Tag: bone marrow cancer

Blessings that Bones Bring

A spirited cancer patient tells his cancer story.

Yes, it’s my latest (fourteenth) book, now out. It recounts the story of my cancer process up to late 2023. Currently available as a PDF for on-screen reading (free or optional donation). Later it will come out as an audiobook.

It will be interesting to cancer patients, their helpers, families or friends who prefer to take a non-standard approach to cancer. Or to people with other serious conditions. Or to anyone who likes a good autobiographical read.

Blessings focuses particularly on the psycho-spiritual side of things. It outlines what I have chosen to do with my situation. It isn’t a how-to book, but there might be some secrets in there that are beneficial to you.

I have taken an integrated medicine approach, doing both chemotherapy and holistic treatments, following my intuitions. And, lo behold, my results are good and, to my surprise, I’m still alive, still at it.

You’ll find it here: www.palden.co.uk/boneblessings.html

For those of you who haven’t followed my cancer story since the beginning, here’s a summary of it, taken from the book…

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Fortuitously, five years ago I started a blog a few weeks before going down with cancer, with no idea that it would turn into a cancer blog. I just had a feeling to start blogging. That says something about intuition: it has ways of knowing things in advance that our conscious minds don’t.

Intuition knows or understands things in the back brain without needing to think about them in the front brain. But it’s a matter of giving it attention and credence, and learning to avoid overriding our feelings with obstructive and over-thought rationales, conditioned responses, fears or doubts – or science.

Cancer was a great surprise when diagnosed in November 2019. Signs were appearing nearly a year beforehand in January 2019, but they weren’t recognisable. Something wasn’t right. It was as if I was in a downward spiral, getting tired of life and losing my spark. Neither my partner nor I could figure out what it was.

In August 2019, while working in her garden, my back cracked – two of the lowest vertebrae in my back fractured and two collapsed. At the time it seemed I had an excruciating, immobilising back problem.

A cranial osteopath recommended I get scanned in hospital – he felt something more was going on here (thanks, Simon Perks). Getting to hospital was a long process. Eventually, in A&E, the junior doctor, in a quandary, called in a specialist, who entered, looked intently at me, then said, “Test him for Myeloma”, and walked out. Brilliant. This man nailed it at first try. Before long 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 also brought me 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 my health quite well, 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 one of the cancer specialists whether he had any clues about the causes of Myeloma. He looked at me straight, saying quite simply, “Radiation exposure”. The next day he brought a map in The Lancet, a medical journal, showing the clustering of Myeloma cases in UK around nuke stations. For 28 years I had lived 15 miles downwind of Hinckley Point nuke station, and I’d had two instances of nuclear radiation exposure in other contexts. His opinion just went ‘ping’. I had known since 1975 that I was electrosensitive. This was not a great problem until around year 2000 when mobile phones and wi-fi became commonplace. That’s what finished me off.

Certain chemical neurotoxins may also be a cause of Myeloma for some. Once, when in hospital, I met a man with Myeloma, asking him what his work had been. “A merchant seaman”, he said. “We have all sorts of strange chemicals on the ships”. I asked what his specific job had been. “Radar”. There you go: radiation exposure.

Another chap said he had been a freight train driver. “What kind of freight?”. “Oh, nuclear waste from Sellafield. It was good pay.”

Many doctors say the causes of Myeloma are unknown. This perhaps deliberate unclarity probably arises because of the court cases and compensation claims that would erupt if such electronic or chemical toxicity became public knowledge. There’s a lot of money in it, and everyone loves their mobile phone.

Back in 2000 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 profound honesty session, a struggle with Weltschmerz – the pain of the world. Then aged fifty, I think my susceptibility to cancer started brewing around that time.

As time went on the electrosensitivity got worse, especially after 4G 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. I completed it in early August, just two weeks before my back suddenly went crack and my life changed. Well, the research was at least done – 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 the doctors, my partner Grace, my son Tulki and a few others – and way out of my depth, flat on my back. It was an exercise in surrender and acceptance – there was no alternative.

