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braindamageforbeginners · 6 years ago

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Intent/The First 120 Hours

Cycle 8, Day 11

Everyone always wants to know what chemo (technically maintenance chemo) is like, and I try to give an accurate portrayal, However, the truth is, even with the lighter touch and my new Hunter S. Thompson drug-fueled lifestyle (actually, after reading “Gonzo Girl,” even at my most heavily-medicated, I’m not in the same league), you’ll feel physically and mentally funky (and there’s always that nasty injection site pain from the Marizomib). The good news is, with Marizomib, fatigue is the most-noted downside (I wrote about that previously, but fatigue, I’ve learned, isn’t really exhaustion, it’s when consciousness is painful), so I usually get a full night’s sleep. Thanks to a quasi-legal medical substance, the chemo hangover is cut down significantly, and you wake up feeling, almost too good. So, yeah, in my false sense of recovery, I did push myself a little too hard and sprain something in the bad leg, so I'm spending today on the couch, thanks to that nasty rubbery leg of mine. I try to keep active and fit, but it isn't always a reasonable goal. So, today; rest; tomorrow, more-achievable goals, like going up and down stairs without a deathgrip on the rail.

Anyway, the point of this writing project is to provide some sort of useful data in an easily-digested form, so I thought I’d give a few pointers on surviving the first 120 hours after a terminal (we'll discuss it) cancer diagnosis (with the warning that it’s from my perspective, but what works for me may well be fatal for you; use your own judgment). I’m not talking about self-care or organizing your prescriptions - that’s later in the process. I’m going to tell you what I wish I’d known to survive the first four or five days after the diagnosis (non-medically). This is about how to subtly shift your thinking from "I'm gonna die" to "I'm going to scream into the gates of the Underworld like I own that fucker," which, based on personal experience, might be the necessary attitude to putting off that particular scenario.

1. Do what you need to do, emotionally. One of the shittier things able-bodied people do to new cancer patients is tell them to buck up, or be positive. Folks, if this goes South, I will experience cachexia. Most survivors are sterilized and have long-term health issues related to treatment. You wouldn’t tell someone who’s about to march into the jaws of hell to smile, especially if they’ve just had a seizure or are in pain. If you have to drink a bottle of whisky and drunkenly call an ex, now’s the time, you might not get it later. I think I spent a day dry heaving and lying in bed before I really came to my senses. Do what you have to, but do it quickly because you are now on the clock.

2. Find appropriate help. Just as not all cancers are created equal, not all doctors are created equal. Again, according to Briish stastics, “medical misadvenure” is the third leading cause of death. Having said that, even though I insist on the very best for my glioblastoma, that’s because there isn’t much of a middle ground between “survivor” and “dead” with that. If I get lung cancer or colon cancer, I may not be quite as picky. I’ve talked previously about finding good oncologists, and, as recently noted, they’re usually not motivated by money. And be creative in where you get information; two friends from the Mesozoic contacted me to ask for help with their parents who have glioblastoma. It seemed odd to me that I’d be asked about, especially since one of these friends is a practicing physician. I try to give everyone accurate, well-researched advice, and I hope I did then, but it still feels like there’s somehing wrong in the universe when I’m somewhat knowledgeable about how to handle a crisis. We’ll ignore the self-contained, Zen koan-like irony of that statement in a guide to what to do.

3. Find new friends/join a support group. I don’t know if it’s just brain cancer patients - I don't know if it's just brain cancer patients or all cancer patients, but your previous support group (or key members of it) will be conspicuous in their absence. In my case (and another person I've read of), I heard back from a bunch of random people I literally hadn't heard from in decades (in a few cases). I get an awful lot of passing privilege, but, so far, any time I've dropped the "C" word - it's immediately changed the nature of our interactions. So far, overwhelmingly, people have been kind, or positive, which is great, but it does get grating after a while that any time the phrase "and what do you do?" comes around, there's a stilted shift. You know who absolutely could not give less of a shit about your new medical label (unless you're having a seizure)? Other cancer survivors and patients. And - bonus - they'll actually be able to give you far more accurate and up-to-date info on your disease and/or financial or social resources that might now be at your disposal than I know about. I'm indebted to my old friends from the Mesozoic who showed up to cheer me on in my hour of need (extra kudos to Laura and Julie), but I owe an unrepayable number of favors to the Leukemia Kids (okay, that's the Young Cancer Support Group, but most cancer patients under 40 are lymphoma or leukemia patients/survivors, hence my name)(sorry if you guys don't like it, I'll think of a better one ASAP) who helped me get past that (sort of, I still need all the help I can get). I did not do that, but, in retrospect, it was a massive mistake I didn’t.

4. Prepare for drama - your life is about to become a bad Lifetime Television Special, and it does affect different people in different ways - I know one brain cancer survivor whose husband left her - and you’re going to be doing this while experiencing an amount of fear you’d previously been unable to imagine; the full 31 flavors. You will be - initially - completely overwhelmed by terror. I'd recommend seeing a shrink (I do); all the prescription pads will come out for this one. The bad news is, even if you beat this thing, you don't ever really get over it. I've talked to late-stage breast cancer survivors who say the same thing; even after years of clean scans, the anxiety and fear never fully leaves (it certainly hasn't for me, though, but I'm not even a year out of a five-year deal).

5. know the difference between terminal, incurable, chronic and fatal. I remember which step on the stairway I was on - the third or fourth - when Mad Scientist told me those six words, over the phone (I was traveling at the time), "I'm so sorry, it's stage IV." The world swung, because I suddenly knew not only that I would die soon, but exactly how (that's a really horrifying thing to consider, I wrote one of my fist essays - posted around here, somewhere - to try and capture that sensation). Fatal diseases are like a car crash - they'll kill you. Terminal illnesses are defined by Wikipedia (and I like their definition, since the traditional definition has involved how, subjectively, soon/quick the disease is likely to kill you) as, "an incurable disease that cannot be adequately treated and is reasonably expected to result in the death of the patient." You'll note a lot of weasel words in there that make this nice, elastic definition my favorite, but the phrase I like to hang on is, "adequately treated." Chronic diseases are the ones that last three or more months (or something like that; I did take an intro pathophysiology class that involved knowing the instructor's definition of "acute" and "chronic"). Chronic cancers - like mine and a lot of recurrent leukemias - are ones that require five consecutive years without metastasis or recurrence before you're declared "cured." It's telling of the quality of my medical team that, as far as I know, none of them have ever said the words "fatal" or "terminal" in my presence. Instead, I've been given a series of treatments that really suck (check this blog for any examples you'd like), but, I'd so far rate as "adequate" in that they've kept the disease at bay (for those of you working out, step-by-step along with me how to save yourself or a loved one, that statistic is progression-free survival. I'd imagine, based on how a new immunotherapy has gotten to round 3 just in the nine months I've been in treatment (technically, treatment ended back in February, I'm in "maintenance chemotherapy," but since I have to be in the infusion center every Tuesday, and I have to remain wary of potential problems/side-effects/etc. it's just easier to think of myself as still being in chemo). And most cancers are, technically, incurable. We might have a definitive treatment of some sort, but since it's ultimately caused by damaged DNA, and we can't repair or zap every single rogue cell in your body, most are just genetic time bombs. And, since I've survived the first tumor, a lot of medicine seems to have swung back to reclassify a lot of very treatable (but not curable, apparantly) as either chronic or having that potential. I like to use the idea/metaphor I saw another science writer use; it's like heart disease or diabetes; it'll take a lifetime of management and monitoring, but it may not, necessarily kill you. In other words, you've received a helluva strong first blow, but, even with the gravest prognosis, you might be around for a longer struggle (and time) than you'd thought.

6. Use statistics as guidelines, not rules. This was a big one for me. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't use statistics, or automatically dispute them, but realizing the GBM median life expectancy included both 20-year-olds and 90-year-olds who dropped dead of heart attack and people who refused (or were not candidates) for other treatment. Again, there's a lot of luck involved in this, at every single point, but you can - mentally and physically - prepare for pain, or hardship, or potential heart problems (and react and treat such things). You can't really prepare for cancer recurring or metastasizing, apart from writing your own eulogy (which, come to it, I suppose this is a part of).

7. Decide right now if you want to live or go gentle into that good night - This is far, far more important than you might think, because both the medical industrial complex, your disease, and the basic, horrible logistics of this situation are going to be beyond exhausting. There's a lot of luck here, but, from minute 1, I have had one thing going for me: complete, near-psychotic commitment to actually staying alive. And that's what it'll take (sadly, in more than a few cases, much, much more will be required). You're going to have to charm, cheer, cajole, finagle, and, in some cases, con people like there won't be any consequences, because, if you're unsuccessful, there won't be. And this will give you the required attitude to deal with some of the higher-ups you'll meet in medicine (and scream at them, if necessary). Again, full honors to all my various clinicians and support staff over the years who have never made me feel trapped or impotent by my immediate sitaution, but, at the same time, if any of the sort of arrogance and contempt I've heard of from other folks (including doctors) was actually warranted on behalf of modern science and medicine, there would be no fatal diseases. Again, I'll happily write glowing testimony on behalf of the people treating me, but I've met too many patients who feel like refusing treatment because they're too dejected or frightened to go on, and their doctors or insurance are still charging them (why that's still allowed is largely due to the fact that modern medical insurance is an entirely artificial industry created to meet no demand, and enabled by Richard Nixon and Edgar Kaiser)(again, I'm making none of that up). I'd urge everyone to get up, remember that dead men, women, transgender, non-binary, (and anyone I'm forgetting), do not pay bills; hopefully that'll give you the sort of needed psychological boost to get off your butt and demand more. It's not a sustainable life strategy, but until the end of your illness is in sight, Malcolm X's statement, "By any means necessary" should be your mantra.

8. Don’t lose hope - Believe me, it seems weird for me to write it, and it might very well be warranted in more than a few cases, but I did ask myself, once, why I'd be on the phone the next morning ordering and organizing my prescriptions (orchestrating what substances should be in me on which day is now a more daunting logistics task than the D-Day landings), instead of just sitting quietly in a comfy chair until it was all over (that's still always a temptation), and all I can say is, I guess it was enough to motivate me through another day. And another. And another. And, in the meantime, another treatment has made it to trials, for, wait for it, recurrent GBM (which is what I'll have if the Warlocks miscalculate using the lunar calendar)(no longer a joke; each treatment period is 28 days). I'm not gonna lie, it's gonna get miserable, and not all of us will make it (Hell, measles has a death rate, which, there, that sensation of realizing measles can be fatal, is what a TIA feels like).

