Body Parts

Jogging in the Rain, Respiratory Disease

I ran my 2.3 mile route this morning. When I set out for the run, during the warm up, I felt good and looked forward to pushing myself. Instead of running 3^1/2 minute intervals, with 3^1/2 minute cool downs, I ran 7 minute intervals with 3^1/2 minute cool downs between them. Total of two 7 minute running intervals and one 3^1/2 minute interval at the end, approximately 17 and 1/2 100-yard intervals I used to run, or a mile. I had no problem deep breathing. I didn't get short of breath. More, I was able, by jogging rather than running, consistently to do abdominal breathing through my nostrils, rather than mouth breathing. This is the first time since November that I've had no problem deep breathing and managing my breathing. Why? What was the cause of the earlier breathing difficulty? 

I ran in a light rain. Perhaps the rain washed the pollens to which I'm allergic out of the air. However, my deep breathing problems had been to consistent and persistent for four months, when I was running nearly every day, to attribute the problems to pollens.

Perhaps I'd finally recovered from drinking cow's milk in a milk whey protein supplement. In September-November, I drank a whey protein supplement to help with building muscle and stamina. It occurred to me one day that of course the whey was a cow's milk product and my naturopathic doctor had told me not to consume cow's milk products. I verified with him that cow's milk whey was not excepted from this injunction and I stopped taking the supplement. In 2005, when I first went off cow's milk, it took several months for the benefits to manifest themselves; perhaps it was the same this time. Perhaps I was able to breathe deeply again because I'd finally recovered from the cow's milk whey.

Perhaps I had some low-level virus that my immune system finally defeated. I started taking vitamin D3 in early September. Vitamin D3 boosts the immune system, but take several months for its benefits to manifest themselves. Maybe it just took that long for my immune system to succeed.

Whatever the reason, the fun felt wonderful and invigorating. The light rain was beautiful and Spring felt like it was at last here, after a month and half of la nina warm sun and no rain. Birds were singing, flocks of migrating robins were chirruping, red-headed woodpeckers were chopping away at the tops of palms, and black labrador retrievers delighted in the cool, moist air and the wet grass.

Cold Weather, Deep Breathing, and Running

SoCal has been having a sprint of cold weather, with some night temperatures into the low forties and daytime highs into the high fifties. I have been running regularly, and, as posted in previous notes since early November, had difficulty drawing a deep breath, with abdominal rather than chest action, through my nostrils. This has persisted through different weather conditions and test changes in my diet, with the one constant variable being cool or cold temperatures. Today, after two days of light rain, the sun has erupted in the sky, the humidity has dropped, and temperature is in the sixties. Still, I could not draw a deep breath through my nostrils and had to run doing mouth breathing to draw deep breaths. This was adequate. I ran 14 minutes, equivalent to about 14 100-yard intervals by my old reckoning. I was not exhauasted and had stamina and leg strength all the way, over the 2.3 mile route.

At My Naturopathic Doctor's Office

Late afternoon, the rain storm drifts to the East, but dragging beautiful, black and gray clouds.

I walked nearly two miles to my appointment. I was greeted, in the pleasant waiting room, with two sunny bouquets of flowers.

The Diverse Protein Diet ... My Dog Gets

I am supposed to be on a four-day rotational diet, while avoiding foods to which I am sensitive, avoiding cow's milk, and severely limiting refined cane sugar. I am urged by my naturopathic doctor to eat only organic foods. The diet is wonderfully healthful; but I would like to expand the variety of meats and grains we consume. Meats are difficult. Our supermarkets carry mostly the commodity meats, chicken and turkey, pork, and beef. Occasionally, lamb. Seasonally, frozen duck. We don't eat pork, as my wife is Jewish. Southern California fish selection is very limited. Only salmon comes reasonably fresh. I once asked a local market, famous for its meats, if it carried goat. The butcher was offended, implied that I was a spy for a competitor market, and directed me to a Mexican market. I discovered that our local health food store carries frozen venison and bison ground meat. So we added them to our menu. But no store at all carries game birds.

