top score on MasterCard ! ouch Pete is back to work

Lovekitties said:

Clarify please
OK Pete, I know I should probably just leave this alone but I want to be sure I understand your thinking about your current situation:

You wrote: “Whats really caused the financial problem is not the supplements and the alternative therapies but my decision to see if my wife could run our business while i looked after the kids and focused on my healing…
Whats really done us in is the financial downturn and our business and i guess my wife ability to cope with it….
But my business was something i built up, that suits my skills and unfortunately not my wifes…”

Do you mean to say that your current financial situation is due to the fact that your wife has been running your business and has not been able to handle it adequately? Or is it possible you could not have done any better under the same circumstances? Or is it possible that you could have offered guidance to help her be more successful? Cash flow has become a problem for all in the world’s poor economic condition.

You wrote: “Maximum my supplements are costing $500 a week and that includes doctor consults, 3 lots of iv C and a massive load load "essential" supplements as i see it.
So the budget for the year is only $60K.”

I take it that you mean this is your weekly cost NOW. Did the travel and expenses of the conferences you attended (one in Atlanta, GA, USA), retreats, specialized therapies, etc. over the last 18 months not contribute to your current debt? $500 per week for a year is only $26K…is the remaining $34K what you have allotted for these other activities? Or is your actual weekly cost $1,154 which would then equal the $60K per year?

You wrote: “my rising CEA is potentially stable at 47. It may or may not be active disease. Winter i hope you are correct, but from my extensive research cea get over 10 are due to crc. Thats why I am trying so dam hard to fight this illness early on with a range of alternatives when nothing is offered by conventional medicine.”

I understand that conventional medicine has not found any active cancer to explain the rise in CEA. I am uncertain if you have had full body scans or bone scans, but have to assume you have had the works to look for active disease. So, it isn’t that conventional medicine doesn’t have anything to offer…just that nothing has been found to treat. Have you considered that your CEA is rising while you are doing all the alts? It would seem to me that those are the things which are failing you, if as you say a CEA over 10 means CRC. Or is it possible that your body is reacting to an overload of alts, therefore causing the rise…which can also be attributed to infections and other things which are not CRC? There is truth to the adage that too much of a good thing can be bad for you. You have to admit that you have had numerous physical complaints while doing the various alts.

I am really trying to understand what appears on the surface to be conflicting info.

devotion10 said:

Yes, perhaps it is simply just too much information ...
Hello Pete,

I hope that you do not take my comments as either a "praise or bash" as you mentioned in your previous post -- but, I have some comments about this thread and your response to what folks have said here.

I do think you may have missed the point a bit on some of the comments of the posters. Perhaps what may be causing the critical responses in this thread has to do with you simply providing too much information regarding your personal finances and your criticism of your wife.

It isn't really about how you spend your money, conventional or alternative treatments, that is your private business. But, what I think is bothersome, at least for me and possibly for others, is when you talk about the specifics of the amount of money you spend ... it just seems out of place. Even though some are more fortunate financially than others, as you seem to be, maybe if you discussed your financial concerns in a more general fashion your concerns would be more well-recieved.

Pete, think about it for a minute. You are stating that you have thousands of dollars surplus cash a year to spend on alternative treatments. This is a great deal of money to many people; possibly more money than their entire budget for all their life expenses for a year.

It comes across as rather insensitive to discuss the specifics of how much money you spend. There are people who come to this site who are struggling financially to maintain their jobs so they can keep their insurance as they endure their treatments, or have lost their jobs entirely because their disease simply prevents them from continuing to work, or they are trying to manage on disability insurance, or in the worse case scenario they have no insurance at all to provide for even their basic medical care.

One last point, you have implied that your wife's inability to run your family business, not your alternative treatments costs, is the reason for your financial instability. Perhaps, this also is just too much information Pete, even if you feel it is true. I can't help but feel that if your wife knew that you have been critical of her here that it might hurt and embarrass her deeply.

You speak a great deal about living peacefully and meditating ... I don't know what your mediation focus is, but as an old hippie myself, I always focused on Buddhist compassion meditation techniques. Being compassionate, being mindful, of how your comments might make others feel uncomfortable seems like a worthy ideal -- not always attainable of course -- just something to think about.

Respectfully,

Cynthia

steved said:

This discussion
I would like to suggest it is left there. I am not sure that this discussion is contributing to any positive outcome and is diverting energies away from the role of this site- to share knowledge and support each other.

