Looking ahead

I have decided to maintain a positive outlook and plan ahead. My mum is going to get better and we are going to plan stuff for her to look forward to.

1. She will come here next summer to harvest fantastic vegetables from my garden
2. We will take her to nice cottages to enjoy walks around the beautiful English countryside
3. We will go on a white Christmas holiday with anttyk, my anttyk-in-law and my Denty.

She is going to have to wait a little for her grandchildren, so she has no other choice but to get well. So, there.

The big debate

I am confused. My mum has cancer and we have been looking into alternative medicines to complement her chemotherapy to make her feel better and to increase the efficacy of the drugs.

My parents are convinced by the “miracle cure“ Tian Xian while my aunt is adamant that Ganoderma lucidum is the “magic pill“.

According to Cancer Research UK however, “the websites selling Tian Xian claim that it has been scientifically tested.  But these claims are not backed up by any hard evidence.  There are no statistics on survival presented. Nor are there any descriptions of controlled clinical studies.”

As for Ganoderma lucidum, a research by the University of Cambridge, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, stated that there was “no clear evidence of benefit demonstrated in well-nourished subjects”.

Denty is right though. I don’t really care about which one my mum would choose to ingest as long as she is comfortable with her choice. As Denty said, the one that she believes in will be the best cure for her. Placebo effect, I guess.

A worthy price to pay

Borrowed from the BBC:

“A cascade of molecular changes triggered in the hours following an initial injury can cause further severe damage to the spinal cord. But US researchers found this can be halted by using a dye known as Brilliant Blue G (BBG).

However, rats given the treatment in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study turned blue.”

(Image also borrowed from the BBC)

Well, turning blue is a small price to pay to keep walking.

On another note, when we were kids, anttyk and I really wanted a pet to love. A pet, any pet… but our mum did not allow it because she didn’t think we were responsible enough to do it.

One day, when a classmate of mine told me that we could have her pet white mouse (as she has grown tired of her sister torturing the poor thing), anttyk and I were delighted! We launched an elaborate plan to get around mum that involve a shoe box, some grapes and a couple of white lies. I think our dad knew and was covertly supporting us.

In the end, we got the very licky mouse, named her Mouse Steven and to this very day, we deny the fact that she was actually a rat.

What now?

It has been a while since I felt like blogging. My mum will be starting her chemotherapy in two weeks time in Kuala Lumpur.

What do I do now?

Cute Cupcake

Oh, just because she can be so cute.

The happy spider

Denty wandered around the garden yesterday and spotted this next to the grapevine…