Would you believe, this is my hundredth blog. I started the blog just a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea it would quickly turn into a cancer blog. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that we don’t. Consciously, at least.
This is a review of my cancer story, for those of you who are interested.
Cancer was a great surprise when it was diagnosed in November 2019. Looking back, signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right, as if I were in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my partner nor I could figure out what it was.
Then in August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked and four of the lowest vertebrae in my back collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem. The pain induced a kind of enforced spirituality, which I blogged about a month later: [1]
“It has been a remarkable initiation, a time of enforced stillness and interiority. Within myself I’ve been ‘back home’ with the star-nation people and have travelled the worlds in ways that ordinary life does not usually permit. Meditatively, I’ve stood alongside people around the world who experience deep suffering, supporting them with gifts of spirit I’m blessed with and finding a deep solidarity with them. I’ve dwelt on my life and what there is left to do with it…“.
A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks in Totnes). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, stood intently looking at me for a while, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Within days I was having treatment. I had Multiple Myeloma or bone marrow cancer.
When the news of cancer hits you, it’s like a thunderbolt and soulquake. Yet it came with a strange element of relief, at last knowing what was actually happening after three months of spirit-wringing pain. For decades I had looked after myself, with a view to avoiding such things as cancer. Had I got things wrong? Seriously ill, if I had arrived in hospital a month later, I was unlikely to have survived. When cancer comes, it can come fast and strong, even if its buildup is long and slow.
After a few days I asked the specialist whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight and said, quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet showing the clustering of Myeloma cases within 40 miles of nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I had had two instances of exposure in other contexts too.
Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause for some. The reason for this perhaps deliberate unclarity could be the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge.
The specialist’s opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was largely not a problem until around year 2000, when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace.
That year I had a ‘dark night of the soul’ crisis and a long illness, going down into the Deep Dark, questioning all I had done over the previous three decades and wondering what value it had really brought. It was a deep honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around then.
As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G and smartphones emerged around 2008. By 2014 periodic overdoses of radiation (in a restaurant, meeting, supermarket or train) were giving me rapid-onset flu symptoms, and by 2017 I was getting heart palpitations. It took until 2019 for cancer to show itself.
That year I was working on my prehistory research and mapmaking, in a rather urgent, driven way. Completing it in early August, just two weeks later my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least complete – perhaps a hidden hand of fate had known what was going to happen next.
When diagnosed in November I was now very much in the hands of doctors, my partner, my son and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance.
Having been a health-conscious, vegetarian meditator for decades, and rarely getting ill, I had always assumed I would be exempt from cancer. Well, life has a way of teaching us other things! In our culture cancer is regarded as something going wrong, a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that, to me. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and do my best to trust that, whatever happened, it would be alright. I did hold on to one belief though: that, whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.
Rigorous experiences as a humanitarian, mountaineer and camper had taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and having survived thus far, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying.
Trusting the doctors was my only option – and most were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive. I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to take such an approach now, and already it was too late. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. It contravened beliefs I’d held until that moment, yet it felt right to do my best with it. If the angels wanted me alive, they’d keep me alive, and if they didn’t, they’d take me out.
I’m pretty good at handling crises and, here was I, going through a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins on a deep level, since healing means fully allowing healing, fundamentally handing ourselves over to the process. This goes as far as dropping any expectation of what ‘healing’ means – it doesn’t only mean ‘getting better’. Whether I am to live or die, may it be for the best, all round – this was my prayer.
The strong pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they might also save my life. I asked for inner help in handling whatever was to come. One profound message came through: use your feelings and intuitions to proceed. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research – though my intuitive senses were quite easy to read off. They just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to how it comes to be true.
I went inside myself, connecting with the angels like never before. This might sound spurious to some readers but, believe me, when you’re in a situation like this, that’s what you tend to do, whatever your foregoing beliefs. I asked them to support my adaptation to a changed life. But when you ask, you also need to offer: I offered up my life, however it was to be. Whatever needed to happen, may it happen well and may I make it easy – that was my key prayer. I think this really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.
I used holistic supplements, CBD oil and good nutrition – judiciously, and careful not to mix them or create conflicts with the pharmaceuticals. Over time, various healers and healing circles weighed in – thank you everyone. Some of these interventions made a big difference – including, over time, an E-Lybra machine, radionics, homoeopathy, cranial osteopathy, herbs, chiropractic and prayer. And an old cat, Tomten, who would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving me genuine pain-relief.
So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life. I’ve written this before and it’s true.
