Day: October 16, 2008

39 weeks to go…

i just finished my 9th week of self injection.  18.75% done.  39 weeks go to.

if you count the 4 weeks of IV IFN, i’ve done 13 weeks, which is exactly 25% of the 52 weeks of treatment.  of course, that doesn’t count my time on drug holidays.  i started the IFN on June 16th (the day before I started this blog…) Which is 4+ months ago.

I have at least one month of drug holiday time in there.  it feels like i was on holiday for more than that, though.  i guess it was just one week in the IV IFN, two weeks in between IV and SubQ, and then two weeks when i got back from Banff and was super sick.  I guess the first week back on the IFN felt like a holiday b/c I was only on a 10 MIU dose.

i was diagnosed on feb twenty-something.  I got the first call on the 20th, but didn’t formally hear the words “you have cancer” until the 22nd.  so that makes it 8 months i’ve been dealing with this.

Medicinal Mushrooms

i got chinese herbs to take.  apparently one of the hot topics in herbalism is mushrooms.  certain mushrooms are immunostimulants.  three types in particular are the focus of most of the studies: shitake, maitake, and reishi.  i regularly saute the first two, but i’ve never seen reishi before.

ganoderma_lucidum

so i was in chinatown two days ago, and i thought to stop into one of the dried good stores.  frankly i was expecting total epic failure, but the first person i talked to got very excited and walked to the back of the store and showed me this box.  and explained that it was the extract of the red reishi mushroom.  the spores are ground up in capsules.

he also tried to sell me some other herbal supplements for “manly potency.”  i passed.

Reishi Mushroom Extract