9. Mourn your old life, don’t waste time trying to get it back. I made that mistake between Tumor #1 and 2. I'm not making it again. I realize I can only write for myself, which was the horrifying realization that came to define my existence - no one, as far as I can tell, has written a decent, current, useable guide to avoiding the reaper when your number's up. So I guess I'm going to have to stay alive long enough to do that. Also, I don't know if anyone out there's outlived their own life expectancy, but I've already done it twice, and there is no more amazing sensation - no matter what else your life looks like.

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maniactypewriter · 5 years ago

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The backlog Week 4 [where the hell have you been edition]

I LIVE! In all seriousness, when im at school, I don't have access to my gaming computer and my laptop doesnt have enough space free for a project like this. Anyway, I am back for the next month, so let's get to the first game(s)

Anomaly warzone earth + Anomaly 2 playtime: 4 hours total

Im bundling these two together as they are very similar in game play. In Warzone Earth, you play as the 14th platoon deployed into the heart of the Anomaly, a giant mysterious dome that crash landed on top of Baghdad and tokyo. As the platoon leader, its your job to make sure the convoy of APCs and walking missile platforms gets through the level safely. The game refers to itself as a tower offense game. Essentially its a tower defense game, but instead of placing down towers, you are the targets that the towers are shooting at. Your vehicle team is constantly moving forward and its your job as commander to choose the right path for the vehicles to drive down and to strategically deploy the four power ups at your disposal. Your tools include a repair which heals your units, a smoke screen which makes enemies less likely to hit your units, and a decoy, which enemies will shoot at instead of your units. Usually the player is spending their time babysitting the convoy and rushing to collect more powers as they are dropped from killed enemies. Each mission has a different objective, but it usually devolves into, get to a place and kill all the towers.

Anomaly 2 is much the same as its predecessor. Set in the far future after an alien invasion, the earth has frozen over and humanity’s numbers are dwindling. Humanity’s only hope is a single convoy on their way through a frozen america to get to New york. As this is the future, humanity's weapons have evolved as well. The standard ACP with a gatling gun on top has evolved into a car with two gatling guns. And it also turns into a walking mech flamethrowers mounted on either arm. Bad ass. The power ups have also changed a little. You have your standard repair bubble, there is a focus power up which will tell all your units to focus fire on one tower you want particularly dead and an emp type power up which will disable enemy towers for a short while. Anomaly 2 also has multiplayer, but I didn't play that as it is most likely dead at time of play.

Antihero playtime: 70 minutes

Antihero is a competitive digital board game where each player plays as a master thief in a victorian england type setting. As the leader of a thieves guild, you have to go around a burgle the good people of “London” to fund your operations and buy pieces to put around the board. You can hire urchins to occupy specific buildings for special bonuses, hire thugs to block access to areas, and gangs to off your opponent's units and hunt down targets (as well as making a little extra dosh along the way.) this game takes advantage of being a digital board game because everything your opponent does is done mostly in secret. Obscured by the smog of war, you can not see what your opponent is doing, which could spell your doom if you aren't fast enough to look into his territory with your master thief.

I am not great at this game. I couldn't get past the second level on easy mode that's how bad I am. However, I can see it is a fun game, and I can see how this game’s multiplayer was popular for a time. However, I dare not go there as I fear that I may be utterly stomped by a player who has had several years more practice than I have at this game.

Apotheon playtime: 4 hours

Apotheon is the story of one greek guy not named kratos going to olympus to kick the butts of all the greek gods. The most striking thing anyone playing this game will notice is the artstyle. It is drawn to resemble Greek pottery paintings. You know the kind. The ones that depict Hercules doing his trials or some other greek hero doing something impressive. Anyway, story. The earth has been screwed over by the gods because chronic rapist Zeus decided to revoke humanity’s access to the things that are necessary to life. Hera picks you as her champion then sends you to mt Olympus to gather the gifts of the gods and maybe smack some sense into her cheating husband along the way. The game play is a 2D mix of dark souls and metroidvania games that are so prevalent in the modern day. However, Apotheon came out before the current wave of soulslikes so there is some small growing pains. Combat is kinda clunky and your character can sprint at 30 miles an hour but immediately slows down to a crawl whenever he so much as touches a staircase. Combat as mentioned before is mildly clunky. It uses a physics engine to do all its swings and stabs. Heavy weapons like a club have a wide swing arc and is directed by which way you tilt the left analog stick. The Reliance on physics to get the job done can lead to some interesting results. I saw one raider in the first area get launched into space after being double teamed by me and a friendly malita man. Apotheon is an interesting game with a stunning artstyle and compelling exploration. Which in this modern age of soulslike metroidvanias, is all you really need to stand out.

Aquaria play time: 1 hour

Speaking of metroidvanias, Aquaria. As the name suggests, the game is an underwater metroidvania mostly concerned with puzzle solving over combat. You play as Naija, a lonely fish lady who can use the power of song to do magic. As a fish lady, you can swim around the oceanic caverns with relative freedom. The game wants to be played with a mouse and keyboard, as my attempt to play it with a controller was thwarted swiftly. As is fitting for a game where the protagonist’s main power is singing, the game has a killer soundtrack. In the little bit ive heard when I was playing, it was some pretty good music. Visuals are decent. The game has a hand painted aesthetic, however some of the animations are kinda stiff and stilted. This game was originally released in 2007 after all. Small indie metroidvanias were not knocking it out of the park yet in terms of animation yet (im sure someone will correct me on that point eventually…) the small amount I played had me swimming around a claustrophobic map going around and solving puzzles that lead me to new areas and new song powers. One of the first i got was the ability to pull around large rocks. The second allowed me to transform into an old fish goddess and shoot energy missiles at hostile fish. While the game is focused on puzzles and exploration, that doesn't mean it is devoid of combat. I feel as this is the weakest part of what i played. I gave up on the game when i died to a puzzle boss who’s apparent solution didn't work. There is probably a lot I didn't see in my short time with the game. There is a whole cooking mechanic that I didn't fully grasp, as well as pets and the ability to decorate the main character’s house with special decorations you found out in the world. I may revisit this game at some later point, but for now its going back into the backlog as I search for more interesting games with less obtuse boss fights.

Armello playtime 2 hours

Armello is yet another digital board game. Set in a fantasy version of zootopia, the king of the land has fallen ill with the Rot. and all the clans of the land have sent their strapingest of adventurers to go and try and claim the throne for themselves. This can be done in one of four ways. Having the most honour points (gained by killing other players, or completing quests), gather four spirit stones and cleansing the king of Rot, having the most Rot yourself, or just straight up murdering the king. In the few matches I have played, the easiest one to achieve is the Honour victory, although that might just be my play style. Like most board games, rounds are taken in turns. Each player has a certain amount of hexes they can move, and landing on spaces will have different effects. Most events that happened as a result of landing on a space are luck based. “Perils” have you rolling dice, quests have you selecting from a circle of icons trying to pick the one that will net you a reward, and a random spinner that could give you anything from rot to gold to teleport you to the other side of the map. Once everyone has had their turn, day turns to night and new monsters spawn on the board. When the sun rises again, the king dies a little from his fantasy aids and gives the person with the most honor points the choice between two Decrees which will most likely be terrible for everyone involved. On top of all this, players have access to a hand of three cards. Which have various effects. Proper use of your cards can lead to victory or defeat depending on who you're playing as. Armello has an online mode, but like the other online modes in this batch of games, I dare not touch for fear of getting crushed. The game also has an online store where you can buy new skins for your dice and new character packs. It's a fun little board game, but im putting it on the shelf for now because i’ve had my fill and have no friends to play it with.

#Anomaly warzone earth #games #video games #writing #review #reviews #Apotheon #Armello #antihero #aquaria #board games #metroidvania

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azworkingdogs · 6 years ago

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The Miracle of CBD Oil for Dogs

Are you dealing with a dog who is suffering from painful, maybe life-threatening health issues?

Maybe your pit bull has such intense anxiety that she cowers during every thunderstorm, or your twelve-year-old schnauzer is struggling to walk from arthritic joints. Maybe you’ve got a rescue Golden Retriever with cancer. Or a Corgi who suffers with seizures. While there are a growing number of natural health options available for canine health conditions, many either don’t work or have nasty side effects.

Fortunately, one alternative treatment that’s getting a lot of attention from the press and dog owners these days is CBD oil. And it’s because there’s a growing body of evidence (both science based and anecdotal) that it WORKS! Made from hemp, CBD oil is proving to offer relief and even healing from a wide variety of health problems…

… And as a result it’s increasing in popularity across the country. And becoming difficult to keep in stock.

But what is CBD oil, and what health benefits can it offer your pet? Let’s look at the facts.

What is CBD?

Cannabinol (CBD) is one of over 85 compounds collectively known as cannabinoids that are found in the cannabis plant.[ii] CBD alone makes up close to 40 percent of the plant’s extracts, [iii] but it’s not what’s responsible for cannabis’s most famous properties.

Instead, a cannabinoid called THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is what actually produces the “high” that everyone associates with pot.

It takes a specialized CO2 extraction process to get a concentrated CBD oil from cannabis plants. However, it’s worth as the resulting liquid is rich in amino acids, omega-3 fatty acids, terpenes, and other beneficial compounds.

For this reason, CBD oil is being used by people around the world to treat symptoms associated with a wide variety of health problems in both humans and dogs alike. [iv]

CBD and the Immune System

Why is CBD oil so special?

It’s the cannabinoids it contains.

These chemical compounds play a key role in regulating your mood, appetite and sleep cycle. Some are produced in your body (endocannabinoid) while others come from your diet (phytocannabinoids). [v]

Cannabinoids work by attaching themselves to your body through either CB1 or CB2 receptors.

CB1 receptors are primarily linked to the brain, and they control coordination, cognition, mood, memory formation, and even appetite.

THC attaches to the CB1 (brain) receptors, which is why it produces a mental “high.”

CBD, on the other hand, only affects the CB2 receptors. These are directly connected to the immune system, and they are responsible for managing pain and inflammation.