I don't entirely agree with a lot of what Pete writes about his treatments, lifestyle choices and family dynamics but it is not the place for me to judge or criticise. I don't think anything he has said is pushing his beliefs onto others here and in fact I worry that others (whom I agree with more about many other things they say) are trying to push their beliefs on how a family/ marriage/ person should function and behave onto Pete.

My own feelings would be we should move on and focus once again on what is valuable in this site. We all bring diverse views and knowledge that at times conflicts with others and that can run the risk of railroading discussions into unhealthy territory.

Everyone has had a chance to put their point across- lets get back to the business of supporting one another.

steve

herdizziness said:

Actually I think this discussion is quite important
and worthy of further discussion and thinking.
I think it's extremely important that others see what can happen when a person lets cancer take over their lives, that when they seek treatments that go way out there, way past just a few supplements to a life consumed around any supplement that the person hears about, past to where your living in the real world around your family and friends because you are in pursuit of the latest supplement,or the newest meditation technique, the need to do IV vitamin C on a daily basis (really, how much vit C does one need in a day? Drink some ORANGE JUICE!!)
My husband's co-worker became desperate; he was dying of cancer, he was dying, there was no doubt about it. So he flew to the Philippines, went to a "hospital" where they stick their hand "into" your stomach and pull the cancer out and showed him. Naturally he was cured. OF COURSE HE WASN'T, this is something that is touted to people that are desperate, that are dying of cancer, and they grab a hold of it, latch on to it with all their being. Just so you know, his co-worker came back and died from his cancer the next week (pancreatic).
And I think it's important for people to see how far overboard Pete has gone, Pete's scans show no cancerous tumors, things come back clean, yet his CEA is rising, and as it rises, he takes more supplements and tries more things, which will probably make his CEA rise even more, causing him to go more overboard (now if it rises though, he's going to blame his wife for MAKING him do the dreaded thing above all else, and that is work)in an attempt to bring the CEA down.
Whereas I think if he dropped at least half if not 3/4's of the $500.00 a week supplements (including the free ones) he might actually see a decline in his CEA. I'm not a doctor, but heck if my CEA was rising and my scans were clear and the only thing different I was doing was going nuts on supplements, then by golly, I'd start looking at those supplements and NOT MY SPOUSE as the problem.
Hopefully through this discussion, others can see that going a bit crazy about the cancer isn't good for either the pocketbook or the family or even their own health.
That I think is a good reason for this discussion to be here and commented on.
Winter Marie

Sonia32 said:

Pete
Arghhh if only we could legally rob banks, but they rob us ha lol. I hope you ease back into work with less stress.

herdizziness said:

I think
That overboard isn't too harsh a word in Pete's particular case. If you read his posts, he's got into some pretty "overboard" ideas and things that one should step back from on occasion and say to themselves, really, is this safe or sane to do?
And health wise, it may be my heart gets me before cancer does,(thank goodness for nitro) go figure!!! LOL.
Winter Marie

pete43lost_at_sea said:

thanks kim
hi kim,

its just because life is to short that they eat tofu and blended greens.

if i don't make it through this challenging illness i am keen that my family has the benefit of what i have learnt. with what i have learned to feed my family the western diet would be negligent.

my kids love my homemade organic potatoe hash browns with a little coconut oil.

now the you feed your family your way and I will feed my kids my way.

Some days are vegan for the family, somedays are not.

For me almost all days are vegan.

I put up a post about three months ago i was starting a vegan experiment based on a doctors guarantee it could help reduce my markers. Now that has not happened yet! its gotten my nutritional knowledge to another level entirely. Experiment is the key word. I don't advocate anything, ok maybe that exercise is good for us.

I never said, thats the way we should go here, i have shared that i have been told vegan is a healthy choice by some. the anti cancer diet, whatever that is depends on which alternative doctor you are talking to or seminar you are attending. they all have different perspectives on it which i find really interesting. what i eat what i have access to and what i believe is in the interests of my long term health. My wife and i went out to dinner with about 40 vegans on friday night which was a great night out. Not one unhealthy looking person on the table.

so my family is mostly eating organic, i still given them meat a few times a week. my six year old loves mixed beans and raw broccoli. not eaten together. he also likes the rare fastfood burger and icecream.

hugs,
Pete