If the saying, “Home is where the heart is” is true then Lennie is coming ‘home’ tomorrow.
It has been 5 weeks since I left him in Hawai’i and in less than 16 hours I will be picking him up at Toronto Airport. How will he look? After 5 weeks will I think that he is looking healthier?
Three days after I left him in Hawai’i something miraculous happened. Lennie woke up in the middle of the night soaking wet. He later told me that he felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of water over him. When he stood up sweat ran down his arms and legs. His tee shirt was soaked; the bed was soaked. After changing his underwear and climbing back into the other dry side of the bed, much to the protests of our cat Lilipuna, he fell back to sleep. In the morning he phoned me and told me about the episode. He told me with a much clearer and stronger voice. He noticed that too. Later that day he started to swim in the ocean and 10 days after that he was swimming up to a mile! Something both miraculous and monumental happened. Some kind of toxic release. With that came more energy and strength. Day by day he would feel stronger and more alert than he had been in a long time. He would phone me and tell me how far he had just swam and we would laugh and we would cry with the renewed hope and belief that the cancer was going away.
Two weeks ago Lennie bid farewell to Hawai’i for a while and flew to Florida to spend some time with his daughters before coming up here to Canada to spend the Christmas holidays with me. Both good and bad comes with this side trip: the good is of course the renewal of his spirit visiting with his grown daughters and the bad is that he was so use to me handling all of his food and medications that several times he missed his oral doses of Laetrile. It’s funny how when we have a life saving type of medicine it gives us a certain feeling of both power and denial if we skip a dose. It seems to be a way of saying to ourselves, “See I missed a dose and nothing happened to me, so I am okay.” I reminded him very sternly (and loudly) over the phone that he was definitely NOT okay. He is still a person with stage IV colon cancer that is getting better, but is not there yet. His body is like an ecosystem that has been severely compromised like the ocean with the BP oil spill. He teeters on the brink and could easily go one way or the other. But in the ecosystem of his body his cells and immune system seem to be slowly cleaning up this oil spill called cancer.
When we parted, his weight had stabilized between 211 and 214 lbs. I don’t know what it is now as his daughter does not have an accurate scale, but he feels that he is about the same weight. His appetite increased after the night of toxic release and has remained good. There is a dramatic increase in his energy level and although he is not swimming in the unseasonably cold weather in Florida, he is walking over a mile every few days. He has far more good days than bad. His biggest complaint is how cold his feet are which is partly due to his low iron count. 75% of all cancer patients have anemia and Len is amongst that group. Added to this was his 55 pound weight loss which makes the cold more acutely felt. I will get his weight and see how he looks and update you on this.
I can’t wait to see him. He asked me a couple of weeks ago what I wanted for Christmas. My answer was, “You.”
Kathryn