Then one day, I discovered a store that does carry an extraordinary variety of unusual meats. I was replenishing Bear's supply of canned dog food at a pet store. I decided to expand the variety of foods our black labrador eats, though she eats enthusiastically and indifferently everything she is fed. I don't think she even tastes any of it. Nonetheless, I began reading can labels. Lo and behold. Merrick Pet Care of Texas cans an astonishing variety of wonderful meats, with can labels distinctly appealing to human pet owners. Here is Merrick's "Harvest Moon": "Duck, Pheasant, Quail, Sweet Potatoes, Green Beans, Minnesota Wild Rice". Duck! Pheasant! Quail! I have never found these game birds in a local supermarket. The clerk at the pet store, an earnest, smiling, and beautiful young woman, explained that Merrick's is human quality dog food. To prove it, she said, the Merrick salesman came to the store and ate dog food out of the cans with a spoon. A great salesman. A great demonstration. Quality level helps explain the price of the food. Over $2 for a 13.2 oz can. Nonetheless. I still haven't found a local market that offers for humans the game foods available for dogs by Merrick. I'm not desperate, however. I haven't started to eat my dog's gourmet canned food. I am thinking, however, of going back to the pet food store and asking the young woman clerk if she has tasted "Harvest Moon".

When a bullet misses ...

Twice this year, medical personnel have uttered the word "cancer" to me. The first time, my GP said that my prostate problems could be cancer; but after a month of observation the urologist thought not and in treatment the problems ended. The second time, last month, the wound care nurse in my HMO wound center, expressed the center's concern that the failure of a burn ulcer to heal, on my lower back, was because a radiation burn had triggered cancer. Biopsy was ordered. Well, three biopsies have now found no traces of cancer, just a lot of inflamed tissue and compacted slough tissue. Whew! Premonitions of cancer had considerably distracted me and, psychological distractions on top of somatic medical issues that raised them, sucked energy out of me. The bullet missed. Thank you, God. I'm listening. And I'm focussing, I really am.

Thank You, William Thomas Green Morton

I was lying face down on a surgical table in an outpatient procedure room at Big HMO. The surgeon--a physician's assistant--, his nurse assistant, and the wound care RN consulted at each step of a surgical removal of a pressure sore. The sore, an ulcer on my lower back, had not healed after six weeks of several different treatments involving chemical removal of slough tissue. The wound care RN arranged for the surgical procedure. Initially, she and the surgeon proposed surgical debridement of the wound site; but upon examination, as he sliced and cut through the tough compacted tissue, they decided for a complete excision. They used local anesthesia, so I was conscious for the procedure. I lay with the side of my face on the pillow, watching several monitors. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the assistant to the surgeon occasionally typing into a computer as the surgeon talked to her, presumably recording the event and updating my digital record. 

The PA asked me to monitor the surgery; if I felt any pain, I should indicate so and he would administer additional injections of lidocaine. As he cut through new layers of tissue and cauterized blood vessels with a laser, on several occasions, I could feel a sensation, something like an extended pin prick on the skin. Throughout, I was expending nervous energy by rhythmically tapping my right hand forefinger on the pillow. When I felt a slight pain, even before I was sufficiently aware of it to say something, the rate of my tapping increased. The wound care specialist, watching my tapping, would see the rate change and tell the surgeon. Followed shortly by my redundant, yes. The surgery required several additional administrations of lidocaine. I could hear the scissors snipping. I didn't hear the scalpel, of course. I felt tugging and pressure, as surrounding nonanesthesized tissue was pulled in the procedure. When he did the inner sutures, the pulling made me feel as if he was lacing up a pair of ice skates. I pictured his hands yanking on long boot laces about two feet above the skate. When the incision was closed, the exterior skin was glued tightly shut with superglue. Throughout the operation, which lasted perhaps twenty minutes, I thought to myself repeatedly, thank you Thomas Morton; this minor surgery would have been unbearable but for anesthesia.

The PA called my wife into the room for a conference about how the healing should progress, when the sutures, incision supports, dressing, and dressing cover would drop off , and other information about post-surgery followup. My wife said that the surgical incision was unobservable, except for what appeared to be a straight line, like a very thin pencil mark, about two inches long. Since the incision was above my buttocks and required drawing together some, alas, slack skin, the PA called the procedure a "butt tuck". That was quite funny. I mentioned to my wife about my finger tapping as an indicator of incipient pain. She laughed, she was sure it was just a coincidence. She told the wound care RN, my husband has no sense of rhythm.

