Tag: plants

Blog, labs

It’s Been Awhile

Jothi

Looks like I haven’t written anything for awhile. For no particular reason; I guess I just haven’t felt inspired. Hmm…. I wonder what has happened recently in my myeloma world.

I had a bone marrow biopsy (maybe in January?) to check my MRD status. I went up to 27 myeloma cells in a million. That was from about 1 in a million. So that was a bummer to see. MRD is pretty cutting edge. Nothing showed up on my blood tests, although the following round of blood tests showed my m-band moved to “detectable but not quantifiable”. BLAH, it would have been nice to hit MRD zero and stay there.

My oncologist didn’t want to make any changes based on MRD as most oncologist would follow. The myeloma specialist then spoke to the oncologist and then had a meeting with me to talk things over. He said that the numbers were not trending in the right direction, and what was the point of waiting until things significantly elevated. The specialist said he went through the list of drugs and wanted to add in a drug that “wasn’t going to do me harm”. He recommended adding back in Dara to punch the numbers back down.

I was on Dara prior to transplant, but Stanford stopped it because it was not working fast enough. Since it didn’t seem to give me any problems, I agreed to go back on it. If he was recommending something like cytoxan, I would have said no.

Well, as it turns out, side effects can change post transplant. I had my first dose of Dara with carfilzomib and it was rough. I turned into a 90-year old, with super fatigue. My skin on my torso also went hypersensitive and wearing a shirt was unpleasant. Too bad we were still in winter ❄️. That lasted for about a week. I had another round two weeks after the first, and the same thing happened again. The oncologist was baffled. We ran some blood tests, but nothing showed up. I’ve noticed that if something is out of the ordinary and not listed on a clinical trial, the oncologist is left bumbling his bottom lip and saying, “Good luck with that”.

Fortunately for me, by the third dose, my body was getting used to the drug and the symptoms significantly lessened. I didn’t have any of those symptoms by the fourth dose. So I’m back to being left with the few days of being miserable from the carfilzomib side effects. Maybe the cancer gods will show me some favor and things will get good enough to eventually drop the carfilzomib and just stay on the Dara.

But then again, at this point, I’m pretty sure the cancer gods don’t like me very much 😜. But then again again, they just updated all the five year cancer survival rates, and myeloma is now 59%. I’m going to hit 5 years soon. Not that I attribute that to the cancer gods, I’ll take the credit with my efforts.

I guess the other thing physically that happened was that, I developed a frozen shoulder. Possibly from the chemo, they aren’t actually sure what causes them. It’s quite bizarre. I can’t raise my right hand or arm above shoulder height or move it in an outward direction. I guess the tissue surrounding the “ball” of your arm, that goes into your socket, just seizes up. It can take 8 months to 2 years to “unfreeze”. Fortunately, it looks like I’m going through the stages at the faster rate. I’m sure the infrared sauna and turmeric are helping. Too bad my muscles didn’t freeze in a better spot 💪🏼. Imagine having your six pack be frozen and being ripped for 2 years.

Let’s see, I guess I have some blood numbers to share, here you go.

My medical provider made it a pain for me to transfer over my data, so that’s why I don’t post much about it (plus, I don’t have blood run much these days). Because of my weird side effects from the Dara, they did run a whole metabolic panel. My red blood cell numbers are still low. From the metabolic panel, they ran iron.

As you can see, my iron is quite well, from all those goji berries and beets. So my poor red blood cells are just quite beat up from the chemo. I thought that was interesting to see.

Well, I can tell your attention span is beginning to wane by this part of the post so I’ll be quick with the rest.

I made it to a succulent nursery, “Succulent Gardens”, down by Monterey, that I always wanted to go to. That was pretty awesome to visit. I’m a huge succulent fan, as you may have noticed from the pictures on my website. They supply plants to a lot of the other nurseries in California, so I was cool to visit the source. Here are some pictures.

I took a mushroom propagating class at a local collage. I sort of knew how to grow mushrooms from books and the internet, but I wanted some hands on training. So I know how to do that now. I have mushrooms growing inside the kitchen cupboards now. Hopefully at some point I’ll have a bigger space to really get into it.

Preparing mushroom growing media.

Finally, spring has sprung. Here are my irises that I planted last year. They had a year to grow and be undisturbed, so they are happy. Yukon likes to eat the grass around the pot.

Nutrition

That’s Some Big Kale

Jothi

I spent a bit of time working on the soil in the garden this winter. I looked at the existing soil and could tell it needed some work. I like to see my soil alive with worms and bugs. Where life is happening, it’s usually a good thing. I added a ton of self made compost and manure (the manure wasn’t self made 😜). With those things, came a lot of worms and bugs.