And evidence shows that they stimulate your system to build its own receptors instead.[vi] So no matter what, if your immune system has been compromised, you can supplement your levels with CBD oil to make up the difference.

Cannabinoids and Dogs

So what does this mean for your dog? Research shows: the endocannabinoid system exists in all vertebrates, and dogs are no exception.[vii] Dogs share almost 70 percent of their essential biology with humans, and studies from the past decade show that cannabinoids bind to receptors within dogs in similar ways as they do with people.[viii] [ix]

While the research about CBD oil is still developing, it’s clear from what we know so far that the oil can reduce physical pain and inflammation without compromising mental functioning. [x]

Plus, it’s not a sedative that “masks” the underlying health problem by merely temporarily hiding your symptoms. Instead, cannabinol triggers the immune system in ways that improve, even reverse, non-normal functioning.

The Differences Between Hemp and Marijuana

Contrary to popular opinion, marijuana and hemp are not the same.

Both plants share the common ancestor of cannabis sativa, but centuries of selective breeding that focused on different characteristics has led to the development of two plants with significantly different ratios of cannabinoids.

To be classified as hemp, a cannabis plant can’t contain more than a 0.3 percent THC concentration. As THC is the coveted compound in pot plants, most marijuana varieties include upwards of 15 to 20 percent. [xi] Despite the amount of THC in the final product, it is classified as hemp or marijuana based on its plant of origin.

Is CBD Oil Legal?

How legal is CBD oil in the United States today?

That answer isn’t as clear as it could be, as regulations change depending on where you live and whether the compound comes from industrial hemp or marijuana plants.

Most simply put, though:

CBD oil derived from industrial hemp is legal across the country.

Marijuana runs the full spectrum from being entirely legal in some states, permitted only for medical use in others, and being banned entirely in the rest.

Likewise, many states permit people to grow “industrial hemp” while others forbid its production but allow it to be imported if grown elsewhere.

There is some debate about whether the effectiveness of CBD oil changes if it’s derived from hemp or marijuana.

Some people find THC improves their symptom relief from CBD.

However, this isn’t a factor you should consider for your pet.

Will CBD Oil Get Your Dog “High”?

You might have seen CBD oil showing up in a variety of dog-related products, from oils and capsules to specially formulated dog biscuits. Yet, many dog owners are leery of serving their pets a dose of cannabinoids. Will using CBD oil make your dog high? The odds are virtually zero. THC highs are dangerous for dogs, so canine-grade CBD oils should always come from hemp.[xii] CBD oil can provide your pet with a calming feeling and reduce chronic pain, but it its lack of psychoactive qualities means that it won’t create a “high” or affect them mentally.

Nine Ways that CBD Oil Might Help Your Dog

Will CBD oil improve the health of your pet? The evidence seems to show so. Some of the conditions that the compound can address include the following.

1. Calms Down Aggression and Skittishness

If your dog regularly lunges on a leash or cowers under the bed when a stranger comes in, CBD oil might reduce that anxiety so that he can develop new patterns of behavior. Likewise, CBD oil can improve the quality of life for dogs that deal with anxiety when their owners leave, helping to prevent them from indulging in destructive behaviors like chewing, pacing, urinating, and more.

According to CBD World,[xiii] one reviewer’s dog had cancer and severe storm anxiety for his entire life. This stress triggered vomiting, which made it hard for the dog to eat enough to keep his weight within a healthy range. Regular doses of a CBD oil tincture improved his sleep and helped him keep down food. After a few weeks of treatment, his general anxiety was almost gone, and the dog was able to maintain a healthier weight because of it.

2. Treats Seizures and Epilepsy

Suffering from seizures is a struggle for both pets and their owners, but CBD oil is proven to make a difference. The compound has been found to be a practical treatment option for managing seizures in humans as they are experiencing them, and it can reduce their frequency over time.

One study revealed a profound improvement in seizure intensity within five months of treatment,[xiv] and another study that looked specifically at children found that they experienced an 84 percent reduction in the frequency of their seizures. [xv]

Close to five percent of dogs suffer from seizures, and many of these dogs take prescription medications like phenobarbital and potassium bromide. While these medications can reduce the incidence of seizures, most have harmful effects on the liver and other organs, and they can trigger lethargy, dizziness, and confusion for your pet. Likewise, some dogs develop drug-resistant epilepsy that defies attempts at treatment.[xvi]

However, anecdotal evidence shows that CBD oil can treat all forms of seizure conditions, especially in situations where other drugs don’t work. In one case, Rocky the bulldog suffered from extreme seizures that triggered erratic movements and foaming at the mouth. Though his owner tried many different prescription medications, nothing made a difference for his symptoms until he gave Rocky two spoons of CBD oil in the middle of a seizure. Within seconds, the CBD calmed his shaking and Rocky was restored to normal.[xvii]

In another instance, Bernie, a Swiss mountain dog, started undergoing grand mal seizures at just six months old that left him completely incapacitated. Bernie’s medication made him disoriented and it was harming his liver, so his owners tried CBD oil instead. The supplement reduced the severity and frequency of his seizures until they eventually disappeared.[xviii]

If your pup hasn’t responded well to standard seizure medication, consider treating them with Full Spectrum CBD Oil for Dogs instead.

3. Relieves Chronic Pain

It’s extremely common for older dogs to develop arthritis in their joints.

As this is caused by inflammation that leads to aching and degenerative illnesses, some dog owners report that their pet’s arthritis responds well to CBD oil.[xix] The compound acts as a natural pain reliever, and it also works to soothe irritation to prevent arthritis from getting established.[xx]

In one instance, Sadie the dog suffered from debilitating hip pain until she was treated with CBD oil. The treatment improved her gait, and it even reduced her chronic anxiety during thunderstorms.[xxi]

The research is still forthcoming, but many doctors are impressed enough with CBD’s potential that they are considering it as a unique class of drug for addressing chronic pain.[xxii]

4. Boosts Appetite

Dogs lose their appetites for numerous reasons, but the issue is often linked to nausea.

You can improve your pet’s desire to eat by giving her CBD oil to eliminate any digestive distress.[xxiii] Likewise, the National Cancer Institute states that CBD oil can increase appetite,[xxiv] making it a smart way to get a stubborn dog to touch his food again.

Some CBD oil products are formulated within dog biscuits to make the process easier for pet owners, but you can also feed your pup a dropperful of Full Spectrum CBD oil directly to help the process.[xxv]

5. Prevents and Fights Cancer

A canine cancer diagnosis is crushing for any owner, and the condition (along with chemotherapy treatments) can result in numerous unpleasant side effects like chronic pain, loss of appetite, and general nausea. Many dog owners claim that CBD oil makes an excellent treatment option because it keeps these side effects under control.[xxvi]

They also say that CBD oil can improve the effectiveness of conventional cancer treatment.[xxvii]

Even more impressive, the compound can slow the rate that cancer spreads and kill off cells by boosting the power of the immune system so that it prevents the cancer from getting established. The oil contains properties that inhibit tumor formation, which means that a small daily dose of high-quality CBD oil daily might reduce your pet’s cancer risk or slow tumor growth.[xxviii] [xxix] [xxx]

In one instance, Monkey the cat was diagnosed with terminal intestinal cancer. Her chemotherapy’s side effects caused her to stop eating and sleeping, and she became lethargic. Monkey’s owner mixed some CBD oil into her food, and it immediately brought her energy back- to the point that she was acting healthier than she had before cancer. While the CBD didn’t cure her (Monkey passed away a few months later), her owner was happy the oil improved her quality of life for the time she had left.[xxxi]

6. Helps with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Ingesting CBD oil has impressive benefits for the digestive system, and numerous studies report that it can prevent you and your pet from developing irritable bowel disease.[xxxii] Also, thanks to natural antibacterial properties, the compound can inhibit the highly-dangerous Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) bacteria from establishing itself. [xxxiii]

7. Reduces Autoimmune Disease

As CBD oil plays a role in managing the immune system, the compound can decrease the production of inflammatory cytokines that trigger autoimmune disorders, allergies, and other sensitivities.[xxxiv]

Part of the benefit comes from its ability to suppress the formation of Th17 dominance, a significant cause of autoimmune diseases.[xxxv] The compound is also a powerful antioxidant (more potent than vitamins C and E),[xxxvi] and it can reduce cases of chronic inflammation for your dog.

8. Protects the Nervous System

Spine and nervous system problems are unfortunately common in dogs, but addressing these concerns with a CBD oil treatment might be a way forward for better treatment. Human and canine research alike shows some promise for helping patients with neurogenerative disorders like ALS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease by protecting the brain from cell death triggered by free radicals.[xxxvii]

9. Promotes Cardiovascular Health

CBD oil might be good for the canine heart. Research has shown that the compound can reduce damage to blood vessels, even out irregular heart rates, and reduce blood pressure problems associated with stress and anxiety.[xxxviii] [xxxix]In other words, taking CBD oil supplements can keep your pet’s heart ticking as it should.

In one example, a Jack Russell had a heart murmur improve after regular treatment with CBD oil … a condition that generally doesn’t get better on its own.[xl]

Treat Your Pet with Full Spectrum CBD Oil

For those looking for a natural alternative to prescription pet medications, CBD oil holds much promise. Our Full Spectrum CBD Oil For Dogs is organic, sourced from industrial hemp (so legal), pesticide free and solvent free.

However, please note that high global demand for CBD oil means there have been shortages in North America and we anticipate that our stock may sell out quickly.

If you’re interested in trying CBD oil with your dog, click here now to get complete details.

(And purchase early, if you’re interested, to make sure you don’t miss out!)

[i] PetMD: Seven Common Side Effects of Pet Medication

[ii] Livescience: What is THC

[iii] Medical News Today: Everything You Need to Know About Hemp and CBD Oil

[iv] Hempmedspx: About Hemp Stalk Oil

[v] Ministry of Hemp: Made from Hemp

[vi] Echo Connection: A Look at Endocannabinoid Systems

[vii] Role of the endocannabinoid system in vertebrates: Emphasis on the zebrafish model.

[viii] CBD World: Using Hemp Oil to Treat Our Dogs

[ix] HolistaPet: The Endocannabinoid System in Dogs and Cats Explained

[x] Medical News Today: Everything You Need to Know About Hemp and CBD Oil

[xi] Hempmedspx: Which States is CBD Oil Legal to Purchase?