Life Through Cook Books: From Julia to Alton

I began cooking in earnest when divorce from my first wife--an accomplished domestic cook--forced me into the kitchen. I had watched Julia Child's cooking show with her. I was fascinated by Julia's ease with complicated sauces and by her conviction that anyone (did she mean me?) could master French cooking. Thrust onto my own into the world of foreign cuisine, cooking for my daughter, as well as myself, I purchased Julia's two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I devoted myself to roasting chicken. In retrospect, it seems so easy to roast chicken; but at the time, I was intimidated. I felt like I didn't speak the language required to navigate the preparation, arrangement, and sewing of the bird. Eventually, I got it. Intuition slowly penetrated the male fog of my mind. Then I turned to baking bread. I couldn't duplicate the French brick oven, but otherwise I tried to follow Julia closely. I discovered I loved making bread. It was about love, too. I was an amateur sculptor, working in clay, doing female life figures. Working the clay, with my hands directly or with modeling tools, was like making love to the model. More accurately, it was not just similar to making love; I actually was making love, somehow feeling the expression of the model's body through the moist clay. In my hands came alive the equipoise between the vigor and defiance of the model's youthful flesh and gravity's unyielding demand on her body, shaping her breasts into their teardrop shapes, bending her abdomen into its fertile crescent. Now, I worked yeast breads through their multiple risings, feeling the fermenting dough assume its plasticine texture as I pulled and rolled the dough ball. Cooking was another mode of engaging with the world, escaping through the interstices of the analytical mind that chopped reality into bits and boxes, and finding intuition to know the world in its whole. And my children loved the bread. They rushed home from school, often with friends, to devour it, fresh out of the oven. We called them, the carbohydrate kids.

Time pressures sent me to Chinese cooking. Teaching, doing research, raising children, civic duties, making a home for my second wife and family, prevented me from devoting more than an hour and a half on evening meal preparation. I gave up my lunch hour to go shopping for ingredients for the meal and to pick up my son from day care or from school and to be home when my daughter arrived from school. Stir-fry cuisine seemed the solution. I began with Nancy Chih Ma's Mrs. Ma's Chinese Cookbook, a gift from my first wife, then added Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking, and Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee, The Chinese Cookbook, to my library. I had become conscientious about healthy eating. California supermarkets were a new world to me when I arrived from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1970. The first time I went to a supermarket, the fresh produce section stunned me. I stood in front of the lettuces, transfixed by six different varieties with different colors. I had ever only seen iceberg lettuce. Now, in the 1980s, California's farm fresh produce made its way into my wok. I served stir fry often, with roast chicken on weekends. I experimented with sauces, gradually increasing the intensity of their flavor and hotness. Later, devotion to soy sauce came back to haunt me. When I was 63 and suffering digestive maladies and chronic inflammation, I took my first food sensitivity test. Soy and ginger were at the top of the list of harmful foods for me. Chinese food was eliminated from our family's diet.

To vary my family's diet, I turned to Italian cuisine. We all loved Italian restaurants--how could it be easier to please my family? I turned to Marcella Hazan's two Classic Italian Cook Book(s). I fell right into Marcella's spirit. Her sensous, tactile approach to fresh fruits and vegetables resonated with my lingering artistic temperament. When she compared a ripe egg plant to a woman's breast, she hooked me. I say, lingering, of my artistic life, because I had given up the sculpture studio some years earlier. I could not do everything. I did not have the time to spend afternoons with a sculpture teacher. And I had discovered that, much as I loved the art, I had only modest talent. I wasn't going to be good enough to make sculpture an avocation. My decision to turn away from sculpture disappointed me, for I had harbored the ambition to move to stone. I had a master teacher who was willing to take me and several other students to his home studio to work on marble. I purchased a basic set of chisels and hammers in anticipation; but I never used them. I reminiscenced about art, somewhat as one reminiscenses about old girl friends, but they were in my youth. And art was no longer hot for me. In middle age, my sex hormones significantly calmed. I went compensatory with Italian. Directed by Marcella, out went the bottled Italian spaghetti sauces and prepared spices. Now it was tomato sauce I, tomato sauce II, and tomato sauce III, made from fresh tomatoes and butter and spices.

Both my wife's career and my career took unexpected turns in the 1990s. Her career moved to a prestigious new level. My career did also. During the same period, we took in several teenagers who needed help. My daughter had graduated from college and now lived and worked in Manhattan; her adulthood opened a bedroom. And my son needed more attention as he went through the storms and struggles of adolescence and the turbulence of high school social life. Evenings were filled with soccer and homework help and counsellors and doctors. I told my wife, she needed to help me more in the kitchen. She agreed. She took over more than half of the cooking, which freed me for the considerable time commitment required by my son and the wayward kids we helped. Home cooking and adventures in new cuisines receded to a place of lesser importance in our lives.

