in total.And on the sixth day after everything I’m doing, which importantly includes a 6-day long water-fast, it is time to refeed.As described yesterday, I initiated refeeding, and that is always a shaky process because the body has been in a dormant but also toxified state.One of the cell types with the greatest sensitivity to chemotherapy is the gut lining.The cells in your gut lining, all throughout the gut, renew themselves very rapidly. I’ve read scientific papers concluding that they renew every three to seven days in any person. So within a week, your gut lining will basically be completely replaced.And the way chemotherapy acts is that it does something to healthy cells that interferes with their machinery. It may incorporate flawed DNA, such as in the 5-FU that I’m receiving. It may tamper with DNA repair and replication mechanisms, as in the oxaliplatin that I’m receiving. It may have other effects as well.But almost all of those effects will cause more cell damage and cell death in those cell populations that are fast-dividing and more metabolically active.And the cells of the gut lining are very much in the main league there.So they will be heavily impacted in anyone going through chemotherapy, including me, even though I’m water-fasting in order to have my healthy cells go into as much of a dormant, protective state as possible.So my gut lining is heavily damaged.Through not eating, and through the burst of chemotherapy, all of the gut flora must also most certainly be heavily modified.And in summary, my gut—and of course all the other bodily systems—are not what they should be in order to start re-ingesting food.Another such subsystem is the organ machinery required to produce digestive acids, such as bile.And then comes the problem: I need to refeed.There is no perfect strategy, but there are better and worse strategies. My current basic logic is to get liquid nutrients, and the highest-value macronutrients possible for rebuilding, into my body as early as possible.That means having a broth filled with protein.The easiest such broth to make, that can be heated and stay on the stove overnight, is chicken broth.So I take in a lot of liquid nutrients in the form of chicken broth, as well as solid protein in the form of chicken meat and beef mince.That is my only nutrient intake—for the whole first day of refeeding.What then tends to happen is that my gut becomes very distended from what it was before, because it was completely empty. During 6 days with no caloric intake it will have shrunk up a lot, and now it needs to reexpand to be able to take up all this nutrient volume—but even more so all this liquid volume.I still think it is a good idea to take in nutrients in liquid form.However, the way I do it, it is quite a lot of liquid. Quite a big quantity.And it still might be the best idea, because there is going to be a lot of turbidity, a lot of motion of these liquids inside the gut.So if I have a nutrient-dense broth—but not too nutrient-dense, because that might agitate the gut too much, too much of a shock—then I reason that this liquid will move around all the nooks and crannies of the gut lining.Because the gut is not an even flat tube. It has all these folds and fibrils. There is so much surface area to cover.And my reasoning, which is purely heuristic and based on common sense rather than on some highly specific scientific model, is that gradually exposing as much of the gut lining surface area as possible to valuable nutrients through a liquid filled with protein might be one of the better ways to go.But what then happens during the first day of refeeding is that my gut is filled with all this liquid.And not all of that liquid can be absorbed by the gut.So it needs to come out one way or the other.It doesn’t come out through the mouth, because I’m no longer nauseous. I’m not going to puke.So it needs to come out the other way.And if the gut is not able to absorb it into the blood and the interstitial tissue, then it will come out from behind.What Happened in the NightWhat happened tonight was that, after having had my gut activate during the afternoon and evening, and having to go to the toilet quite often and produce very loose stool, there was still enough liquid in my body when I went to sleep that it needed to come out sooner or later.So I fell asleep around half past eleven, quite late. I think this was due to my body still being so metabolically active from having started to ingest food. So my bedtime got relatively late because of that, despite me not having slept much at all the night before.The night before had been the one night in this cycle where I had the most intense near-psychedelic-state sensations—my gut rumbling and undulating and feeling hypersensitive, my whole body in that strange intermediate state where it is most intensely trying to recompose and reconstitute itself.But the problem now was that I still had all of this fluid in my gut.And I woke up around 2 a.m. with this sensation of sticky