[xii] Preventivevet: What to Know if You Want to Give Your Dog CBD Oil

[xiii] CBD World: Using Hemp CBD Oil to Treat Our Dogs

[xiv] Hypnotic and antiepileptic effects of cannabidiol

[xv] Report of a parent survey of cannabidiol-enriched cannabis use in pediatric treatment-resistant epilepsy

[xvi] American Epilepsy Society: Efficacy and safety of epidiolex (cannabidiol) in children and young adults with treatment-resistent epilepsy: Initial data from an expanded access program

[xvii] Mirror: Dog suffering terrifying seizures transforms within seconds thanks to CANNABIS oil

[xviii] The Guardian: Pets on pot: is medical marijuana giving sick animals a necessary dose of relief?

[xix] Medical News Today: Can CBD oil relieve arthritis pain?

[xx] Cannabinoids suppress inflammatory and neuropathic pain by targeting α3 glycine receptors

[xxi] CBDWorld: Using Hemp CBD Oil to Treat Our Dogs

[xxii] Cannabidiol as an emergent therapeutic strategy for lessening the impact of inflammation on oxidative stress

[xxiii] Cannabidiol, a non-psychotropic component of cannabis, attenuates vomiting and nausea-like behaviour via indirect agonism of 5-HT(1A) somatodendritic autoreceptors in the dorsal raphe nucleus.

[xxiv] Cancer.gov: Cannabis and Cannabinoids (PDQ®)–Patient Version

[xxv] Cancer.gov: Cannabis and Cannabinoids (PDQ®)–Health Professional Version

[xxvi] Cancer.org: Marijuana and Cancer

[xxvii] Phyto-, endo- and synthetic cannabinoids: promising chemotherapeutic agents in the treatment of breast and prostate carcinomas

[xxviii] Cannabidiol-Induced Apoptosis in Human Leukemia Cells: A Novel Role of Cannabidiol in the Regulation of p22phox and Nox4 Expression

[xxix] Cannabinoids increase lung cancer cell lysis by lymphokine-activated killer cells via upregulation of ICAM-1.

[xxx] Cannabidiol rather than Cannabis sativa extracts inhibit cell growth and induce apoptosis in cervical cancer cells

[xxxi] The Guardian: Pets on pot: is medical marijuana giving sick animals a necessary dose of relief?

[xxxii] Project CBD: Irritable Bowel

[xxxiii] Antibacterial cannabinoids from Cannabis sativa: a structure-activity study.

[xxxiv] Cannabinoids in intestinal inflammation and cancer.

[xxxv] Cannabinoids decrease the th17 inflammatory autoimmune phenotype.

[xxxvi] Cannabidiol and (−)Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol are neuroprotective antioxidants

[xxxvii] Cannabidiol for neurodegenerative disorders: important new clinical applications for this phytocannabinoid?

[xxxviii] Acute administration of cannabidiol in vivo suppresses ischaemia-induced cardiac arrhythmias and reduces infarct size when given at reperfusion

[xxxix] Effects of cannabidiol and diazepam on behavioral and cardiovascular responses induced by contextual conditioned fear in rats

[xl] Dogs Naturally Magazine: CBD Oil for Dogs

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spookyenemyperson-blog · 7 years ago

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how to say insurance quote in spanish

"how to say insurance quote in spanish

how to say insurance quote in spanish

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://freecarinsurance.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr

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I have been driving for a year now and am going to be 19 in august. i have been looking for a new car and have narrowed it down to audi tt or a5 both 1.8t. they are both insurance group 14 or so but i cant get a quote online. would any be able to tell me how much it would roughly cost if i went on my mums insurance with 5 yrs no claims. i dont even mind having a 3rd party theft policy. thank you

Car Insurance for 16 year old son?

Hey, Im a 16 year old boy turning 17 in 5 months. I have been eligable to get a license since December 23,2011. My parents dont want me to get it ONLY because the insurance will cost too much. I live in Florida. I only want to be a secondary on the insurance and im not going to own my own car. Will it really cost that much? I havent gotten any driving penaltys or anything like that.""

""How much would you expect a family of three making 40,000 a year to pay for health insurance?

This should be interesting. How much?

On getting a quote for car insurance I am not sure if i qualify for no claims bonus.?

Looking for good company to buy term life insurance?

My husband and I recently purchased a home and have a baby on the way. We are desperately searching for a solid insurance company to purchase a 20yr level term life policy. I have gotten a quote from an independent insurance agent that suggested for Primerica at $95/mo (for both of us with a disability waiver rider) (note: agent is family member), one from SelectQuote for Banner Life (never heard of them) at $64.97/mo for same coverage and waiver, and one from another insurance finder for ING at $72.70. ING has had a good rating but I think they have just been demoted slightly from AM Best and S&P. Any info I find online for customer reviews are all negative for every company I look at (not a single positive review for any). I'm not quite sure how these rates vary so widely. I would rather spend a couple extra dollars a month for peace of mind but I am truly at a loss of what to do. Can anyone make any suggestions or recommendations for a company to go with or look into? Thanks.""

Insurance for a 17 year old male?!?

Ill be turning 17 soon and ill be taking driving lessons. Ive been looking at car insurance for a 1.2 renault clio ( cheapest quote 5000) 1.1 citroen saxo(couldnt get a quote but when i did 14,000. Whats the best ways to get it cheaper. I also tried a 1.1 peugot 206 and still its around 7000. Thats for 3rd party fire and theft.""

What is an insurance quote?

Can someone explain to me just what the heck an insurance quote is?

Car insurance renewal - is it compulsory ?

I had accident earlier this year(few months ago) wasn't my fault and other side admitted it but they still haven't paid for damages so the case is still open. I have been told by my car insurance company that they don't know where is the problem but as final bill hasn't been paid as a result my car renewal will go up as my previous 4 years no claim will vanish for now. Apparently once the other side pays what they should then they reduce my monthly payments accordingly as they take no claims years(this is 5 th year into account.) My question is : 1. is this correct what I said so far(or been told) 2. Do I have to renew my car insurance which expired last week even if I don't drive my car which is safely parked on my driveway(off road) ? Can I pay later lets say next month ? this is due my finance difficulties and I hope that other side pays by then and so I pay much less insurance. Professional advice would be great ! Thanks for reading :-)

How much would insurance cost for a 1990 pontiac firebird?

I am 17 and a new driver but I was going to buy a 1990 firebird and I was wondering what the average price I would have to pay for this car

What is cheapest 33bhp bike to insure?

Hi , I'm 16 and 17 soon and thinking of taking my A2 bike test which will restrict me to 33bhp i know i can buy a big bike and get it restricted but not all insurance companies cover that and the one's that do are rip off's. so does anybody know the cheapest 33bhp bike to insure, i would like it to be a 250cc or over because 125cc are to slow for motorway or modified till the insurance don't mean nothing. Thank you .""

Car insurance with dwi?

I went to a bar in upstate ny to see a friend's band play. I was drinking at the bar, so I decided to stay at a friend's house down the road (walk there obviously). Someone I thought was my friend took my car to go home ( I left the keys in the ignition ). I know I'm a dumb *** for leaving the keys in the car, don't flame me for that please. Anyways this guy got pulled over by the cops and got a dwi. The car was legally parked when they pulled him over so it didn't get impounded. My question is will my insurance go up? I wasn't driving the car and this guy had no license or any kind of insurance whatsoever. He was also under 21 if that helps and no I didn't report the car stolen. But when the cops questioned him he just told them he took the car.""

How much would insurance for a 2002 chevy tahoe cost? ?

ok im 14 and im taking drivers ed this summer when im 14 1/2 to get my learners permit and for my car im getting a 2002 chevy tahoe or a 2004 Cadillac escalade and i was wondering how much the insurance would be for them? not the full coverage but the liability insurance and we're on state farm insurance and i live in a pretty low crime town in montana so my car probably wouldn't get stolen or broken into

Cost of health insurance?

How much does health insurance cost per year if I pay for myself instead of my employer paying for it? I would pay through my employer's group insurance and mine is a family of three (including a child of 4 yrs). I am a contractor and I will be moving through the country quite a bit in which case would the insurance rates be from the state from where the employer is from or should it be as per the state where i am residing? How does insurance cost vary from state to state?

Temporary car insurance??

so I just bought a car that I'll get from the dealership tommorow night and I need it right away. the problem is that it is my first car and my insurance needs to take 15 days to ...show more

Is it mean to cancel the kids' health insurance?

I pay for all of the health insurance through my job, including his. I told hime that he has 15 days to some for himself and 30 days to get some for the children. He thinks that is a horrible mother because it would all cost me $300 a month but it will cost him $1200 per month. He make 260K per year. I make $70K He he moved out and got involved with someone else. Why should it be free to destroy your family? I really should have done this four months ago when he moved out.""

What are the other things do I have to pay for besides the car and insurance?

Okay my budget for my first car will be 1000 pounds insurance will be about 4000 or even more...whats MOT and Tax? what about breakdown cover? I'm thinking about getting breakdown cover because I dont really have anyone to call if i'm in trouble...it would save me the embarassment...

Why is it a requirement to have a car insurance in the UK?

i have just passed my driving test last week. i already have ford fiesta (its so loud). why would i want to insure my car against what. what is car insurance about? what/where is the cheapest company to go and why? what are the benefits of car insurance?

Should i gain my CBT license to lower insurance on a 125cc scooter?

I currently have a full driving license and interested in buying a scooter. To lower insurance even further should I gain my CBT license or any other awareness courses?

What are some affordable model of cars to insure?

I will be purchasing my first car in a few months. I need something safe and reliable, as well because I have two small children. What model of car would you recommend?""

What car insurance do you like?

I'm an adult and looking for a good car insurance that's pretty affordable for the age group 18-24. I know that's it's more expensive for young adults due to reckless driving. I want esurance but I was looking for opinions on others I haven't thought about yet.

How much would car insurance be for a 16 year old girl with a mustang?

I will be turning 16 and getting my license in January and i plan on getting a Mustang 2008 GT not certain the color yet although i understand that affects the cost of insurance. Its most likely to be red, which i also understand it will cost more for red. Anyways it will be a convertible. So i would just like an estimate on monthly cost for insurance. and if your one of those adults that is just gonna mouth off that its not reasonable for a teen to get a mustang convertible, your just trying to look cool ect ect, please dont, adults always feel the need to be snarky i just am asking what you estimate is thank you for your time!(:""

How can I get insurance for my car?