Our situation lasted for a decade and a half, abruptly ending with my health problems. At my daughter's urging, I sought the help of an alternative doctor for chronic allergies and asthma. Thirty years of desensitization shots and fifteen years taking several steroids had helped me manage these conditions, but did not eliminate them. My vigor and general health declined. My doctor told me, I was, referring to my health, fragile. On the theory that food sensitivities and mal-digestion were causing systemic inflammation, I radically altered my diet under his guidance, removing most foods that I had regularly eaten and scheduling new foods into a four-day rotation. Because some of the foods to which I was sensitive were ingredients in most processed foods, such as cane sugar, cow's milk, yeast, barley, grapes and grapejuice, and soy, I had to prepare all meals from fresh raw ingredients. My diet was supplemented with digestive enzymes and dietary supplements. As I began to read processed food labels closely, I found that I had to reject even apparently innocuous processed foods. Nothing was pure.

At the same time, as part of my new regimen, I began to run daily. I started training with pilates. My  health improved dramatically. I was able to leave behind all prescription drugs. I stopped using steroids for the asthma. I stopped using any over-the-counter medicines, such as antihistamines and aspirin. I dropped twenty pounds. Within six months, my blood pressure dropped from 140/93 to 93/63. Cholesterol indexes collapsed. My lungs cleared up. No wheezing. No fits of suffocation. No asthma. My allergies--which had once caused blindness, on another occasion facial paralysis, yet another time sudden hearing loss syndrome--these allergies disappeared. My allergy to cats, which had been so severe that brief exposure to a cat would send me to a hospital, was reduced by ninety percent. I was able to spend days in the company of multiple cats without being destroyed or having an asthma attack. It was a new world.

As part of my new world, I returned to cooking. Demands on my wife's time, demands she could not deny, brought me back into the kitchen to cook on week days. Because of my food sensitivities--food sensitivity being generated by over-consumption of the same food--I could not return to my old favorites. Keeping out soy meant, practically, no Chinese food. No yeast, meant no yeast breads. No barley, meant almost no wheat flour products, since barley was so often added. No wheat-flour pasta. Reducing the additives and toxins in commodity meats meant less chicken and beef. We began to shop for organic meat and produce. But I was uninspired in the kitchen. I began to watch Food Network. I enjoyed Emeril and Rachel, but I could not eat most of their foods. And I needed to go back to basics in a way that I had not done before.

It was Alton Brown who led me. The first show of his that I watched was a rerun of his lesson on smoking meat in a smoking oven he put together in a junk yard. Well, that was me. My body, now lingering at the gate of being old, sometimes felt like a junk yard. He explained how food worked. He resurrected BBC cooking techniques (before Betty Crocker). He explored ethnic foods and forgotten regional American cuisine. He shopped for cooking utensils at a hardware store. His  philosophy seemed timely. My wife gave me as a present the second edition of Alton's I'm Just Here For the Food. He had a recipe for a breakfast meat loaf with ground turkey and figs, spiced with nutmeg. Meat with nutmeg? I wasn't sensitive to nutmeg. In another recipe, he flavored beef with cinnamon. Cinnamon? I wasn't sensitive to cinnamon. He explained how to boil an egg so that it was soft and flavorful, not rubbery and tasteless. Julia would have appreciated that. The French had made eggs, along with dairy, prominent in their cuisine. I had not mastered eggs. Alton's strategy in cooking and his general philosophy suited me perfectly.

Alton would fit into our new world. We have decided to leave California and retire in West Virginia. We bought farmland. We are going to farm. We want to produce much of our own food. We will raise organic Angus for market. We are, at the moment, buying our first Angus weanlings to be raised with a farming partner. Our children began to give us, as gifts, farming books. I love the forced technological inventiveness of American farmers. Could we do that? We don't know much about it, despite my wife's childhood on a farm; but we have heart. Alton will go with us. We will be constructing a new life in West Virginia from old parts. We're going to make it up, American-style, California-style, from scratch. Organic.