wetness.What had happened was that I’d shat myself.There was a big wet, liquid stain all around my boxer briefs.So I had to get up. I had to clean that off.A bit had spilled onto the bed. Fortunately, not much had come out of the boxer briefs and onto the bed, but it was still enough liquid on the bed that I had to pull apart some of the blankets, bring a towel, bring hot water, bring a cleaning cloth, and clean things up.I then had to clean my underwear.I then had to figure out a way to still be able to sleep on our double bed without the dirty part being exposed to the clean part of the bed. So I had to fold the bed linen in a way that let me sleep on half the bed while the dirtied part was rolled away, which was a mess.And in this state, I’m already very weak.This is never anyone’s favorite activity to do in the middle of the night, and it definitely was not mine tonight either.And then of course there was still more liquid to come out.So I had to sit on the toilet for another thirty minutes or so to gradually let all that liquid come out, because I didn’t want to go back to sleep only to have this happen again immediately.I did that. I cleaned myself.And what’s also happening is that because I have so much liquid in the gut, it is kind of diluting the stomach acid in a way. So I think the nutrients and the liquid are moving through the gut quite quickly.And that means it is acidic.So in my groin I’m feeling this acid coming out as well, which is very unpleasant.So I had to keep wiping myself.Then I got to a stage where I thought my stomach was maybe not as active anymore, and I went back to bed.But I’m not sleeping much at this stage.I got back to bed around 2:50, and then maybe lay there for half an hour before there was more liquid to come out, so I went back to the bathroom for another half hour or more.Then I went back to bed again, maybe got a little bit of sleep, or maybe just lay there before my stomach once again wanted to rid itself of fluid.Then I went back to the bathroom for another fifteen to twenty minutes.Then back to bed again.And now I’ve woken up, so I think I got a bit of sleep toward the end of it, because it’s quarter past ten in real time now.The Numbers of the NightI checked what my smart ring says about the night.It is currently giving me a sleep score of 66.So over the night I was at least able to accumulate 6 hours 34 minutes of sleep, which is definitely better than yesterday, when I only had 3 hours 54 minutes.So: 6.5 hours of total sleep, 1 hour 40 minutes REM, 1 hour 5 minutes deep sleep.I was “in bed” for ten hours…So yes: roughly three and a half hours of wake time.Those waking slots were between around 1:45 and 3:00, and then another large waking bout between 7:00 and 8:15.My resting heart rate is not too bad.HRV is really crap: 46 ms. So I did manage to make it through the night.There were some casualties, though.So we need to clean the bed once more.After having cleaned the bed linen yesterday—Jonna was diligently doing the cleaning yesterday to rid our bedroom and apartment of everything I had been wearing or sleeping in during the intense chemo infusion period—now this happened once more.And yes, we need to clean it up.Sleep Is Always Under SiegeMy sleep is always disrupted by new things.There is always something, wherever I am in the cycle, that might be disrupting it.Whether it is chemo, or HBOT, or the fact that I have fasted for so long, or my gut being unstable, or my nervous system being unstable……or my body overreacting to strength training, or sauna and therefore being overly inflamed……or the fact that I have started eating again, or that I have eaten a bit too close to bedtime, or that I have eaten a little too much because I need to overeat, basically, to regain body weight and strength and reboot my systems.There are so many different ways my sleep can be destabilized.The neighbors might be doing something.Something might happen in the morning and cause noise.You name it.So that is one common theme here: we will keep having these disruptions.Another common theme is the cyclicity of things.The cyclicity of my challenges and my struggle.SisyphusIn recent days I’ve already, twice in the past two or three days, been exposed to the myth of Sisyphus.I don’t remember every detail, but in some way Sisyphus committed some unforgivable act against Hades or another Greek god.And the punishment that was devised for him was this:He would be placed in the underworld at the bottom of a cliff.The incline of the cliff was such that he could walk up it and push a boulder up it—but not enough to ever actually get the boulder over the top.At the bottom there was a massive rock.And Sisyphus’ task was to push that boulder up to the top of the cliff.But the devious crux was that every time he neared the shoulder of the cliff, every time he got close to the top, the boulder would roll back down.There was nothing he could do about it.No determination, resilience, or strength in his repertoire could stop it.And then