I bought a car yesterday to use as a parts car to repair things I need for my other car.My other car is in my mom's name and on her insurance policy, however, the new car is in MY name. I need proof of insurance to have the car registered so that I can get tags for it, but I don't need real insurance for it. The car I bought isn't drivable and I had it towed to my house. Is there an insurance company that will offer me a very cheap policy? I'm under eighteen. I need someone to help me figure out what to do. I live in Virginia. If someone could help answer this, it would be greatly appreciated.""

Best health insurance for young single people?

I'm looking for informaiton about health insurance for a single, young man...he is 27. Are there any affordable policies out there that may provide minimal coverage (annual well visit, a couple sick visits, one prescription, some emergency?)""

How much would my car insurance cost?

im 16 years old and i have a job i have 2 grand saved up in the bank and my gpa is about 2,6 would it really be expensive or not the car i am drving is a 93 honda acorrd""

Cost of insurance for 2nd gen Toyota Mr2?

Would you pay a higher insurance on this car than a normal car? what about a turbo? I got an online insurance quote and it was about $600/year for liability and $1000/year for collision coverage, does this seem like a fair price? I'm almost 19 years old and have a clean drivers record.""

Teen Car Insurance + Accidents Clarification?

I'm a 16 year old girl who just got her license in March. A week after I got my license, I rear ended another car while driving my mom's new car that is insured. We got it fixed and only had to pay the 500 dollar deductible. I do not have my own car. My sister, who is 19, has her own car that is not covered for collision. My dad's car is not covered for collision either. My sister just got into an accident, rear ending someone as well. I really need to get a car next year for work and such but my parents said my insurance would be high enough already with both of me and my sister's accidents. Couldn't I just buy a car on my own and not get collision coverage on it like my dad and sister's cars? Would that be cheaper? I really don't know how car insurance works at all, i only know what my parents tell me, so any help would be appreciated :) Oh, and if it matters, I went to traffic school after my accident to remove the points against my driving record (I think that's what it did) My sister had already gone to traffic school recently for a speeding ticket so she can't go again for her accident.""

What is the cheapest car insurance?

Hi, I need car insurance but I really don't have a lot of money to spend on car insurance. I need the cheapest possible. I've tried Progressive & Harley's Ville and both were way too expensive. Progressive has given me so many issues it is ridiculous. What is the cheapest car insurance. Please?!""

What is considered full coverage on auto insurance?

i have progressive and i just wanted to know what is really considered full coverage. please no rude answers!

Driving without insurance?

I got pulled over for driving someone else's car in the wrong lane. He had his insurance in the glove box, but all i had was my license. I got my license less than a month ago, but dont have any insurance of my own. i got a ticket for improper lane and have to go to court. Is there a grace period for insurance or am i completely and utterly screwed? I live in Illinois btw""

On getting a quote for car insurance I am not sure if i qualify for no claims bonus.?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-insurance-premium-motorcycle-125cc-cassiopeia-najera"

0 notes

chemochronicles · 7 years ago

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The Day That Happened. Gas station poop dilemmas and other stories: A Day in the Life with severe Chronic Graft vs Host Disease.

This is my gas station poop story. If you can’t handle it, I warmly invite you to stop reading.

First things first: a small update. I don’t have energy to write a full one, but this has been the hardest physical month of my life living daily with chronic GVHD thus far. I had a few different separate bad reactions a few weeks ago which put me in the ER, unable to open my eyes or mouth in all severe pain, or move my body without severe scleroderma skin hardening/tightening/cracking pain nonstop for around 5 days. My team wanted me to be an inpatient for two weeks for pain management and IV nutrition but they didn’t have any beds available. Thankfully it’s much more comfortable for me to be at home though with all of my autoimmune relief protocols so it worked out better. I’ll share a better update when I have less going on… the good news is though, I am seeing small results from the photopheresis blood treatments, my skin is improving little by little. Which means that they’re working for now, and we hope to see more improvements as the months pass! Please keep praying! I also had a little accident where I lost the first layer of my eye and now have large (not visible) wounds on the outer later, the last few days I haven’t been able to open them at all but thanks to the help of a friend I was able to get this finally put together! I am waiting to get an appointment to have these special PROSE (prosthetic) eye contact lenses made, as well as special blood serum tears spun from 30 viles of my own blood from the only clinic in California who offers this technology, in Irvine. What a blessing that I have this accessible to me! My eyes are so dry they’ve been unable to heal, and I can’t open my eyes at all without heavy pain killers. So please pray that my eyes would miraculously heal quicker than we expect, or that all of these processes would be expedited. All of my issues are very specific and require specialists who book out pretty far in advance.

Back to my story!

The day that happened.

The morning started off better than usual. My acupuncturist who has become one of my favorite people in the world lent me her very own healing mini biomat. She has a full sized Amethyst Biomat in her office that is amazing if you go 2-3x a week for chronic inflammatory health issues. But she wanted to see if using a portable size one at home each night might make a difference with all of my severe symptoms, so she let me borrow her personal one to try sleeping on and using whenever I have time at home during the day for two weeks. God is so kind to place so many sweet people in my life who are going out of their way to help me!

Not gonna lie, I was skeptical. I have tried many wellness tech devices in clinics and at home and didn’t expect much more of this one. But my goodness, does that thing make a world of a difference when you’re using it consistently for insomnia, chronic pain, chronic fatigue and so much more! I could sing it’s praises and would love to learn more about this technology so I can share more and help my other chronic pain suffering friends!

SPEAKING OF WHICH! Kathleen and I put together a little Spring Seasonal discount for my friends and readers, if you’re interested in trying the full sized Amethyst Healing Biomat that she has available to reserve for 30 minutes in her space. She’d like to extend a little discount to you as well as a free acupuncture consultation to those who are interested. She has helped me reverse many of my food allergies, other environmental sensitivities, and helps me SO much with my other severe symptoms as well, which all in turn has helped me along this path. She works a lot using acupressure with kids, helping them reverse their health issues by balancing out their allergies! She’s a wonderful resource that I’d be selfish to keep to myself! I love it when my friends are able to both be helped and also supported by the people who’ve helped me! I’ll share details at the bottom! ♥️

Anyways. I was pleasantly surprised and a complete believer after using it every day for two weeks. So when most mornings I wake up feeling like I got hit by a train until I wait for pain relief to kick in, I woke up feeling better than I had in months. I was only in 5/10 pain as opposed to the usual 7/10. My sandpaper eyes were still glued shut but once I finished my two hour morning biohacking wellness routine I was ready to leave the house less tempted to have a bad attitude, which is everything for me these days!

Earlier that week a sweet friend dropped off the most amazing Julia Child worthy home baked rotisserie chicken, to which I used the leftover bones to make some pretty incredible broth! I was feeling blessings surrounding me from every side in the midst of all of those storms raging. I hadn’t been able to eat solid food in over a month or two and haven’t been able to function (eat / drink / talk / + constant sharp pain caused by ulcers, scleroderma hardening & tightening limiting the ability to swallow and also meanwhile thinning of the mucous membrane lining of my cheeks and tongue and other inside skin, causing severe sensitivity to even water) without lidocaine for a few weeks. So any taste of flavor without tears was a major win! My mom came and picked me up around noon to leave to see my natural doctor. She’s 90, and a naturopath with PhD’s in nutrition and biochemistry and is also a super sweet believer who works within the field of energy medicine, along with analyzing blood work and balancing the body using Russian astronaut biofeedback technology. (I could nerd OUT about wellness tech, guys. All day LONG!)

She has saved my life SEVERAL times over the last 8 years in some seriously hard times when the field of medicine wasn’t able to! So the morning was GOOD! It took me an hour and a half on the drive there to drink my bone broth with small bites of fresh soft sourdough with ghee on top for lunch. It only hurt maybe 4/10 instead of the usual 8!!! But I FINISHED it! It was the first meal I completed since I couldn’t remember! I played Oh Happy Day and rejoiced at that win for a few minutes.

The appointment was wonderful as always but super long because she invests time and care into each patient. I was drained. And by drained, I mean I couldn’t open my eyes, mouth, or lift a finger. When I say drained, I mean debilitating exhaustion caused by adrenal failure (what happens when you take steroids for too long, but that’s also how they TREAT GVHD! So. It’s a pickle that I’m in! We were parked on the freeway at 6:30pm. My GVHD of the GI tract decided to take its vengeance out on me at this pinnacle moment… we stopped at a Starbucks just in time… it’s hard to move because scleroderma has hardened and tightened the skin on my body from the neck down, and sometimes that causes people to eventually be in wheelchairs or on oxygen because of the loss of mobility. So I’m fighting hard against that with physical therapy and everything else… but the struggle is real!

We get back on the freeway, and sure enough, I feel another rumble. We hurry off to a well lit gas station. I hurry in and ask the Lord to please help me NOT recreate any dumb and dumber scenes. I guess this is my life now. This is fine. Ugh, do I have to start wearing depends? Does this mean I can’t wear my beloved leggings anymore? Who am I?! All these thoughts keep running through my mind. This is not my home.

This. Is. Not. My. Home.

A grizzly looking man with an eye patch and a reflective neon yellow vest with the bathroom key walks past me into the bathroom. He looks at me as he closes the door with a dirty looking gender neutral sign hanging on the back. I look nervous. He looks like the kind of man who might intentionally miss his aim. Excellent.

I’m dizzy so I lean against a magazine stand, close my eyes and continue to pour my heart out to my Counselor through each tummy grumble… in that moment, when life just felt unbearable… I was just so done. I love Caleb. I adore him. I would give absolutely anything to make him happy. My love for him and my fear of God are what keeps me motivated to stay alive and fight every minute of the day. And it’s a true driving motivation.

But in that moment… I was selfish. It was cold. My joints have been getting severely painful in the cold, it makes me shiver and have trouble breathing and then I start to panic. I was begging God to help me not have an accident right there on that gas station store floor. I asked God to please help me not catch any of these nasty germs that I was unable to fight off in this dirty bathroom. Asking Him to give me strength to breathe through the cold, strength to breathe through my anxiety, through the scleroderma breathing issues and grant me enough range of mobility in my skin during those few cold steps to the bathroom without crying from the joint, skin, lung, ulcer, eye, mouth and tummy pain. So in that moment… and in light of all the thousands of moments each day perfectly mimicking that one… I begged God to please, just let some crazy psycho come in and just shoot me in the back of the head really nice, painless and fast (Don’t worry friends I’m not remotely suicidal).

