Mom has been going crazy with this neuropathy thing and it has driven us to try anything and everything to find relief. Her chemo oncologist referred her to an integrative oncologist. Now you are probably wondering, as I was, what the heck is integrative oncology. Well, basically its alternative approaches to cancer treatment. In some cases people choose this in lieu of more conventional treatment like radiation and chemotherapy. For others, it is used to help alleviate different side effects or in conjunction with those conventional treatments. So mom got an appointment with Dr. Just to see what he thought could be done about the neuropathy. We met with Dr. Just, who spent a good amount of time talking with mom about how things are going for her and then he performed a test called Bioelectric Impedance Analysis. This is primarily used to determine body fat, but can also be used as a sort of general cellular health metric.
BIA is a test that is performed by placing 4 electrodes in specific places on the body (2 on a foot and 2 on a hand). A small current of electricity is applied to the body and the impedance (or opposition to the flow of electricity) through the bodies tissue. The measurements can be used to calculate total body water which along with body weight can be used further to measure body fat.
In mom’s case, it was not used to determine body fat content (because you can just look at her to get that information) but rather as an indicator based on average outcomes, how healthy her cells are which can then be used as a baseline after further treatments to see how she is doing at a cellular level. The test that was performed measured impedance, resistance, reactance and phase angle. Now, I am no expert on this sort of thing and frankly this starts getting into an area of science that is far too confusing for my brain to comprehend. The bottom line however is there are ranges of healthy and unhealthy numbers for each of these measurements. Mom’s indicated that she is dehydrated and not healthy, which I suppose was to be expected, but more importantly we have some way of tracking her body’s health at a cellular level as she moves forward in the progression of her disease and treatment. If you care to learn more about BIA, perhaps to ask your physician if he or she does this sort of testing, you can follow this link for a yahoo search of the topic.
After the examination by Dr. Just, he setup an appointment for mom with an acupuncturist. Mom had her first acupuncture session two days ago. The acupuncturist spent about 2 hours with mom, first just talking about mom’s condition, her troubles and her desired outcome. She was very thorough and explained that unlike western medicine, eastern medicine tends to track issues in terms of body systems and then work on the entire affected system(s) to achieve the desired outcome(s). In mom’s case she was first gather information to determine which systems might be involved in the ‘complaints’ mom had, which turned out to be primarily the liver system. This does not mean just the physical organ itself, but all of the body parts that supply or are a result of the normal function of the liver. So the nerves that are related (from head to feet), the blood vessels, digestive tract, etc. It was apparent after her questioning that many of the problems mom has are directly related to liver function and not just a byproduct of treatment.
It was during this initial consultation that I heard the term overactive nervous system. This was brought up in a conversation about mom’s sleep habits (or lack thereof). One of the things that we were hoping to correct was mom’s inability to get much in the way of prolonged sleep. She sleeps for an hour or two (and frequently even less time than that) and then is up for some period of time before trying to sleep again. The acupuncturist explained that even though mom’s body wants to rest, her nervous system is not shutting down during the rest period. An evidence of this is the muscle twitching she has while sleeping. Often times it is the muscle twitching that will wake her up, as she described (when asked about her dreams) she says that she will wake up and find she is trying to grasp something. I recognize that is not actually the case, she is just twitching and her perception is that she is trying to grasp or grab at something. This overstimulated electrical system is not allowing her to get the rest needed for the body to repair itself naturally during sleep.
After talking for a long while, it was needle time. I had acupuncture done 20 years ago and there was very little to it and in my case it worked wonders and allowed my knee to be pain free for about 15 years. Your job during acupuncture is to relax and lay there. In my case, I would simply fall asleep. Relaxing music is playing and the room’s lighting is dimmed. The needles themselves are very thin (a pamphlet they had there described the needles well by likening them to cat’s whiskers). You really do not feel them. The placement of them depends on the body system being treated. Mine were primarily in my leg and knee. Mom’s was primarily in her feet. Mom’s job I knew would be the tough part. Mom does not relax very well. She get anxious and then cannot think of anything but escaping the anxiety inducer. The acupuncturist tried deep breathing with mom, which didn’t really help, but mom stuck it out as long as she could. The needle part was cut a bit short as mom had about enough of the lying there unable to lay still any longer.
I really don’t know how well acupuncture is going to work for mom. On the way to the appointment she expressed negative thoughts on it and I told her that if she thinks it won’t work then it won’t work. That she has to keep her mind open to the possibility of it working. In my case, I believed it could work and wasn’t disappointed when it did work. So far, after one treatment, we do not see any improvement and I think it has mom even more down than normal. She has really been irritated the past day or so. She will tell you that she is being positive and there was a time when I would have agreed with that 100%, but lately not so much. I hope she can turn that around. I hope that she can find that will again. I am just not sure anymore if she wants to.
She will have 4 acupuncture treatments and then Dr. Just will perform the BIA again to see if there is any change. The acupuncturist is also a nutritionist and is going to work with mom on nutrition as well. Hopefully they can get her feeling better and improve her attitude and desire to continue the fight. Coming up in a couple weeks it will have been two months since her last chemo treatment. She will have a PET scan and another MRI to see how things are going. The result of all of this will determine the next step in September. She really does have a team of wonderful people working to make her life as best as possible and you can tell that they care deeply about her and her outcome. Especially given how things went with dad. All these same people were involved in the care of dad and all were equally shocked with how that went. Speaking of dad, I have started and scrapped several posts about him. I want to share my thoughts on my experience with dad’s illness, but I have a difficult time formulating the words. Maybe one of these days I will figure out how to say what I am feeling about dad’s passing.
Well that is all for now. Actually there is more, but this post is already way tooooo long and my arms are getting tired of typing, so I will have to save the other stuff for another post.