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, as if a failure, but it didn’t quite feel like that to me, once I accepted it was happening. There was something strangely fitting about it, even though life was being hard on me. I decided to suspend all my foregoing beliefs and to do my best to trust that, whatever was to happen, everything would be alright in the end. I held on to one belief though, and I have a suspicion you know what it is: whatever life presents, there is a gift in it.

Earlier in life, rigorous experiences as a mountaineer, camper and humanitarian taught me energy-management, attitude-maintenance and steadfastness. Having got through plenty of crises and survived, I felt it was possible to do so now, whether that meant living or dying. At one point I said to the haematologist that I felt I had gone past the allotted nine lives (of a cat) and was on my tenth. She laughed but, dealing every day with people with terminal aliments, she probably knew what I meant.

Trusting the doctors was my only option. Nearly all of them were really good people. My experience of NHS treatment has largely been positive, once I gained the right attention. As the Covid period went on, by 2022 Treliske hospital became much more efficient and better organised. That helped a lot.

I had done alternative medicine for decades, yet I did not have the knowhow, energy, facility, support, time or money to opt for a holistic approach while in the depths of cancer, and already it was too late, too urgent. Chemotherapy was the only doable alternative. Accepting 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 full-on crisis, a test of spirit. I had to grasp life’s reins. Healing means fully allowing healing to take place, handing ourselves over. 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.

Pharmaceuticals shocked my system, though clearly they could 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. My brains were not working well – I couldn’t get my head around all the medical research and terminology – though my intuitive senses were easier to read off. Intuitions just say Yes or No – and then it’s up to us to figure out why, or to bear witness to the way it becomes 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 help me adapt to a changed life. But when you ask for help, you need also to offer something: I offered my life, however it was to be. May it happen well and may I make it easy – that was another key prayer. I think this approach really helped, not just psycho-spiritually but medically too.

I used holistic supplements, helpers and good nutrition judiciously, 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. And old Tomten, Grace’s cat, would lie on my pelvis, the most painful place, giving genuine pain-relief.

So, doctors saved my life and healers gave me a new life.

I feel immense gratitude to Grace, 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 good souls made a big difference in that dark time.

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 a member of the awkward squad – ideologically rigid, argumentative health-freaks with antipathies to match – though I did have my own ways and preferences. Two things helped: the doctors and nurses found me interesting and, lo behold, as the months 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 the doctors got the message. One or two drugs were withdrawn and one was reduced – Dexamethasone, which had had positive effects on my cancer and distressing behavioural side-effects. My dose was reduced and, lo behold, it worked 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 my use of holistic practices, supplements and remedies helped, together with, to me, an almost palpable influence from my inner doctors. They scanned and treated me on an energy-level, and it worked. I think they worked through the hospital doctors in mysterious ways too.

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; and coming to peace with as many life-issues as possible.

And sunshine. And love. These aren’t available all the time, and they don’t just come when requested, but they work.

At the time I wrote this, I was on an immunotherapy maintenance treatment, Dara. I had a subcutaneous Dara injection every four weeks – a nurse came round, inserting a short needle into the flesh of my stomach. This made the Dara disperse slowly (in contrast to an injection in a vein or artery). She took my temperature, oxygen count and blood pressure.

Every twelve weeks she took a blood sample and sent it off, and it’s from this that my condition was judged. Later I was taken off Dara and currently I’m chugging along with no pharmaceutical cancer treatment – only holistics – but I’ll probably go on ‘third line’ medical treatment eventually.

With Myeloma, most people don’t get ‘remission’, just a delay in dying – some get a year of life and some get ten, even fifteen. In my fourth year, I’m still alive. Yes, just checked, I’m still here.

After decades of living a holistic life, your system evolves differently to that of ‘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 deeper 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.

Yet by summer 2022 I was reborn, even attending a week-long Oak Dragon camp. This itself was a healing boost, as much from the people and the ambience as from the campfires and outdoor life. As Oak Dragon’s founder (in the 1980s) I felt so welcomed, and this in itself was medicinal.