Digging my bare hands into the earth of the garden bed and I could pull out a good handful of worms. When I could see that, I knew we were in good shape.

I started some kale, purple mizuna and purple kohlrabi in late winter. I planted them in the garden right before my transplant, hoping to have some good nutrition out of the garden afterwards when I got home.

Mizuna is high in many vitamins, especially vitamins A, K and C. It’s also a good source of calcium, iron, and antioxidants. Kohlrabi is an excellent source of vitamin C and a good source of fiber, vitamin B6 and potassium.

The kale had gotten mature enough to harvest about a month ago. I picked some today for lunch and holy cow, the leaves were enormous! It’s the biggest kale I’ve ever grown. Maybe some of the biggest ever grown for the variety?

The cutting board is 18×13 and I don’t have small hands
The next generation of kale is on the way
The kohlrabi is starting to bulb up. The leaves are really tasty to eat as well, they kind of remind me a bit of taro leaves
Inspired by last years successful celery grown in the garden, we are starting a bunch indoors from celery ends and then planting them in the garden when they are big enough
Blog

Random Acts Of Kindness

Jothi

Last year, a stranger gave me this special regal geranium plant. It was just leaves when I got it, but I could tell from the leaves what it was. It was a variety of geranium that I wanted to grow, so I was pretty excited to get one.

I spent the last number of months looking after it, making sure it had what it needed to thrive and I was rewarded this. Definitely a showstopper in the yard.

I’m grateful for random acts of kindness.

Blog

Joaquin Miller Park

Jothi

We went hiking the other day in Joaquin Miller Park in the Oakland hills. We had been there before, but the park is so large, we decided to go to another entrance, which ended up being a completely different experience due to the park’s size.

We have a big rainstorm hitting California at the moment, but we managed to get a hike in, in between the rain. The Bay Area fog did roll in though, which made it really COLD. Now, I do realize that it wasn’t actually cold compared to other places, but sitting around having a picnic before the hike at 39 degrees felt pretty frosty 🥶.

While hiking, we stumbled upon some reddish orange mushrooms that were pretty cool. There is nothing like moisture and decaying plant matter to spawn mushrooms! I think they are Red Russula mushrooms, but I’m definitely not a mushroom expert. Probably quite poisonous, judging by that they were still there and not collected by someone already. Apparently most red mushrooms are poisonous. We also came across some version of turkey tail mushrooms, which are always cool to see.

Hiking in the foggy redwoods was also a pretty awesome experience. I think redwoods are my favorite kind of tree, with Japanese maples being my second. Redwood trees are definitely an entity and walking in between them, you can feel their presence. These redwoods are second or third generation, as the first was logged for building materials for San Francisco over 100 years ago. So they are big, but not that big when it comes to redwoods.

There is a small grove of untouched redwoods at Henry Cowell State park in the Santa Cruz mountains. There is a tree there that is about 277 feet tall and around 1,500 years old. Can you imagine, with this being the year 2023, this tree started growing in the year 500? Just to give you an idea how large it is, it’s so wide, that it takes 16 adults hand to hand to hug the tree. And this one is still not as big as the trees near Yosemite or in Humboldt up north. They are quite something to see in person. Thinking about my previous post on gifts, these trees are a gift by just being.

And of course, Yukon thought it was the best day ever, that boy loves to hike 😊.

Nutrition

Part of Me?

Jothi

Sometimes I like to change the way I think about food and ask myself if I want that to become part of me? That’s what you really are doing when you eat.

Here is today’s vegetables for juice. I can easily say that I want all of this to be part of me. I’ve been drinking fresh vegetable juice almost daily for 3+ years now.

Today was a special batch because it had some homegrown celery in it from my garden. Grown in composted food scraps and horse manure. Can you see the difference in green between the garden and store bought?

Ground all up, concentrated liquid nutrition. Sometimes you even get cool patterns in the juice.

Among the effects for me are blood building, especially the red blood cells, hemoglobin, platelets. Detoxing, anti constipating (from drugs).

Hmmm….. I used to eat things like this. I don’t think I want it to become part of me anymore. I’m sure it would be an instant stomach for me. The body is always talking and letting you know how you’re doing.

Nutrition

Nutrition Matters

Jothi

Your body is intelligently designed, made to grow, repair and adapt.

Early on in my cancer journey, I would walk laps, limping in my backyard due to cancer damage in my right sacrum affecting my right leg. Although, I didn’t have a very large backyard, around and around I would go. I even wore a circle in the ground from my path. Intuitively, I knew I just needed to move.