It’s funny the things you start to pray for when your body is failing.

It seems trivial now to pray for things like my finger nails to stop falling out, my hair to grow back, to be able to wear jeans and heels again… To attend church, to serve, to live, to be a mother someday… when in the same breath each minute, I’m also asking God to grant me the strength to help me take another step, another breath, and help me to chew and swallow an entire meal in without a single tear or regurgitation.

Life is a funny thing.

And I also say that, with 100% peace, assurance, confidence and joy. I am rejoicing in HOPE in JESUS through every impossible step.

Guys, I’m THIS low, there’s no confident end in sight. This is just my life now. I don’t know if I’m going to have to suffer with this for another long and painful 50 years like Joni Earickson Tada has had to endure, if I’m going to happily die and see my Savior’s face next year or if I’m going to happily heal and God will use Caleb and I mightily together here until it’s time to go to the comfort and glorious perfection of Home.

But in light of Romans 8, I have never been able to say more confidently that God is good. In light of THAT, I can truly laugh at the days to come! Proverbs 31:25. So if you’re truly a believer, stop complaining. You’re gonna be fine. Rejoice in hope!

Anyways. Icky grizzly man walks out and hands me your typical long black gas station bathroom key holder and key. They’re wet. And there’s no napkins in there. I’m still asking Jesus for help throughout this entire process because without His strength I, millennially, just “CANT EVEN.“

So there I am.

MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS.

LITERALLY. 💩

Thinking that the door is locked… because… I have the lock and key. And that’s how those things work.

So there I am… giving my body the release it needed… when BOOM. The door SWINGS NICE AND WIDE OPEN.

I’m not usually abrupt in that type of a situation when I know it’s an accident. But this girl, probably around my age lingered way too long with that door wide open for all to see so I yell at her, “CLOSE THE DOOR! I’m sorry! I thought it was locked! Please close it!!! CLOSE IT! PLEASE CLOSE IT! CLOSE THE DOOR!” Oh my gosh, does this girl not speak English? Hmm.. I’m trying to frantically remember Spanish (to which I failed in high school twice) and draw an unsurprising blank. Isn’t this common sense!? Can she not see and smell what is happening right now!?!?

This girl had to have been on something. Because she just gives me this entitled expression and says, “ummm I have to go!?!?”

I tell her again, “You need to wait! Close the door! CLOSE THE DOOR PLEASE! PLEASE CLOSE THE DOOR! CLOSE THE DOOR! GET OUT!”

Oh Lord help me.

Oh my gosh people. Meanwhile. REAL LIFE IS HAPPENING AND THE DOOR IS WIDE OPEN FOR ALL THE GAS STATION CUSTOMERS TO SEE MY EXPOSED SELF AND MY SCENT IS NOT REMOTELY RESEMBLING IT’S USUALLY BEAUTIFUL AROMA AND OH MY GOSH CAN LIFE POSSIBLY GET ANY WORSE RIGHT NOW.

The door swings wide open and closed maybe 10 times. She keeps repeating herself. Many expletives are running through my mind but none seem adequate or appropriate to say out loud as I was literally just talking to Jesus like 30 seconds ago. I finish, clean myself up and try to exit the bathroom but she stops me at the door and gets in my face and says…

CAN I HAVE FIVE DOLLARS?!

And at this point I’m just GIDDY! I mean come on, this is COMEDY GOLD.

WHAT IS MY LIFE!?!? 😂

So I respond by saying… I AM SO SICK AND YOU JUST RAN ME OUT OF THE BATHROOM WITH DIARRHEA, NO, YOU CANNOT HAVE FIVE DOLLARS.

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

But you guys, this entire day was worth it because of that moment. And that story. Because who else can say that they’ve literally been ran out of a gas station bathroom with diarrhea AND heckled for money at the same time!?

I win. 👍🏻

And that, my friends, is my gas station poop story. That was just another average day in my life! What else can you do but embrace the inevitable chaos? God likes slapstick potty humor too I guess, haha.😂.

The struggle is real. But so is Jesus.

The end.

PS.

My acupuncturist Kathleen and I put together a little Spring Seasonal discount for my friends and readers. If you’re interested in trying the full sized Amethyst Healing Biomat to see if it’d help with any of your chronic pain, inflammation issues, or just would like a nice, warm & quiet rejuvenating 30 minute self care treatment, she would like to extend a little discount to you guys! If you call her office which is in a shared wellness center in Canyon Country 661-252-4100 and schedule your first biomat session with Kennealley Acupuncture, mention me (Elisabeth Effinger) or my Chemo Chronicles blog. From March 20 through June 20 you’ll recurve a 30 minute relaxing, warm pain relieving biomat session for $20 instead of $35 and a free 20 minute acupuncture consultation. If you or any of your children or family members struggle with food sensitivities or unexplainable symptoms, she might be able to help you too. She is certified in an allergy elimination technique, she’s actually helped a LOT of kids and families in the SCV area by helping remove food allergies using acupuncture (or acupressure for kids).

0 notes

clamonnaturalhealth · 7 years ago

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Multiple Sclerosis Major Improvement

this is from friend that has adult MS, she bought a bottle about 5 days ago…….. Oh and by the way… We got in them drops last week and we both been taking them twice a day now for about 5 days now… And it seems to be helping Heather… She was able to walk Walmart today better than she had been and she has been able to pretty much stop taking her moloxicam & neurotin…

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From Jennifer

I just burned the heck out of my hand with a flat-iron while doing my hair. I put one drop of Hempworx on it and it stopped the burning immediately, and this is the Peppermint! I thought the Peppermint may make it hurt worse, but nope! I totally recommend this for something as simple as burns. It works! Update: No blister today! Read on the rest of these testimonials are truly amazing, too!!!!! For more information or to place an order go HERE.

Susan shares:

Long testimony! I have suffered for 20 years from fibromyalgia, horrible headaches, super tight painful muscles, stiff joints, depression and anxiety. Most recently March 2016 I suffered a hip injury, started limping which caused greater trochanter bursitis, tendinitis, and I have been limping ever since. This caused problems with my SI joint, muscle spasms in my legs, and plantar fasciitis. I have gotten injections every 4 months just so I could continue working. My quality of life sucked because I was in so much pain. This wonderful woman ordered some CBD oil for me and told me to take it. It took me 4 days to try it and the only reason I did was because My pain kept me from sleeping and I could barely get out of bed. I started out with half a dropper full of 500 mg and It started working immediately! I could feel my muscles instantly relaxing. I’ve been taking half a dropper 2x a day for 2 weeks and I feel like a well oiled machine! I don’t have any joint pain at all and I feel like my whole body moves so smooth. I am not limping anymore and my plantar fasciitis is better. I don’t even think about taking my anxiety medicine because I feel so calm. My headaches are almost non existent and I can go for days without ibuprofen or Tylenol. I am in such a good mood because I feel great! This stuff is a miracle and I wish I would’ve found it sooner. All this stuff didn’t happen overnight..it happened gradually so give it time to work and take it consistently. Thank you God! CBD Oil Is it Legal? What is it? Will it Help Me?

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From Kelli:

HERE IS MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE::: Well, folks. Its been a week since i started giving Sierra the CBD OIL in place of her 20 mg Adderall 3X daily. I guess i should start this by telling you all that Sierra has ADD/ADHD/ & ODD. While the pills do work, they have horrible side effects, such as thoughts of suicide, depression, sleepiness,and not to mention the horrible mood swings, plus many more that i wont go into. Sierra isn’t quite 15 yet. She has always been on the Honers Roll and been a top student. However, she can sometimes be mean, both physically and emotionaly. I researched this product for months. After all, I was going to be giving it to my child. After seeing other parents sharing about the results that they were having i decided to give it a try. I absolutely HATE giving my child her prescribed medication almost as much as i hated the side affects it gave her. For the past week i have been giving Sierra 5 drops in the morning and 5 drops in the evening. I stopped the medication completely before doing this several days before hand. Her and i both noticed a difference on day 2!!! Not only did i not have to fight with her to take it, but she actually said, “Hey mom, do i take that calming oil again today?” That is NOT normal for her. Within just a cpl of days of taking this oil her mouthing and meaness has all but subsided. There is no more anxiety, her ADHD/ADD is non existant to those around her, and her ODD is nowhere in sight. I cannot tell you how happy I am that i gave this product a try. I am now taking it myself for my pain from my endometriosis and since i started taking it i haven’t taken any over the counter or prescribed meds for pain. I absolutely love this oil and i fell so very grateful that i was introduced to it. All You Need to Know About CBD and Anxiety (Infographic)

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DISCLAIMER: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers non-THC based hemp products to be “food based” and therefore legal without a medical marijuana license.

CBD Oil Testimonials (more from Hempworx amazing stories of healing) Multiple Sclerosis Major Improvement this is from friend that has adult MS, she bought a bottle about 5 days ago........

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Sickening, gruelling or frightful: how doctors measure pain | John Walsh

The Long Read: Suffering is difficult to describe and impossible to see. So how can doctors tell how much it hurts?

One night in May, my wife sat up in bed and said, Ive got this awful pain just here. She prodded her abdomen and made a face. It feels like somethings really wrong. Woozily noting that it was 2am, I asked what kind of pain it was. Like somethings biting into me and wont stop, she said.

Hold on, I said blearily, help is at hand. I brought her a couple of ibuprofen with some water, which she downed, clutching my hand and waiting for the ache to subside.

An hour later, she was sitting up in bed again, in real distress. Its worse now, she said, really nasty. Can you phone the doctor? Miraculously, the family doctor answered the phone at 3am, listened to her recital of symptoms and concluded, It might be your appendix. Have you had yours taken out? No, she hadnt. It could be appendicitis, he surmised, but if it was dangerous youd be in much worse pain than youre in. Go to the hospital in the morning, but for now, take some paracetamol and try to sleep.

Barely half an hour later, the balloon went up. She was awakened for the third time, but now with a pain so savage and uncontainable it made her howl. The time for murmured assurances and spousal procrastination was over. I rang a local minicab, struggled into my clothes, bundled her into a dressing gown, and we sped to St Marys Paddington at just before 4am.