By now I was in a state of positive shock, realising I was still alive and that there was indeed a future. Perhaps I needed to get a new coat for 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. Four of the lowest vertebrae in my back subsided. Reducing my height by over an inch (4cm), this squeezed my stomach, leading to digestive and eliminative difficulties. It caused the outer gluteus muscles in my backside, which do the major pulling when walking, to lose their tension, making long walks strenuous and painful. Added to this I have osteonecrosis of the jaw – a dying jawbone – stopped by medication but still an area of susceptibility. If I break any bones, repair and revival could 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. Chemo-brain has had mixed effects, reducing my left-brained ‘executive’ thinking and my memory for details, yet improving the right-brained intuitive-imaginative side. It has pushed me into the present moment. My sense of time, sequence and duration have dwindled. I’ll remember something that was said by someone, but not who it was or when. I screw up when things get complex.

Yet my creativity – through writing, podcasting and websites – has never been better. This can deceive other people because, if they read my writings or see a photo, they get the impression I’m in better shape than I am. “You’re looking well, Palden!” Gosh, do I? It doesn’t quite feel like that.

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, an experience-rich chapter, however long or short it is to be – miraculously paid for by the government and the noble taxpayers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Life is twice as difficult but, in compensation, it has changed in shape and content.

I’ve had some pretty amazing spiritual initiations in my life, and this has been one in a sequence, as if it was meant to be that way all along. Twice coming close to dying in the last four years, I’ve had some training for the inevitable journey that is yet to come.

So, did I go down with cancer, or did I go up?

In our time, we’re all faced with many unknowns. Most people can however safely assume they will be alive later in life. The removal of that assumption has a strangely spiritualising effect – and that’s another bizarre 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.

Relief

A cancer update.

Wind-strafed heather on Bartinney Castle, West Penwith, Cornwall

I’ve just had my three-monthly phone conversation with the haematologist – she’s at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro. One good thing about my particular cancer, Myeloma, is that it is easily tested and monitored with a blood sample (I had it two weeks ago). So we can do it over the phone. She’s always rather brisk – the poor woman probably gets fed up of the list of calls to make through the day, and with us cancer patients and our anxieties.

Anyway, I had been anticipating bad news. Well, not exactly bad, but not good either. I was hovering between optimism and pessimism.

This winter I’ve begun experiencing a kind of stress – partially due to circumstances but also because part of me feels vulnerable and undefended. No one has my back. It takes me back to experiences I had around the age of six-seven-eight. I remember the feeling of it. I was turning short-sighted, and as an unrecognised Aspie I felt like a stranger in a strange land and a fish out of water. My poor old Mum was always busy with other things, without paying much attention, and the world seemed so big and incomprehensible, and somehow I was expected to manage with all this.

Nowadays they might call that ‘learning difficulties’ but it isn’t really. It’s not a lack of intelligence but a bit too much of it. It’s a complex Aspie perception of the world that takes longer to compute – for me, it took until around age fourteen, when suddenly the other boys started calling me ‘Professor’ instead of ‘Speccy-Foureyes’.

Part of me feels like a seven year old – feeling a need to have someone holding my hand and shielding me from that big world out there. This is quite a change from earlier times in life when I had more confidence and a relative invincibility that was calm under duress and pretty competent – I’m a Virgo, after all, and us Virgos tend to be quite calm and serene, or we tend to be neurotic. Or perhaps both at different times.

So I was somewhere between nervous and calm over this phone call. It could decide many things. One thing in particular is that the next line of treatment – I’ve exhausted two out of five now – is Thalidomide. It’s a good cancer drug, the doctors say, but what makes me nervous is this: my mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness while pregnant with me, and I was very lucky to emerge into life with all my limbs and body-parts intact. Apparently, deformed bodies arise only if the drug is taken during a certain early week of pregnancy, and it wasn’t that week for me. However…

Prayer clooties at St Euny’s Well, near Carn Euny.
But if you ever wish to tie a cloutie at a well, make sure it is natural and biodegradable, since the problems you weave into it will disappear as the cloutie rots away. And it doesn’t throttle the tree.