he would have the task forced upon him again: push the boulder back up.This is me, basically.This is my life, and it has been my life for almost two years.And I can never really mentally leave that state of just pushing.Because if I did, then given the state of my being, given where I am in this disease process, the boulder would just get heavier and heavier, and harder and harder to keep pushing.I’ve been trying to find ways to normalize this, but the process itself keeps barraging me.It keeps hitting me.It is like a hailstorm with new obstacles coming along.And I just need to find relief and consolation and strength in anything I can grab onto along the way, on this journey, just to accept that this is now my journey.I am just pushing this rock.And I think we all are, in some sense.Sooner or later, we all have to come to the conclusion that we are pushing this rock.Every one of us can find small examples in day-to-day life.For example, cleaning your bedsheets.It is something you have to do all the time.You need to do it from when you become responsible for cleaning your bedsheets until you die—unless you pay someone to do it, or you are still living with your mother and she does it.The reason I experience this so intensely is that there is such a clear cyclicity to my suffering, and that the suffering has such a high intensity compressed into very short recurring blocks of time.There is this recurring stage where I feel I have pushed the boulder up to a certain point, and then it falls back down again.There is such a clear seasonality for me.Nowadays every three weeks I crash and burn, and then from the embers, from the ashes, I slowly recompose myself to the best of my abilities, trying to rise like a phoenix.That too is a most useful symbol… Because the phoenix, in the tale, is decomposed and recomposed so many times.So it becomes this image of constant regeneration.And that is life.That is what life is all about anyway.You might mentally think that you are a stable, concrete entity that has been living on this planet from the day you were born until today.But that is very far removed from the truth.You are in constant flux.All the molecules in your body, all the cells in what you interpret as your body, are constantly being replaced and renewed and repaired and destroyed.So there is no stability in this life.It is all just a process of regeneration, decay, decomposition, recomposition, reformulation, reformation, revolution, evolution… I could go on.Why I Keep PushingThere are ways I can find consolation in this conundrum.One, of course, is that this intense crisis situation instinctively puts my body in a state where it is acutely aware of its frailty and acutely aware of its capacities.So it develops a very strong self-interest in exploring every avenue of how what I perceive, moment to moment, can be used to improve my life situation.That is true both in the sense of ensuring survival from one moment to the next, and in terms of life quality.Because if I do not experience life quality, if I do not experience a joie de vivre, a joy in being alive, then what is the point of all this?If I’m just pushing a big boulder up a mountain and it is going to roll down anyway, then if I cannot enjoy the ride in any respect whatsoever, I might as well be done with it.So it becomes intensely clear that in order for me to have the tenacity, the psychological energy, the resilience to keep doing this, I need to find ways to enjoy the process.One such way is to accept the downsides and see them as something thrilling, something that piques my curiosity.And here I think I’m fortunate in being endowed with such a high degree of novelty seeking.I’ve had it since I was a young boy. There are video recordings of me talking endlessly about dinosaurs and how different dinosaur species relate to each other.And it has just carried on from there.It is such a thankful way to be driven—curiosity-driven— in the situation I'm facing, because I get so much real-world information that I can spin my web around.It is like I’m a spider spinning a web of knowledge, and there is such a variety of flies ending up in my net.Such a variety of prey needs to be caught.So I need to spin the net wisely, and I need to be very much on my toes to perceive the minute differences in the vibrations in the net, or the shifting weather patterns, and try to make conclusions about how those relate to what type of prey is falling in, and how I need to adapt my strategy.And this is not just knowledge-building in the abstract.It is embodied knowledge.It is built through real-world embodied information that I receive from the physical world in near real time.And if that knowledge-building helps me foresee things and proactively adjust my strategy in a correct way, then I will also be rewarded in the most embodied way: higher perceived quality of life, higher chance of sustaining my health, repairing my systems, hopefully even strengthening my systems while going through these bouts of