Thinking the unthinkable

A drop. Yes, I will repeat that. My CEA has dropped. In four weeks it has gone from 16.6 ng/ml to 14.9 ng/ml. This is not supposed to happen. I was on a rapid rise with growing and radiology-evident tumours. OK. Let's deconstruct this.

First, my previous reading showed a rise that was less than I had expected, from 14.3 to 16.6. So that's the first intriguing phenomenon. And what did I start doing at 14.3? I returned each morning to "Uncle CC's famous vegetable juice" (potato, carrot, cucumber, tomato, green apple, celery and barley green). Note that back at day 400, when I began Uncle CC's remedy in response to my then rapid CEA rise (a 4 week-doubling period) in 2010, the rate of rise fell back to a noticeably lower rate, just as seen in my latest May 2011 response.

So what of this latest drop? Now my embarrassment is extreme, because, dear reader, as I mentioned one month ago, I have used my holiday from scientific medicine to carry out a personal experiment. I said then that I would use a two-pronged strategy, at the risk that if a positive response resulted, then I would not know the source of that success. And I promised then that "details will follow that may amuse you as much as they do me." Now, I think it is the time to confess all.

I have been taking massive doses of intravenous vitamin C, at 100 grams per infusion. I have had about 6 treatments, over a four week period, stepping the dose up from 25 grams, though 50, 75 to 100. I urinate incessantly for several hours following, but the biological half-life of vitamin C is around 3 hours, so that the next day I return to normal. And, for two weeks, following my return from Singapore, I have taken a chinese herbal medicine prescribed by the Ngee Ann chinese medical centre in Singapore.

Am I mad? Probably. I took the vitamin C, partly because my good friend Pablo Etchegoin has done so for 14 months and defied his oncologist's prognosis, and partly because one of the most brilliant scientists I know, immunologist Graham LeGros, suggested to me that vitamin C might potentially "provoke the immune system" to my advantage. And, I took Chinese herbal medicine, because my comrade and mentor, Uncle CC, swears by it.

So there it is. Is this science? Not really. You can't base a treatment regime on n=1. But being that particular n=1, I could say "well it works for me". But even that may be stretching credibility. My data so far suggests a correlation between my CEA reading and the treatment regime. Of course, it may all be a coincidence. It may be the TaiChi (I have now mastered the 32 form). It may be the public speaking I am doing. It may be the Chilean volcano.

I am not entirely a fool. Next month it might all change. My CEA may start galloping upwards, despite gorging my veins with "all the vitamin C in China." And then again, it might just keep dropping.

It seems as if I am condemned to continue my strange experiment for a while yet. Ah well, as I said once before on this subject, "It's better than a kick in the pants."