I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and I have wondered whether it’s related to the Thalidomide I took, second-hand, during gestation. The chemotherapy I had four years ago made me wonder about this – particularly the steroid Dexamethasone. The drugs seemed to amplify my Aspie symptoms. The behavioural transition prompted by these drugs helped lose me a partner and some friends. It has become more difficult to manage some of life’s tricky social situations, or deal with bureaucracy, or insensitive people, or hackers, or modern-times complexities.

But, on the plus side, this Aspie-amplification has led to a wave of creativity, perspective and original thinking. As you might perhaps have noticed, I’ve been churning out loads of stuff – mainly in the form of blogs, podcasts and books. That’s the other side of Aspergers – the Aspie genius, with an ability to excel in certain specific interests and gifts (though not necessarily in the full range of abilities that modern humans are supposed to cover). Also, there’s a certain blindness to human guile and manipulation, making us emotionally rather susceptible to getting caught in other people’s webs without realising it.

Many ‘neurotypicals’ judge Aspies to be emotionally neutral or feelingless. Truth is, we get so flooded and drowned in feelingful impressions that we short-circuit or melt down, showing little or no responsive expression except perhaps the look of a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Or a bit like Commander Data. The picture comes clear within hours, days or longer, but by then people have formed their conclusions and stomped off, often making big, inappropriate decisions on our behalf.

Over two years after we separated, I have only recently lightbulbed a bundle of key insights into my relationship with my former partner that I had just not seen before. I had sensed it unconsciously but I still didn’t see it. While talking to a friend I suddenly saw it – the whole pattern and network of connections, events, clues, mistakes and junction-points. It’s funny when that happens – everything suddenly becomes very different. Nothing changes, but everything changes, and a healing can occur.

Yet the paradox is that empathically I understand the workings of the human psyche and human emotions more clearly than many people, though not necessarily in my own personal sphere of life. Many would interpret this as a growth blockage, a refusal to open up to my emotions, but that’s not the case. It’s just that I operate with a different operating system that computes things in a different way, and neurotypicals have some advantages and Aspies have others.

The main problem is that neurotypicals are in the majority and neurotypical culture is dominant, even though today we’re presented with a rather chaotic and multidimensional spectrum of psychodiversity. NTs tend to define the rules and, being more rule-bound than Aspies, they tend to insist that everyone should behave like them, according to their criteria.

Victorian architecture, at Porthmoina Cove, Penwith

Anyway, the haematologist quite likes me – I’m an easy customer. She was pleased (yet again) with my results. I’ve had no cancer medication now for four months and, lo behold, there is no significant change in my readings.

So suddenly I’m feeling relieved. My wobbles were just that – wobbles. It means I won’t have to go on Thalidomide for the next few months at least – and I won’t have to do the rather long journey to the hospital either, once a month.

That’s good, because it comes back to that vulnerable, undefended feeling. My fear is that my Aspie tendencies will get switched up by Thalidomide. The bit that concerns me most is that I have no one to speak for me or cover my back. There are times when I blank out and (this might surprise you) have nothing to say, at precisely the moment when I need to fend for myself. Or I simply forget about something important, remembering it afterwards, and too late. Again, it’s that eight-year old feeling where there are quite a few things you can handle, but some things are too much. You need Mummy or Daddy, or someone, to come to the rescue.

But there’s a lesson here too, in trust. Things always work out alright. My anticipations were based upon the fear that my readings would deteriorate and they’d put me on the new drugs quite quickly. I have a few public speaking engagements coming up, and some anticipation about how well I’ll do on stage if I’m on new drugs. Or whether Thalidomide would lead to regrettable behavioural changes, just as the steroid Dex did. But there was no need to worry, and everything is alright. My readings are fine.

So is Paldywan the oratorical bard. Lacking anyone to talk to, a few days ago I went up the hill to the 2,000 year old ruin of a courtyard house and recorded two podcasts on the trot. And one of them, Ascension, comes out with this blog.

