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Debbie and I got up early to go visit one of my prostate-treatment doctors. This one deals with my PSA scores and hormone treatments. The news on my PSA score was excellent because there is no detectable PSA, which means that at the moment all of the active prostate cancer cells have been killed by the one hormone treatment given me six months ago and the forty-four radiation treatments which concluded two months ago. Today I was given another six-month shot of Eligard (Lupron). The plan is to get two more of these for a total of two years of that testosterone-suppressing drug. 

 

I dropped off Debbie at home and went on down to the Commons to visit my dudes. Richard and I had a great conversation, as usual, about art and stuff. I showed him a couple of the shadow pictures taken since yesterday.

We have been having a good time talking about the nothing qualities of these photos. There is almost nothing there and yet we both find them strangely intriguing.

Debbie and I had a 1 PM lunch date with Steve B at Toomie’s restaurant. At some point, we got into a conversation about my various heat treatments of poison oak itching, and my current experiments with capsaicin. I have been treating what appears to be an arthritic ankle bone with capsaicin, which is a standard home remedy, but with a difference. My thought is that it takes a couple of days for the capsaicin to absorb all the way into the center of an ankle bone and that it is the burning sensation that creates the effect of helping to subdue the arthritic inflammation. The problem is that the capsaicin feels painfully burning hot on the skin long before it can penetrate to the center of the ankle joint. The capsaicin-loaded skin is very temperature-sensitive and from 100°F to 105°F goes from comfortable to painful. The coping technique I have been using is to take a hot bath, raise my body temperature to 101°F, including my ankle joint, which isn’t painful, and then raising the bathtub water to 104°F, which is painful but endurable. I hold this pain level for five minutes, it’s a challenge, with the idea that the pain is becoming available to the center of the ankle bone joint. If it is the pain that is causing the inflammation to flip its switch off, then the ankle inflammation should be gone the next day. This experiment seems to have worked and I was telling Steve about it.

He was very excited about the idea because he has been studying heat shock proteins and their effects for years, and this experiment was new to him. But he made some observations from his background of experience that seemed to confirm my findings. I have attended several of his lectures on the subject, so his ideas were known to me but this was a new arrangement of those ideas. It was fun. I wanted to explore how we might apply these heat-pain ideas to rejuvenating whole body cells. We are both going to be exploring that idea.

Debbie and I came home and I worked in the garden fairly hard for about two hours and put the ice dam prevention cable on the valley in my back roof. It developed a six-inch deep ice dam one year that had to be chopped away carefully before it forced water uphill and through the shingles.

I forgot to mention, this was the seventh day of my cold, and it is totally gone.

It was a memorable day, but the ideas about cleaning up the body may be the most significant.