Tag Archives: health

The Weight (Wait) of Infertility

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 “What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?” 

- Denise Levertov 

I am tired. 

I think that sentiment is one that has accompanied me more over the last three years of my life than perhaps any other. 

I am tired.

Is this exhaustion the result of hormones gone wild, hormones that like the TV show so much they refuse to exist stage left? 

Is this exhaustion the likely outcome of the emotional roller coaster of infertility? 

Or maybe is this exhaustion unfairly convicting infertility for the transgressions of the work and academic worlds? 

I don’t know. 

I just know that I am tired, and life keeps adding weight. 

Infertility keeps adding wait. 

I believe in hope. I believe in second, and third, and millionth tries. I believe in the possibility of tomorrow. 

And yet, the weight and the wait are tiring. 

Our shoulders get slumped under the weight/wait. Our muscles, especially our heart muscles, become sore with the buildup of life’s lactic acid. Our “get up and try again” becomes too hard to wake up, even with a blaring biological alarm clock. 

The weight/wait can feel too heavy, and when it does we look up and another 20 lb. disc is being added to the bar. 

And though I would like to have a way to turn the weight/wait into something happy, something positive, something hopeful, I can’t–because sometimes, it’s just hard. And sometimes there is no way to make a lemon sweet like lemonade, it’s just a lemon and sucking it makes us sour. 

Sometimes, it just needs to be ok to be sour. Pucker up!

Infertility and Cancer: Are we battling or thriving?

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I find this blog inspiring, and so today I share it with you. Perhaps we can learn from Helena’s choice to THRIVE with cancer, and maybe we can learn to THRIVE with infertility.

Thriving with Cancer

by Helena’s Healing Circle

What a weird combination of words. Usually you hear dying of cancer, suffering from cancer, fighting/battling cancer (post about this coming soon, BTW).

I choose to thrive with cancer.

Yes that is a state of mind, a spiritual state, etc…but that’s also a choice about how to treat your physical body while you are alive dealing with a physical challenge. So far, for someone whose body is at stage 3 something, I have rosy cheeks, shiny skin and hair, and lots of energy—enough to get on people’s nerves sometimes! If it weren’t for Clotilde (the tumor) and for the stuff that comes out in PET scans, I wouldn’t know my body had cancer. At all.

So the 13 juices, the coffee enemas and all the veggies and fruits keep my body and my mind happy and alert enough to have time and energy to thrive while I pray.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Tonight I spoke to my dad, who has emphysema. He’s having such a hard time breathing. So yes, “emphysema is emphysema” – we all know what it is and that there is no way out of it. But…did any of the lung doctors he went to ever said the most basic thing…that dairy creates huge amounts of mucus?

Of course not. So he uses his breathing machine and takes some medicine, and then immediately cancels out all the potential usefulness of these 2 things by eating all the cheese, milk and butter he can. This causes an immediate production of mucus, which makes it even harder for oxygen to get anywhere.
Let’s take the cold, or a bad flu, for instance. People say these things have to run their course.
But try going through the flu while eating dairy. You’re talking about at least 4-6 days feeling sick and putting out mucus, for most people.

Try eliminating dairy. The healing time is going to be cut in half.
If you are lucky enough to be around medicinal plants, drink several teas made from Surinam cherry leaves during the day, and then a very hot tea of natural orange leaves at night. Gilvania (our angel who works here with us at Viva Institute) was taught by her mom how to use this medicine, and now she is teaching us. She cured me of a bad flu in one and ½ days simply by making teas from the plants around us.

How I Do It

Doctors try to help with their medicine (despite most doctors’ unfortunate cluelessness about food – sorry, but it is true). God sadly wonders why we humans create disease and suffering, and we go around suffering more than we should—forgetting that we can choose to assist the well-being of our bodies at any moment by using what nature gives us so freely.

I don’t know what will happen to my body. None of us do.

But I know, with this experience, that the energy of I what I am choosing to put into my body is giving me, right NOW, strength and good mood despite Clotilde’s crankiness. She tries really hard to be loud and obnoxious, only to be engulfed and quieted daily by a stream of healthy organic coffee and juices of fruits and vegetables and hourly prayer!

That’s how I thrive with cancer.