There’s a funny twist I discovered recently. In 2021 I contracted Osteonecrosis of the Jaw (ONJ), as a side-effect of some pharma drugs I had been on earlier. It caused pus to drip from my chin – urgh, yuk! It made me feel horrible and disgusting and, naturally, no one wanted to come near me. I asked myself about the inner meaning of this, digging up an image or a memory of having had leprosy sometime back in history, and being rejected by society. Rejection and exile are two karmic patterns of mine. When I twigged this, it made some sort of sense – deep memory was involved in the ONJ.

As time went on the ONJ subsided, becoming manageable. Then, a few days ago I was looking up the various uses of Thalidomide and the two specific ailments mentioned were leprosy and multiple myeloma (my kind of cancer). Ah, there’s a connection. I’ve been given a clue. Clues like this can act as keys to healing. It’s fascinating how intuition can know things long before the brains catch up.

I’ve started on some new holistic remedies – the main one is Resveratrol, a specific treatment for Myeloma. I’m back on Shitake Mushrooms as well. I have started some new supplements and remedies too, including one by Detox Trading in Devon called Happy Mix – it really does lift the spirits and, with the late spring we’re having, it has helped me emerge from wintertime blues and cabin-fever.

The Watcher. A simulacrum at Porthmoina Cove

I didn’t need to be worried about the haematologist’s verdict. Perhaps I am a neurotic Virgo after all. Though there’s something else here too… cancer has stripped away many of my defences, sensitising me to vibes, energies, situations and scrangles. There’s more emotional lava erupting as well. This makes me both more open and more vulnerable. Small things demand more processing than before, yet I’m less dulled by the very defences, built with the cement of trauma, that are designed to protect us from a rather tough and violating world. Life has become more colourful, textured and meaningful.

So a key cancer benefit – or a possibility, at least – is that cancer is a big jolt to become more human, to live more fully – even if physically constrained like me. In some respects it might be worth looking on cancer as an upgrade – and other terminal, serious and painful ailments too. From a soul viewpoint, at least.

It’s not a matter of primary importance how long we live – dying ‘before one’s time’ isn’t necessarily a failure or a shame. What matters is how we filled the time and space we were given, how we chose to experience the life we had and what contribution we made. In terms of soul evolution, three years with cancer can sometimes be equivalent to fifty years of normality.

But then, you don’t have to contract cancer for that to happen. It’s the way cancer hits you that matters, and what doors it opens – and whether we choose to go through them. This is regardless of how well or badly the cancer goes from a medical viewpoint. It’s the psycho-spiritual impact and the jolt that matters. It induces a cards-on-the-table focus of energy and of will-to-live.

It obliges us to face our shit, stuff, fears, failings and foibles. And regrets. On a deep level, that’s one reason why cancer is increasing in incidence: it’s one way in which the soul of humanity is serving us notice that we need to wake up. Or, at least, wake up more. Or you die. It’s a simple formula. It’s a bit like being in a war or crisis zone – the situation is terrible, but a crazy enspiritedness can take over, making you put your life on the line and getting you through to where you truly need to go.

My cousin Faith calls it a state of super-concentrated uncertainty. Or I’m reminded of the title of Alan Watts’ book of fiftyish years ago, called ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity‘.

Even so, I’m rather relieved to know that I’m cruising along on a cancer plateau and my results are okay. I felt it was so, but the confirmation is much appreciated. After all, it does help to know at least a little about what’s going to happen next. Should I buy a new computer or put some money down for my funeral? Um, I don’t know, but it might be the computer. Sometimes you just have to choose. And that’s what life on Earth is about.

With love, Palden.

[Written using human intelligence. Such as it is.]

PS: my cancer book is progressing, and recently I decided to release it as an audiobook too – better for people with fatigue and chemo-brain. I still haven’t found a really good title for it though. That’s most strange. I guess it’ll come in its own time.

Site: www.palden.co.uk
Blog: https://penwithbeyond.blog
Palestine Audiobook: www.palden.co.uk/audiobook.html
Podcasts: www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
Meditations: www.palden.co.uk/meditations.html

Looking toward Ding Dong mine (in the far distance) from Carn Eanes, near Pendeen

The Wisdom of Insecurity

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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