The flurry of action made the pain subside, if only through distraction, and we sat for hours while doctors brought forms to be filled, took her blood pressure and ran tests. A registrar poked a needle into my wifes wrist and said, Does that hurt? Does that? How about that? before concluding: Impressive. You have a very high pain threshold.

The pain was from pancreatitis, brought on by rogue gallstones that had escaped from her gall bladder and made their way, like fleeing convicts, to a refuge in her pancreas, causing agony. She was given a course of antibiotics and, a month later, had an operation to remove her gall bladder.

Its keyhole surgery, said the surgeon breezily, so youll be back to normal very soon. Some people feel well enough to take the bus home after the operation. His optimism was misplaced. My wife came home the following day filled with painkillers. When they wore off, she writhed with suffering. After three days she rang the specialist, only to be told: Its not the operation thats causing discomfort its the air that was pumped inside you to separate the organs before surgery. Once the operation had proved a success, the surgeons had apparently lost interest in the fallout.

During that period of convalescence, as I watched her grimace and clench her teeth and let slip little cries of anguish until a long regimen of combined ibuprofen and codeine finally conquered the pain, several questions came into my head. Chief among them was: Can anyone in the medical profession talk about pain with any authority? From the family doctor to the surgeon, their remarks and suggestions seemed tentative, generalised, unknowing and potentially dangerous: Was it right for the doctor to tell my wife that her level of pain didnt sound like appendicitis when the doctor didnt know whether she had a high or low pain threshold? Should he have advised her to stay in bed and risk her appendix exploding into peritonitis? How could surgeons predict that patients would feel only discomfort after such an operation when she felt agony an agony that was aggravated by fear that the operation had been a failure?

I also wondered if there were any agreed words that would help a doctor understand the pain felt by a patient. I thought of my father, a GP in the 1960s with an NHS practice in south London, who used to marvel at the colourful pain symptoms he heard: Its like Ive been attacked with a stapler; Like having rabbits running up and down my spine; Its like someones opened a cocktail umbrella in my penis Few of them, he told me, corresponded to the symptoms listed in a medical textbook. So how should he proceed? By guesswork and aspirin?

There seemed to be a chasm of understanding in human discussions of pain. I wanted to find out how the medical profession apprehends pain the language it uses for something thats invisible to the naked eye, that cant be measured except by asking for the sufferers subjective description, and that can be treated only by the use of opium derivatives that go back to the middle ages.

When investigating pain, the basic procedure for clinics everywhere is to give a patient the McGill pain questionnaire. Developed in the 1970s by two scientists, Dr Ronald Melzack and Dr Warren Torgerson, both of McGill University in Montreal, it is still the main tool for measuring pain in clinics worldwide.

Melzack and his colleague Dr Patrick Wall of St Thomas Hospital in London had already galvanised the field of pain research in 1965 with their seminal gate control theory, a ground-breaking explanation of how psychology can affect the bodys perception of pain. In 1984, the pair went on to write Wall and Melzacks Textbook of Pain, the most comprehensive reference work in pain medicine. It has gone through five editions and is currently more than 1,000 pages long.

In the early 1970s, Melzack began to list the words patients used to describe their pain and classified them into three categories: sensory (which included heat, pressure, throbbing or pounding sensations), affective (which related to emotional effects, such as tiring, sickening, gruelling or frightful) and lastly evaluative (evocative of an experience from annoying and troublesome to horrible, unbearable and excruciating).

You dont have to be a linguistic genius to see there are shortcomings in this range of terms. For one thing, some words in the affective and evaluative categories seem interchangeable theres no difference between frightful in the former and horrible in the latter, or between tiring and annoying and all the words share an unfortunate quality of sounding like a duchess complaining about a ball that didnt meet her standards.

But Melzacks grid of suffering formed the basis of what became the McGill pain questionnaire. The patient listens as a list of pain descriptors is read out and has to say whether each word describes their pain and, if so, to rate the intensity of the feeling. The clinicians then look at the questionnaire and put check marks in the appropriate places. This gives the clinician a number, or a percentage figure, to work with in assessing, later, whether a treatment has brought the patients pain down (or up).

A more recent variant is the National Initiative on Pain Controls pain quality assessment scale (PQAS), in which patients are asked to indicate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how intense or sharp, hot, dull, cold, sensitive, tender, itchy, etc their pain has been over the past week.

The trouble with this approach is the imprecision of that scale of 1 to 10, where a 10 would be the most intense pain sensation imaginable. How does a patient imagine the worst pain ever and give their own pain a number? Some men may find it hard to imagine anything more agonising than toothache or a tennis injury. Women who have experienced childbirth may, after that experience, rate everything else as a 3 or 4.

I asked some friends what they thought the worst physical pain might be. Inevitably, they just described nasty things that had happened to them. One man nominated gout. He recalled lying on a sofa, with his gouty foot resting on a pillow, when a visiting aunt passed by; the chiffon scarf she was wearing slipped from her neck and lightly touched his foot. It was unbearable agony.

A brother-in-law nominated post-root-canal toothache unlike muscular or back pain, he said, it couldnt be alleviated by shifting your posture. It was relentless. A male friend confided that a haemorrhoidectomy had left him with irritable bowel syndrome, in which a daily spasm made him feel as if somebody had shoved a stirrup pump up my arse and was pumping furiously. The pain was, he said, boundless, as if it wouldnt stop until I exploded. A woman friend recalled the moment the hem of her husbands trouser leg snagged on her big toe, ripping the nail clean off. She used a musical analogy to explain the effect: Id been through childbirth, Id broken my leg and I recalled them both as low moaning noises, like cellos; the ripped-off nail was excruciating, a great, high, deafening shriek of psychopathic violins, like nothing Id heard or felt before.

It seems a shame that these eloquent descriptions are reduced by the McGill questionnaire to words like throbbing or sharp, but its function is simply to give pain a number a number that will, with luck, be decreased after treatment, when the patient is reassessed.

This procedure doesnt impress Professor Stephen McMahon of the London Pain Consortium, an organisation formed in 2002 to promote internationally competitive research into pain. There are lots of problems that come with trying to measure pain, he says. I think the obsession with numbers is an oversimplification. Pain is not unidimensional. It doesnt just come with scale a lot or a little it comes with other baggage: how threatening it is, how emotionally disturbing, how it affects your ability to concentrate. The measuring obsession probably comes from the regulators who think that, to understand drugs, you have to show efficacy. And the American Food and Drug Administration dont like quality-of-life assessments; they like hard numbers. So were thrown back on giving it a number and scoring it. Its a bit of a wasted exercise because its only one dimension of pain that were capturing.

Illustration: Matthew Richardson

Pain can be either acute or chronic, and the words do not (as some people think) mean bad and very bad. Acute pain means a temporary or one-off feeling of discomfort, which is usually treated with drugs; chronic pain persists over time and has to be lived with as a malevolent everyday companion. But because patients build up a resistance to drugs, other forms of treatment must be found for it.

The Pain Management and Neuromodulation Centre at Guys and St Thomas Hospital in central London is the biggest pain centre in Europe. Heading the team there is Dr Adnan Al-Kaisy, who studied medicine at the University of Basrah, Iraq, and later worked in anaesthetics at specialist centres in England, the US and Canada.

Id say that 55 to 60% of our patients suffer from lower back pain, he says. The reason is, simply, that we dont pay attention to the demands life makes on us, the way we sit, stand, walk and so on. We sit for hours in front of a computer, with the body putting heavy pressure on small joints in the back. Al-Kaisy reckons that in the UK the incidence of chronic lower back pain has increased substantially in the last 15 to 20 years, and that the cost in lost working days is about 6 to 7 billion.

Elsewhere the clinic treats those suffering from severe chronic headaches and injuries from accidents that affect the nervous system.

Do they still use the McGill questionnaire? Unfortunately yes, says Al-Kaisy. Its a subjective measurement. But pain can be magnified by a domestic argument or trouble at work, so we try to find out about the patients life their sleeping patterns, their ability to walk and stand, their appetite. Its not just the patients condition, its also their environment.

The challenge is to transform this information into scientific data. Were working with Professor Raymond Lee, chair of Biomechanics at the South Bank University, to see if there can be objective measurement of a patients disability due to pain, he says. Theyre trying to develop a tool, rather like an accelerometer, which will give an accurate impression of how active or disabled they are, and tell us the cause of their pain from the way they sit or stand. Were really keen to get away from just asking the patient how bad their pain is.

Some patients arrive with pains that are far worse than backache and require special treatment. Al-Kaisy describes one patient let us call him Carter who suffered from a terrible condition called ilioinguinal neuralgia, a disorder that produces a severe burning and stabbing pain in the groin. Hed had an operation in the testicular area, and the inguinal nerve had been cut. The pain was excruciating: when he came to us, he was on four or five different medications, opiates with very high dosages, anticonvulsive medication, opioid patches, paracetamol and ibuprofen on top of that. His life was turned upside down, his job was on the line. The utterly stricken Carter was to become one of Al-Kaisys big successes.

Since 2010, Guys and St Thomas has offered a residential programme for adults whose chronic pain hasnt responded to treatment at other clinics. The patients come in for four weeks, away from their normal environment, and are seen by a motley crew of psychologists, physiotherapists, occupational health specialists and nursing physicians who between them devise a programme to teach them strategies for managing their pain.

Many of these strategies come under the heading of neuromodulation, a term you hear a lot in pain management circles. In simple terms, it means distracting the brain from constantly brooding on the pain signals it is getting from the bodys periphery. Sometimes the distraction is a cunningly deployed electric shock.

We were the first centre in the world to pioneer spinal cord stimulation, says Al-Kaisy. In pain occasions, overactive nerves send impulses from the periphery to the spinal cord and from there to the brain, which starts to register pain. We try to send small bolts of electricity to the spinal cord by inserting a wire in the epidural area. Its only one or two volts, so the patient feels just a tingling sensation over where the pain is, instead of feeling the actual pain. After two weeks, we give the patient an internal power battery with a remote control, so he can switch it on whenever he feels pain and carry on with his life. Its essentially a pacemaker that suppresses the hyperexcitability of nerves by delivering subthreshold stimulation. The patient feels nothing except his pain going down. Its not invasive we usually send patients home the same day.