The Hypochondria of 'Possible Cancer' Diagnosis

On the evening of Tuesday, November 4, 2008, about seven o'clock, as the electoral victory of Senator Obama was being announced, I was reading a short email from my physician, telling me that I possibly have prostate cancer. I had waited for the email all day. The previous day, I asked my doctor to tell me the results of a recent PSA test. This was the news. My PSA index had exploded over the previous year. It was still rising. It was way above the score at which Big HMO conventionally does biopsies. Three years earlier, after a long, slow rise in my PSA index, my urologist said, if it goes up again, "we need to do a biopsy". I remember his words exactly and his matter-of-fact and unyielding tone of voice. Shortly thereafter, unrelated to my prostate worries, I began a radical transformation of my medical care and lifestyle under alternative medicine, under the supervision of a naturopathic doctor. In the first year of this new regimen, my PSA score dropped by half, down to normal for my age. When my score began to rise, again, a year ago, I was half-confident that a strict enforcement of my alternative diet and exercise schedule would knock back the score again.

As the excitement of Obama's victory rose from the television broadcasts in the background, I sat at my desk with my laptop. My heart beat began to race and I could feel, simultaneously and contradictorily, my heart fall into a chill and my blood pressure rise. My wife came into the room. She avoids politics and cannot abide political news. She was not particularly interested in the election. She and I both knew that McCain would be defeated. She came to learn from me if the doctor had written to me. I told her. She staggered backward and slumped into a chair in front of the television. Color drained from her face. "I can only imagine what you are thinking," she said to me. Then she began to cry. We were only a year and a half beyond her breast cancer scare, a drawn-out ordeal through which every emotion from anger to despair ripped through us before it concluded with a clean bill of health. She embraced me. "I'll be there with you every step of the way."

Every step of the way turned out to be many steps. Big HMO took two weeks to schedule an appointment for me to see my urologist, to discuss my PSA test and my condition, and then I had to wait two weeks beyond that for the scheduled meeting. Despite many calls by me and by my referring GP, Big HMO is so overbooked that I could get to see him no sooner.

In the intervening month, the management of the HMO sent me three letters discussing my cancer diagnosis. They wasted no words. They had no sentiment of sympathy. They had, in the words of an old and famous British joke about British bureaucracy, all the efficiency of the Communist East German housing authority, but none of its sense of humor. They scheduled me for additional tests and a biopsy. They reassured me that my urologist would discuss the options for cancer treatment. Quote fact unquote. I called and rescheduled the surgical biopsy. I wasn't going to have the biopsy before I talked about the procedure with my urologist. During the four weeks I waited for my urology appointment, every moment that my spirits stopped falling and I began to deal with my possible cancer with philosophical detachment and some acceptance, a new letter arrived to pump up the sense of dread.

Probably against common sense, since I did not have enough knowledge to evaluate the information, I began to inform myself about prostate cancer by reading articles on the Internet. Prostate cancer, if mine had been detected in the early stages, would not be a death sentence; but it would be a sentence of the end of my sex life. Every time I thought about the possible side effects of radical prostate treatment, I could feel a chill of fear rip through my nervous system like a rusty can opener tearing open a can of frozen orange juice. Thinking about a rotor-rooter procedure made my penis shrink back inside my abdominal cavity for security. A surgical excision of my prostate gland made my anus seize up. The likelihood of impotence filled me with despair. I had enjoyed sex so much over my life, the anticipation of not being able to enjoy it blackened my future. It's better than being dead, my wife said. I agreed, but I seemed destined to a half-life.

I listened to my body. I tried to sense the condition of my prostate gland. How would cancer affect it? Could it give me clues to whether I did, indeed, have cancer. I counted how often I urinated, and when, and the quality of urination. Did my testicles ache? What would aching testicles have to do with the prostate, anyway? Nothing, but I worried. I kept a mental record of how tired I was each day. Was I weakening in my morning runs? Did I take a long time to recover? Did I take naps? The infrequent naps I took provoked additional worry. Did I awake refreshed? Were my muscles sore?

I knew that these hypochondriac worries were incipient panic, but I could not resist them. Three years earlier, my urologist had told me, "These are the ten symptoms of prostate cancer. One ... no symptom, two ... no symptom, three ... no symptom ... nine ... no symptom, ten, you have cancer." More words chiseled into my brain.