having the huge boulder pushed up to then roll back down on me.So curiosity is maybe number two after survival.Then number three would be to share this with other people—to share this with the world, and through that build stronger bridges and more multifaceted bridges with my fellow humans, whether I know them already from before or they are completely new to me. This is also very valuable and worthwhile.I have so many examples of old and newfound friends where our interactions have been strengthened, developed, or deepened drastically through me being in this harsh situation.Then, number four would be to enjoy what comes out of the widening of my spectrum of perceived experiences. The widening of the spectrum between bad and good experiences.Over time I’m widening that spectrum ever more—between how bad I have felt at my worst and how I can feel when I am on the other side of that spectrum.I’m becoming more acutely sensitive to anything remotely positive in relation to those worst experiences....and this continuous widening naturally gives me a heightened perception of sensory pleasure, gratitude and appreciation whenever I get to experience something positive and life-affirming. One obvious example is with food.Fasting and being poisoned leaves my gut like a quarry—crushed up and toxic, rubble everywhere.Compare that to when I start refeeding and my system stabilizes enough that I can appreciate a small piece of food.It barely matters what that food is....or going from not having any energy to be social—not even with my partner—to having enough energy for an engaging, deep conversation with someone....or going from being at the precipice of my body just laying down all its weapons, almost wanting to jump off the cliff, screaming in agony—to my body starting to have my muscles and joints and cartilage and bones and nervous system stable enough that I can go to a dance class, stand on a dance floor or just in my living room and express myself through dance, or go to the gym and lift quite heavy weights in complex movement and experience the real-time benefit of that, mentally and physically....or the contrast between lying in bed day and night for days, intoxicated and drained and frail and pale and lifeless, panting for air and for time to pass—and then being stable enough and fortunate enough to go out into my surroundings and experience beautiful weather, whether a cool crisp morning with wind gusting by, or rain, or sunlight on my face, or fresh air, or touching a waterway, or climbing a tree…I mean, I’ve been climbing trees in the middle of the winter.I’m a stage IV cancer warrior who’s now gone into a second aggressive long bout of treatment rounds and still just recently got to experience five or six weeks of an intense learning, internship, climbing trees, pruning trees, felling trees.So there are so many aspects to how I can find value and pleasure in keeping pushing this rock, this boulder, this f*****g spheroid, up and down the mountain.And I will keep pushing.Best believe I’ll keep pushing.Even though there will be hurdles.There will always be new obstacles.Another theme has now come up in the last few weeks—most probably lymphedema—that Jonna and I started troubleshooting yesterday, and I’ll get to that in a separate episode.But there is always something new.There will always be something new.It will be the same for you as well.But for me, fate just made it come in this very intense, immediate way at this stage of my life.And I need to sustain myself through this process.But best believe: this is what life is about.This is the juice of it.You can choose to cry because you went to the canteen and the menu wasn’t palatable enough for you, so now you’re just going to starve yourself to death.Or you can take what you have on the plate.It is nutrition.It is the components of life.Whether you need to suffer through that plate or not.You need to down it sooner or later.One bite at a time.Otherwise, you’re dead.So life is suffering.I’ve said it before: life is suffering. If there is no suffering, there is only death.So I’d rather have life.So bring it on.Give me all the suffering you’ve got.I’m here for it.Because with every ounce of suffering, there will be an ounce of appreciation.And I’m going to be here for the highs and lows, the uprisings and the downfalls.And the way to sustain myself through this is to appreciate all of it, all the journeys, all the excursions, every single milestone.Whether it is a steady march onward with my supply line and battle-hardened warriors through no man’s land, or whether it is a cha-cha where suddenly we are stuck in cha-cha class doing one step forward, two steps back—I’m fine with that too.Just bring it on.Staring fate straight in the eyes.And saying: I’m here.Right here, right now.This moment.And the next.Best believe I’m here.I’m here for it all.And I’m hoping you are too, fam.That being said:Be mindful of your life force.Talk to you later.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com