About three weeks ago Cristina was pretty underweight at about 53kg (approx. 116lbs.) Her hip bones were very visible and it wasn't the greatest of sights. On top of this it was time for her to start fasting again because her chemotherapy was coming up. It wasn't nice to see but after seeing her lack of side effects from the chemo I'm inclined to believe her when she says fasting is what's doing that (you can read some benefits of fasting while on chemo here.)
A day before her chemo I we woke up at three in the morning because Cristina needed to go to the bathroom. I was drowsy so I got up and let her go. It was a short while later when I heard her yelling from the bathroom. When I rushed in I found that she had briefly fainted while on the toilet. Because she was starting her new raw vegan diet while fasting at the same time she had lost a lot of energy. At this point Cristina was very spaced out and barely conscious. Her mom woke up and we decided it would be best to take her to the hospital a day early to get her checked out. We got dressed, called Ricardo to pick us up, and fed Cristina a pear to help her get some much needed energy back. When Ricardo arrived we walked her out to the car and took off to the hospital.
She stayed at the hospital from that point until the end of the round of chemotherapy. Afterwards I made her eat. I made her eat until she couldn't eat anymore. That event frightened me and I don't want a repeat. By now she's back at a normal weight and is doing fine so I'm happy with that.
I mentioned to some that I was going to detail what exactly Cristina's doing to help combat her cancer, because when you have a life-threatening disease you can't help but try out everything, no matter how silly it sounds.
So here it is! This is Cris's entire regimen. From left to right we have scorpion venom, graviola, spirulina, sida cordifolia, the little rectangle pill there is T4 Bago for her thyroid condition, bach flower drops, cymbalta (perscribed by her psychiatrist,) and quetidin which was also perscribed by her psychiatrist and she's been taking it for years to help her sleep. She takes all of what you see in the morning (aside from the quetidin of course.) Other than this as I've mention before she has taken up raw veganism and fasts before chemotherapy.
Whether or not any of this works we don't know but taking plant pills doesn't hurt so why not try? Soon Cris will try taking cannabis oil as well which actually has been proven to help some cancer cases, so I'm pretty excited to see how that turns out.
Moving on. For the past two days we've been celebrating one of Chile's national holidays. The 18th of September represents when the first meetings took place to help Chile gain its independence from Spain 203 years ago. To celebrate we visited two houses for barbeques. The first were family friends who had a beautiful house and an adorable cocker spaniel that Cris absolutely fell in love with named Albert.
The next house was her godparents home, which we visited both days of the holiday.
That's about it! Things have been going pretty decent here. We still need to wait for Cris to get another scanner done to see if this second chemo is working on her body, but we're remaining optimistic. We appreciate all of the well-wishes everyone's been giving us.