I'm not superstitious, but superstition gripped me. I thought, prostate cancer is going to be my disease. It's my fault. I've enjoyed sex so much--too much--that God will take my sex life away from me. When my wife went through her breast cancer scare, I had been irrationally confident that she did not have it. I had thought, breast cancer isn't her disease; something else will be. I knew that confidence was simply denial of the threat to her, but superstition does not listen to rationality. Now, my success in denying that she had breast cancer rebounded to me in fear that I would have prostate cancer. My wife is not superstitious, either, but she said, she was praying for me.

My wife was with me. We waited in the consultation room for the urologist. He did not remember me from my appointment three years ago. He seemed absolutely as I remembered him. Direct. Plain spoken. Completely clinical. He pulled up my computerized medical record on the screen of Big HMO's networked computer. He read it over. He turned to me. I don't think it's cancer, he said. Cancer doesn't ordinarily cause such a rapid rise in the PSA. When the nurse took my blood pressure just before the urologist came into the room, it was 179 over 90. Ooh, that's high, she said. Fear of white coats, my wife gamely joked. The nurse replied, reassuringly, we'll take it again after the consultation. Now, with the physician's words, I could feel my blood pressure drop. Free fall. I'm lucky I didn't pass out, right there in the chair. He prescribed a course of antibiotics. I was too relieved to ask why. But I realized that he suspected that my prostate was inflamed because of infection. How could my prostate get infected, I wondered silently? I was ordered to take another PSA test a month after the anti-biotic therapy.

For prostate inflammation, my naturopathic doctor, with whom I had an appointment the following day, prescribed a course of diathermy of the prostate. Heating it, he explained, would increase circulation and reduce the inflammation. When I had discussed with him my PSA results several weeks earlier, he said he was not alarmed. I said, great, I'm glad someone is not alarmed. Now I began to think his lack of alarm was reasonable. I had four treatment sessions. In the first treatment, the heat was strong enough that it produced a light "sunburn" on my butt. I said, hey, my ass is so hot! Well, I thought the idea was funny.

My followup PSA test result came back earlier this week. My PSA index was significantly down. That's good, the urologist said. Not probably cancer, after all, I realized. Just inflammation. I am in Monterey with my wife this week, accompanying her to her business conference. I have been running along the recreational trail that follows the coastline of the bay from the Presidio westward to the lighthouse at the headland of the peninsula. Yesterday, the day after hearing the goods news from my urologist, I was invigorated and lifted. I ran longer than ever, six miles, more intervals than ever, twenty-four. The weather, sunny and warm, is unusual  for a coastal winter in northern California. Everyone is out, smiling. The cloudless blue sky, the relentless surf washing the rocky cliffs below the path, the incessant barking of the sea lions, the brown hills across the bay, all seem elemental and eternal.

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Life's Illusions

• Pheromones
• The Hypochondria of 'Possible Cancer' Diagnosis
• In Movies, What Is 'Unsimulated' Sex?
• The Illusions of Modern Life, The Politics of Authenticity
• When the Literal Truth Is a Lie

A Woman's Healing Hands

Asthma afflicted my health my entire life, until recently. Though I was never hospitalized during an asthma attack, I remember, in my childhood, nurses sitting by my bed in my room at home, ready to administer medicine. I have vivid memories of many debilitating episodes when I was incapacitated to helplessness, my body wracked by uncontrollable gasping for air,my fear of suffocation turning into panic. Nightmares of drowning, of suffocation, were my most frequent dreams, during which my mind struggled to wrest itself out of the grasp of the nightmare's fright and rise to the surface of waking consciousness.

I took all the most advanced medicines, finally ending my struggle with asthma with eighteen years of treatment with several steroids, managed by multiple daily readings of a lung capacity gage, emergency inhalers, and ordinary anti-allergy medicines to control my allergies which contributed to my asthma and frequently triggered episodes. Several years ago, at my daughter's wise urging, I turned to alternative medicine practiced by a naturopathic doctor. Radically different therapies, centered on removing foods to which I was sensitive, digestive supplements, and homeopathic remedies quickly ended my asthma, reduced my lung inflammation, and brought an end to my lifelong struggle with my crippling malady.

Exercise has become an important part of my recovery. Exercise as therapy required a paradigm-shift in my thinking, for exercise had always been part of my asthma problem, not a solution. Violent exercise would trigger asthma, and asthma episodes would always, nonetheless at unexpected and unwanted moments, force me to cease whatever physical activity I was doing. Central to my current exercise regime is Pilates. At my wife's urging, I enrolled in a Pilates program three years ago. My teacher, a former ballet dancer and dance instructor, helped me gain the muscular strength and stamina I need to work through exercises. She patiently waited for me to outgrow my self-defeating attitude, that I could never do any physical exercise routine, because my asthma would intervene, so why bother.

