Helena Trent

In Darkness Born the Light - My Journey From Mutation To Transformation

Deja Vu

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I can hardly believe this is happening again even though there is a part of me that knows anything could happen on this cancer journey. When I feel good, it doesn’t always translate to scan results. Well, this is a shocker… again.

The latest brain MRI scan result showed the 3 little tumors they did the focused brain radiation are gone, but 30+ more showed up! Again, they are all tiny, the largest one is 5mm, half a dozen of other ones that are 3 or 4mm and countless tiny lesions all over the entire brain. I met with the brain doctor this morning. His suggestion is we do a whole brain radiation everyday for 2 weeks. It needs to be done at a different location by my old radiation doctor that treated me about a year ago. She was the one I almost died from radiation treatment last time. Of course, she is not the reason, it’s the treatment. It’s the same protocol, but of course this time we are not going through the gut. At least she knows my history to radiation. I have a consultation appointment scheduled with her next Wednesday morning. I will make another post then.

Silver Linings

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Happy Chinese New Year to you all! I just got back from spending another week in Florida doing tai chi. It was a small workshop with no evening sessions. I loved it! After the program ended everyday, I would take a walk along the water, watched the sunsets, and had dinner with friends in the evenings. My kind of life! 😍

Speaking of Chinese New Year and sunsets, I woke up this morning and a thought hit me. I didn’t expect to see Christmas, New Year’s Day, or Chinese New Year a little over a year ago. Now I have lived to see 2 Christmas, 2 New Years, a new decade, and 2 CNY! How magical is life?! Did I feel this magic 45 years prior to that? Sometimes, but if I was completely honest, I took it for granted most of the time. All I have to do is to get deathly ill for it all to be magical! lol!! Funny how my perspectives have changed! 🙃

Sunset at Honeymoon Island

I want to share this particular sunset. When I was in Dunedin last month, I loved biking out to Honeymoon Island, watch the sea birds and enjoy the ocean breeze. This trip, however, I didn’t have time for that, so I decided to drive out there with a friend to watch the sunset. It was a beautiful day all day, no clouds, I was expecting to see a beautiful sunset. When we got there though, it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen because there were just enough clouds where the sun would go down that it wouldn’t be the sunset we had hoped for. There was no point in turning back, so we sat and watched the sunset anyway. In time, the setting sun behind the clouds shined a golden light ring around every cloud above it. The sky lit up and everything around it turned to a beautiful rosy golden color. It was not the same old everyday perfect sunset, but one of the most spectacular and unique sunsets I have ever seen!

I have been reading a lot about cancer. 30% of people that get my particular type of cancer (EGFR mutation) are Asian, women, and never-smokers. 30% is not statistically insignificant! It has been in my DNA all my life to get to this point, but life didn’t just throw it at me, it prepared me all my life for this. I have my tai chi practice. I have an incredible large circle of friends that support me. I have the financial resources to get through what I need to get through. There is nothing fair about me getting sick, but my being sick has invoked such deep compassion, generosity, and love in the world… so much so that it changed my perspectives on life! Life is not fair because it’s too perfect to be fair. What I want is not about getting what I want. It’s meant to get me to where I can receive what’s being given… like the sunset. If I had not wanted to see the sunset, I wouldn’t bother to show up. I could have been disappointed I didn’t see the sunset I wanted to see and turn away. Or, I could fully appreciate what was actually there and it was better than anything I could have hoped for. There is such a thing as silver linings. Cancer might eventually go away, it might not, that’s not the point anymore. The point is to live everyday that is given as it is. I am alive today because I am not the one that’s breathing me, life is. I wake up everyday excited that I get to be me again today❣️I will live this day well.

Intermediate Fasting

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Happy New Decade, my friends!

Just finished the first round of chemo this week, way to welcome a new year, huh? 😉 Things are so much easier now that my body is getting use to the regular treatments. It’s still an “event”, but I feel much better and recovering faster at each cycle.

I also started intermediate fasting about a month ago. There was a Japanese biologist that won the 2016 Nobel Prize for the discovery of cellular self-repair benefits during intermediate fasting. When we eat constantly, the body is busy digesting food, absorbing nutrients, handling waste, etc.. It’s a never ending job. When we fast, our body goes into a self repair mode. It repairs the cellular damage that occurs and cleans up any tissues, fat or storage that’s not needed… like tumors. 🙂

I started fasting 16-hours a day everyday since I got back from FL. I eat from 12-8pm and I don’t eat from 8-12pm… basically skipping breakfast and no snacking before noon each day. My stomach complaint loudly for a few days and then got quiet. lol! I didn’t expect much from it at first, but noticed my body was a lot happier inside. My digestion is much easier. I feel lighter. I lost a few pounds initially, but not much. After 2 weeks or so, I stopped losing weight which is good because I didn’t want to lose weight. I started sleeping through the night which hasn’t happened in almost a year! I use to joke about cancer doesn’t sleep so it wouldn’t let me sleep either. I would sleep for a few hours initially then wake up in the middle of the night for a few hours before falling back to sleep. Now, more often than not, I would sleep through the night. My energy is so much better. I stopped needing to take naps in the afternoon (after taking daily naps for more than a year). More than that, I stopped snacking on impulse naturally. That’s a side benefit came as a surprise. Now that I know what hunger feels like, I know it when I am eating out of bad habits. I never had a weight problem so I didn’t realize I had any food problems until I started fasting. All of a sudden I realized how often I was eating emotionally. It turns out most of the time I snack out of boredom instead of hunger. I snacked just because I was bored and I wanted to experience something or I am out at a gathering with food and I didn’t want to miss an experience… so my body paid for it. Even if I was eating healthy snacks… the snacks might have been healthy, but my eating habits certainly were not. Just as simple as skipping breakfast daily, I discovered all kinds of things about myself!

I don’t know if it would make any difference in my scan results next time, but I feel better than I have been in a long time! My oncologist thinks I look good too so he scheduled the next set of scans in mid-February. I will keep everyone posted.