I feel immense gratitude to my partner, who gave balm to my heart and helped me through the process – she was a true healer and a great soul. Her love, care and protection made a critical difference in a bleak time. I was a heavy weight for her to carry. There was no financial help for a ‘family carer’ like her, she had a business to keep going and a life already filled with issues and concerns. And I’m a tricky and complex character at the best of times. My son Tulki was a constant companion and support, though he could be present only sometimes. These two made a key difference.
So I followed an intuitive route through the cancer tunnel. I worked at getting the doctors on my side, showing them that I was not one of the awkward squad of ideologically rigid health-freaks, though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: they found me interesting, cooperative and lucidly descriptive of my symptoms, and, lo behold, as the weeks went by, my medical results were surprisingly good. This gave me leverage.
Still, I had to badger them about drug dosages. I didn’t need blasting with explosives. Eventually they got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – the steroid Dexamethasone, which had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects, especially to people close to me. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it started working better.
Initially I was supposed to have eight cycles of chemotherapy but they stopped treatment after five, saying I could go. Later on, one specialist said, “Mr Jenkins, I don’t know what you’re doing and I don’t want to know, but whatever you’re doing, keep doing it”.
Myeloma is a blood cancer that causes the bones to hollow out and weaken. It’s not as complex to treat as other cancers – there’s just chemo, with no radiation or surgery (since no tumours are involved). I responded well and quickly. I think the holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped greatly, together with an almost palpable influence from within, from my ‘inner doctors’. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors as well, in mysterious ways.
I’ll add a few more things: walks on the hills and clifftops; a lovely place to live on a wildlife-rich farm with low EM radiation; unchlorinated springwater from just up the hill; a positive attitude; coming to peace over as many life-issues as possible, and working on the rest.
I’m on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara (Daratumamab), which flags up emergent cancer cells that my immune system then deals with itself. I have a Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse comes round to shoot me up. She takes my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure, and every twelve weeks she takes a blood test and sends it off, and it’s from this that my condition is judged. With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a ‘pause’ – some get a year of life and some get ten. In my fourth year, I’m still alive.
After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to ‘normal’ people. When you’re doing spiritual work and you have some pretty amazing healers as friends, normal medical rules get bent and broken. But still, there’s a deep karmic story that goes on underneath cancer, with a trajectory of its own. I did well at first but, after two years, I was ailing, hit a crisis and got ready for the possibility of dying within the year. Yes, more wading around in the deep dark!
Yet by summer I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp, which itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and ambience as from the camping. By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was alive, kicking and that there was a future. And perhaps I needed to get a new coat for the winter.
I’m doing well with the cancer, but the side-effects are problematic and these might fell me in the end. It’s all about bones (in my astrological chart I have a strong Saturn). Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back collapsed – I must use sticks to stand and walk. Reducing my height, this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It also caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication, but an area of susceptibility. And if I break any bones, repair and revival is likely to be difficult. These side-issues affect my life more than cancer does.
Then there is chemo-brain. Chemotherapy chemicals destroy brain-cells and nerve-endings. It has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and memory for details, yet improving my right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment – my sense of time, sequence and duration has dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up easily when things get complex. Yet my creativity – channelled through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better.
At one stage I asked myself what I would be doing if I didn’t have cancer. “Just carrying on“, was the answer. Instead I have been given a new relationship with life on Earth, an experience-rich new chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and taxpayers. Life is twice as difficult but in compensation it has changed in shape and content. I’m focused now on staying alive more than on life’s many complexities, diversions and tensions.
I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been the next in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Well, perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. Having twice come close to dying in the last four years, it has given me some training for the inevitable transitional journey that is yet to come.
So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?
In recent months I’ve found that I see no future ahead of me. I’m drawing a blank, and my customary faith in life is not that bright. What does that mean? We shall see. In our time, we are all faced with so many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive next year or later in life. Having that assumption removed has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another strange gift that cancer has given. It’s what the psychedelic guru Alan Watts used to call the wisdom of insecurity. Earlier in life I knew it was good to appreciate life and all that it gives us, but cancer has taught me what that means in far more real-life terms.
It’s funny how things go.
With love, Palden
PS. My soul-brother Alan suggests my blogs are too long, and he’s right. But this is how they come out. I wish I had an editor – that might help. I’ll try to do shorter ones. Problem is, I’m a time-rich person writing for readers who are mostly time-poor. But then, if you read this far, well done, you did it!
Disclosure: the apparent paintings were done by me using a graphics program (Corel Painter Essentials 8) – they aren’t paintings. The photos they are based on are by me. The bottom photo is by Lynne Speight.
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Notes from the Far Beyond 