I’ve always liked plants and growing things. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a tall hobbit. I had three raised garden beds that I walked by every day. Prior to my diagnosis, I planted a row of bok choi in one of the beds. I had dug a small trench and mixed in some fresh manure with my hands. For me, there is nothing like having my hands in the earth. The earthy smell, the energy going back and forth between the ground and my myself. I planted the seeds, gave them a drink, and they were good to go.

A few weeks later, I had just received an infusion of zometa, which is a biphosonate for strengthening bones, the day prior. Come to find out, biphophontes are something that don’t agree with me. My body, upon awaking that day, had super clamped up, and I had a hard time bending my legs and my right leg wouldn’t bend at all.

In my stubbornness, I still went out in the backyard to do my laps. Hobble hobble, slowly one leg that felt like I had a board strapped to it, went in front of the other. Around I went.  

I was going so slow, that when I got to the bed that had the bok choi, that had since sprouted, a realization hit me. When I sprinkled the seeds a couple of weeks earlier, some must have landed 8 inches or so outside my manure filled trench and started to grow. The ground 8 inches away was depleted from the previous year’s crops. The plants in my trench were  4-6 times the size of the ones that were 8 inches away, where I didn’t mean for them to land. The only difference was the soil nutrition!

Right then, at that very moment, I knew there was something to this. Nutrition Matters! Plants that receive optimal nutrition and growing conditions do amazingly well.

We are grossly over fed, but we are STARVING! Stop eating processed empty filler food and drinks full of sugar, preservatives, chemicals and pesticides that are really slowly killing us. The rates of cancer and other chronic diseases are rapidly increasing, and it’s not happening by accident.

Food is the major foundational piece to your body’s equation. Feed yourself real whole food, full of life, full of vitamins and nutrients. Give your body the tools it needs.

Your body is talking and even screaming at you by way of symptoms. Being overweight, chronic pain, inflammation, type 2 diabetes, thyroid disease, insomnia, rashes, diarrhea and constipation are all signs that your ship is not sailing correctly. Drugs mask the symptoms, but with most that’s all they do, they don’t fix the root cause.

I know, humans like to pretend that we are not part of Mother earth’s system. We work the exact same way as everything else on this planet. We are all connected. Give a human optimal nutrition and growing conditions, and we do amazingly well, and our bodies have the ability to repair and correct.

Certainly, we can’t always repair and correct everything, but give yourself your best chance. Your body knows what to do, even if you don’t. Amazing things and miracles happen every day!

I promise you, Nutrition matters!

Blog

The First Post

Jothi

Well, where to start? My name is Jothi (pronounced Joe-T). I’m married for 20+ years at this point, and we have 4 children aged 12-19. I am a big nature person. I love spending time outdoors, gardening, hiking, going to the beach, exploring. I am also a huge gamer. Games of any type, board games, sports (both playing and watching) and occasional video games.

People who I would like to sit down and have a long conversation with are in no particular order: Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, Anita Moorjani, Neil McKinney, Shin Terayama, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Jordan, John Stewart, Helen Jane Long and Steve Kerr.

For my myeloma family out there, I have Lambda Light chain myeloma. Which means I have too many lambda light chains that make up my blood for everyone else. I have the 14;16 translocation in my myeloma genetics, which basically means my myeloma is smarter than standard myeloma and is good at side stepping drugs.

I had 2 lesions when I was diagnosed, one on my 7 rib on my right side and a bigger one on the right side of my sacrum. Sometimes, I think about tumor placement in the body, and while there are worse spots than the sacrum, the sacrum is a terrible spot to have a tumor! I don’t recommend it. That’s the spot where your spinal cord fans out in a fantastic web of nerves. To this day, it’s like a little bird sitting on my shoulder poking me, saying, cancer, cancer, cancer.

I have had radiation on my sacrum and I went through the VRD chemo protocol (Velcade, Dex and revlimid). I elected not to do the stem cell transplant at that time. My lambda light chains at the high point were 470 and my Kapp/Lamb Fr was .01. M-band was 1.4.

About a month ago I started on Dara sq, Pom and Dex. As of last blood draw, my Lambda light chains are 142.52 Kappa Light chains 5.70 and KAPP/LAMB FR is .04. My M-band is 1.4. These numbers are after being off of all Chemo for over 6 months after I had a go with covid and saw that the chemo wasn’t doing anything anyhow.

I’ve had 2 pet scans this year, with the most recent in July. Both have come back showing no cancer activity.

I have become very passionate of diet, nutrition and what actual food is along my brief journey. When I was struggling for a website name, my kids suggested: Eatyourvegetablesdotcom, but it was already taken. But it is definitely my motto.

That’s the gritty numbers post with the information download. I hope my future posts will be a bit more fun and entertaining.

EAT YOUR VEGETABLES!!!