I was one of the few men enrolled in her classes. She was initially reluctant to give me the hands-on instruction she gave to her women students. With them, she would touch their bodies, identifying the muscles she wanted an exercise to strengthen, or moving her hands along their abdomens, torsos, and backs, explaining the sequence of motions and their timing with breathing inhalation and exhalation. So I told her one day, she could touch me, that I wished she would, because it would help me understand the complicated exercises she wished me to execute.

For some of her students, including me, she engaged the assistance of an osteopathic physician, a woman, who came to the studio. The physician had also been a professional ballet dancer and a friend of my Pilates teacher twenty-five years ago when they danced together. Dr. Ballet, my instructor and we students call her. The physician examined me, and the other students who became her patients, to identify muscular and skeletal misalignments and dysfunctioning muscular routines that interfered with normal Pilates exercise. Dr. Ballet pulls, pushes, rotates, stretches, compresses, bones and muscles, gradually realigning my body. I lie on a padded bench, a pilates reformer, while she pulls my arms and legs, climbing on top of me to use her body weight to offer resistance to my muscles and to arrange bones and joints the way she needs for correction. Her hands and body are warm. Her breath is sweet. She gives me a few simple instructions, how to move, to press, to release.

As the doctor does her work, I feel my body begin to align and move properly. I relax. Tension dissipates. I sit and stand with my pelvis aligned. When I stand, my right side of my torso does not collapse. My shoulders are not hunched. My spirits sigh with relief. Every firm, knowledgeable touch of the doctor's hands makes me feel better. I feel safe. I am being put back together. My body will not fall apart.

At the end of my most recent session with Dr. Ballet, I confided in her with an early memory. When I was perhaps four years old, I had a horrific asthma attack. It was prolonged. My medicines and inhaler did not bring me relief. Though my mother was a practical nurse, she did not have a hypodermic needle with epinephrine. For some reason, she could not contact our family physician. She became desperate. My gasping, struggling for breath, wheezing, flailing around, crying for help, must have been frightening. She called a friend, a regular nurse, who suggested that she take me to a chiropractor. My mother put me in our family car and drove me thirty miles to the chiropractor.

My question to Dr. Ballet was, how was the chiropractor able so quickly and completely end the asthma attack? I remember going up the stairs to the second story of a building in the commercial downtown. I don't remember whether I walked up the steps or my mother carried me. We went into the chiropractor's office. The hallway and the office, at least in memory, seem relatively dark. The chiropractor was a woman. My mother took my shirt off, then the chiropractor and my mother laid me, stomach down, on a bench. I remember the chiropractor's warm, strong hands begin to push and press my upper back. Suddenly, and it was instantaneous, my asthma attack ended. It was over. It was as if my lungs had received an enormous blast of albuterol. I lay exhausted with relief on the table. 

Dr. Ballet said, the chiropractor manipulated the T2 and T3 vertebrae, which manipulated a nerve that controls the lungs. It seems so simple, I thought. I thought it had to do with her hands, with the warmth, the pressure, the confidence, the knowledge. To touch is to control. To tame the beast. To tame me. That's what I thought I learned in that old office in an old building, long ago.

Walk and Weight

New Park/Bridge loop: 4.1 miles, with 8 intervals; 5th interval up the lower half of new park hill (to the chain link fence)

My weight is down to 138.25 lbs. I'm sure some of this is just water, but at least four pounds are from my diet. After my last lipid profile and PSA tests in early August, I decided to go back on my four-day rotational diet with its greatly restricted foods--no cane sugar, red meat only once every four days, low fat, lots of fish, fruit, vegetables. I knew that I would start to lose weight again, though that is not my objective. My wife is adamant that I not lose any more weight; but it is inevitable on this diet. My naturopathic doctor says that the diet will drop my cholesterol back to 180 (from 196 to which it had risen by early August) and will drop my PSA (up to 452) as both are sensitive to red meats. That is, indeed, what happened in August 2005 when I first went onto the 4-day rotational diet. Then my Cholesterol dropped from 240 or so to 135 and my PSA from 560 or so to 395. My naturopath does not want my cholesterol to drop that low again, wants it to settle about 180.