When Carter, suffering from agonising pain in the groin, had failed to respond to any other treatments, Al-Kaisy tried his new combination of therapies. We gave him something called a dorsal root ganglion stimulation. Its like a small junction-box, placed just underneath one of the bones of the spine. It makes the spine hyperexcited, and sends impulses to the spinal cord and the brain. I pioneered a new technique to put a small wire into the ganglion, connected to an external power battery. Over 10 days the intensity of pain went down by 70% by the patients own assessment. He wrote me a very nice email saying I had changed his life, that the pain had just stopped completely, and that he was coming back to normality. He said his job was saved, as was his marriage, and he wanted to go back to playing sport. I told him, Take it easy. You mustnt start climbing the Himalayas just yet. Al-Kaisy beams. This is a remarkable outcome. You cannot get it from any other therapies.

The greatest recent breakthrough in assessing pain, according to Professor Irene Tracey, head of the University of Oxfords Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, has been the understanding that chronic pain is a thing in its own right. She explains: We always thought of it as acute pain that just goes on and on and if chronic pain is just a continuation of acute pain, lets fix the thing that caused the acute and the chronic should go away. That has spectacularly failed. Now we think of chronic pain as a shift to another place, with different mechanisms, such as changes in genetic expression, chemical release, neurophysiology and wiring. Weve got all these completely new ways of thinking about chronic pain. Thats the paradigm shift in the pain field.

Tracey has been called the Queen of Pain by some media commentators. She was, until recently, the Nuffield Professor of anaesthetic science and is an expert in neuroimaging techniques that explore the brains responses to pain. Despite her nickname, in person she is far from alarming: a bright-eyed, enthusiastic, welcoming and hectically fluent woman of 50, she talks about pain at a personal level. She has no problem defining the ultimate pain that scores 10 on the McGill questionnaire: Ive been through childbirth three times, and my 10 is a very different 10 from before I had kids. Ive got a whole new calibration on that scale. But how does she explain the ultimate pain to people who havent experienced childbirth? I say, Imagine youve slammed your hand in a car door thats 10.

She uses a personal example to explain the way perception and circumstance can alter the way we experience pain, as well as the phenomenon of hedonic flipping, which can convert pain from an unpleasant sensation into something you dont mind. I did the London Marathon this year. It needs a lot of training and running and your muscles ache, and next day youre really in pain, but its a nice pain. Im no masochist, but I associate the muscle pain with thoughts like, I did something healthy with my body, Im training, and Its all going well.

I ask her why there seems to be a gap between doctors and patients apprehension of pain. Its very hard to understand, because the system goes wrong from the point of injury, along the nerve thats taken the signal into the spinal cord, which sends signals to the brain, which sends signals back, and it all unravels with terrible consequential changes. So my patient may be saying, Ive got this excruciating pain here, and Im trying to see where its coming from, and theres a mismatch here because you cant see any damage or any oozing blood. So we say, Oh come now, youre obviously exaggerating, it cant be as bad as that. Thats wrong its a cultural bias we grew up with, without realising.

Recently, she says, there has been a breakthrough in understanding about how the brain is involved in pain. Neuroimaging, she explains, helps to connect the subjective pain with the objective perception of it. It fills that space between what you can see and whats being reported. We can plug that gap and explain why the patient is in pain even though you cant see it on your x-ray or whatever. Youre helping to bring truth and validity to these poor people who are in pain but not believed.

But you cant simply see pain glowing and throbbing on the screen in front of you. Brain imaging has taught us about the networks of the brain and how they work, she says. Its not a pain-measuring device. Its a tool that gives you fantastic insight into the anatomy, the physiology and the neurochemistry of your body and can tell us why you have pain, and where we should go in and try to fix it.

Some of the ways in, she says, are remarkably direct and mechanical like Al-Kaisys spinal cord stimulation wire. There are now devices you can attach to your head and allow you to manipulate bits of the brain. You can wear them like bathing caps. Theyre portable, ethically allowed brain-simulation devices. Theyre easy for patients to use and evidence is coming, in clinical trials, that they are good for strokes and rehabilitation. Theres a parallel with the games industry, where theyre making devices you can put on your head so kids can use thought to move balls around. The games industry is, for fun, driving this idea that when you use your brain, you generate electrical activities. Theyre developing the technology really fast, and we can use it in medical applications.

Illustration: Matthew Richardson

Pain has become a huge area of medical research in the US, for a simple reason. Chronic pain affects over 100 million Americans and costs the country more than half a trillion dollars a year in lost working hours, which is why it has become a magnet for funding by big business and government.

Researchers at the Human Pain Research Laboratory at Stanford University, California, are working to gain a better understanding of individual responses to pain so that treatments can be more targeted. The laboratory has several study initiatives on the go into migraine, fibromyalgia, facial pain and other conditions but its largest is into back pain. It has been endowed with a $10m grant from the National Institutes of Health to study non-drug alternative treatments for lower back pain. The specific treatments are mindfulness, acupuncture, cognitive behavioural therapy and real-time neural feedback.

They plan to inspect the pain tolerance of 400 people over five years of study, ranging from pain-free volunteers to the most wretched chronic sufferers who have been to other specialists but found no relief. The idea is to find peoples mid-range tolerance (theyre asked to rate their pain while they are experiencing it), to establish a usable baseline. They then are given the non-invasive treatments such as mindfulness and acupuncture and are subjected afterwards to the same pain stimuli, to see how their pain tolerance has changed from their baseline reading. MRI scanning is used on the patients in both laboratory sessions, so that clinicians can see and draw inferences from the visible differences in blood flow to different parts of the brain.

A remarkable feature of the assessment process is that patients are also given scores for psychological states: a scale measures their level of depression, anxiety, anger, physical functioning, pain behaviour and how much pain interferes with their lives. This should allow physicians to use the information to target specific treatments. All these findings are stored in an informatics platform called Choir, which stands for the Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry. It has files on 15,000 patients, 54,000 unique clinic visits and 40,000 follow-up meetings.

The big chief at the Human Pain Research Laboratory is Dr Sean Mackey, Redlich professor of anaesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine, neurosciences and neurology at Stanford. His background is in bioengineering, and under his governance the Stanford Pain Management Center has twice been designated a centre of excellence by the American Pain Society. A tall, genial, easy-going man, he is sometimes approached by legal firms who want him to appear in court to state definitively whether their client is or is not in chronic pain (and therefore justified in claiming absentee benefit). His response is surprising.

In 2008, I was asked by a law firm to speak in an industrial injury case in Arizona. This poor guy got hot burning asphalt sprayed on his arm at work; he had a claim of burning neuropathic pain. The plaintiffs side brought in a cognitive scientist, who scanned his brain and said there was conclusive evidence that he had chronic pain. The defence asked me to comment, and I said, Thats hogwash, we cannot use this technology for that purpose.

Shortly afterwards, I gave a talk on pain, neuroimaging and the law, explaining why you cant do this because theres too much individual variability in pain, and the technology isnt sensor-specific enough. But I concluded by saying, If you were to do this, youd use modern machine-learning approaches, like those used for satellite reconnaissance to determine whether a satellite is seeing a tank or a civilian truck. Some of my students said, Can you give us some money to try this? I said, Yes, but it cant be done. But they designed the experiment and discovered that, using brain imagery, they could predict with 80% accuracy whether someone was feeling heat pain or not.

Mackey finally published a paper about the experiment. So did his findings influence any court decisions? No. I get asked by attorneys, and I always say, There is no place for this in the courtroom in 2016 and there wont be in 2020. People want to push us into saying this is an objective biomarker for detecting that someones in pain. But the research is in carefully controlled laboratory conditions. You cannot generalise about the population as a whole. I told the attorneys, This is too much of a leap. I dont think theres a lot of clinical utility in having a pain-o-meter in a court or in most clinical situations.

Mackey explains the latest thinking about what pain actually is. Now we understand that pain is a balance between ascending information coming from our bodies and descending inhibitory systems from our brains. We call the ascending information nociception from the Latin nocere, to harm or hurt meaning the response of the sensory nervous system to potentially harmful stimuli coming from our periphery, sending signals to the spinal cord and hitting the brain with the perception of pain. The descending systems are inhibitory, or filtering, neurons, which exist to filter out information thats not important, to turn down the ascending signals of hurt. The main purpose of pain is to be the great motivator, to tell you to pay attention, to focus. When the pain lab was started, we had no way of addressing these two dynamic systems, and now we can.

Mackey is immensely proud of his massive CHOIR database which records peoples pain tolerance levels and how they are affected by treatment and has made it freely available to other pain clinics as a community source platform, collaborating with academic medical centres nationwide so that a rising tide elevates all boats. But he is also humble enough to admit that science cannot tell us which are the sites of the bodys worst pains.

Back pain is the most reported pain at 28%, but I know theres a higher density of nerve fibres in the hands, face, genitals and feet than in other areas, Mackey says, and there are conditions where the sufferer has committed suicide to get away from the pain. Things like post-herpetic neuralgia, that burning nerve pain that occurs after an outbreak of shingles and is horrific; another is cluster headaches some patients have thought about taking a drill to their heads to make it stop.

Like Irene Tracey, Mackey is enthusiastic about the rise of transcranial magnetic stimulation (Imagine hooking a nine-volt battery across your scalp) but, when asked about his particular successes, he talks about simple solutions. Early on in my career, I used to be very focused on the peripheral, the apparent site of the pain. I was doing interventions, and some people would get better but a lot wouldnt. So I started listening to their fears and anxieties and working on those, and became very brain-focused. I noticed that if you have a nerve trapped in your knee, your whole leg could be on fire, but if you apply a local anaesthetic there, it could abolish it.

This young woman came to me with a terrible burning sensation in her hand. It was always swollen; she couldnt stand anyone touching it because it felt like a blowtorch. Mackey noticed that she had a post-operative scar from prior surgery for carpal-tunnel syndrome. Speculating that this was at the root of her problem, he injected botulinum toxin, a muscle relaxant, at the site of the scar. A week later, she came up and gave me this huge hug and said, I was able to pick up my child for the first time in two years. I havent been able to since she was born. All the swelling was gone. It taught me that its not all about the body part, and not all about the brain. Its about both.

Main illustration by Matthew Richardson

This is an edited version of an article that appears on Mosaic. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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