One Month Post Op Update

I’m 4 weeks out from surgery now. Recovering well, the scar is doing fine. Still a lot of swelling in between all the cuts that doesn’t seem to want to go anywhere.

Bubble Wrap

The air has finally started to leave my brain. There was a pocket of air where my tumour used to be but they said that it would find its way to the surface eventually. This happened for the guy who had surgery on the same day as me within 3 days. Whereas it’s taken me four weeks. People describe it as a bubble wrap popping feeling. And I suppose it does. i can hear it as much as feel it. It sounds and feel like popping corn going off inside my head.

Diet

My diet has changed all over again. Upon further research on ketogenics it turns out all the success was coming from glioblastomas which I do not have and are genetically different to my tumour. it’s likely my tumour can use ketones to grow. So that extremely challenging diet probably wouldn’t help me that much. Calorie restriction on the other hand still shows a lot of promise though.

mum and rene had read a lot of success stories regarding vegan diets and wanted me to look into it. I really didn’t want to go vegan, after having meat at least twice a day for 3 years. This would be a huge change to my diet. Anyway after reading a lot of research I came to the conclusion that they were right. This mostly came from all the studies regarding insulin-like growth factor or IGF-1. I was well aware of this before and that meat increased this hormone. But that to me was a good thing because it’s related to muscle gains and strength increases. So for the past 3 years I actively ate meat to encourage this hormone. However I didn’t realise at the time that I had a tumour and that igf-1 increases tumour growth as well.

anyway I’ve been vegan with a ban on sugar and refined flour for two weeks which is a fairly easy diet to follow and allows me to  eat a lot more veg  and fruit, so in terms of overall health I feel a lot better. Apart from my gut, all the extra fibre I am definitely struggling with. Anyway I’m making a green juice daily which consists of organic kale, spinach, a lemon and an apple everyday. This is an effort to get the majority of nutrients from raw leafy greens without all the fibre or bad taste (kale isn’t especially easy to eat raw). It actually tastes quite good to me. The rest of the day consists of mostly of eating veg and pulses. As far as calorie restriction goes, Its quite hard to overeat on such a limited diet. I’ve lost quite a bit of weight already. Which is good because I managed to put on a load since being diagnosed through steroids, comfort eating and inactivity.
Kale and Lemon Juice

Moblity


Moving on to inactivity, a friend from church lent to us a treadmill to help me with rehabilitation. I’ve been using it every day trying to build up my tolerance to it. I started off at 10 minutes on the treadmill with someone watching in-case I had a seizure and eventually built up to over an hour a day. I think this is helping battling the fatigue I’ve had since surgery. Also it makes me feel good. I’ve started to introduce weightlifting back into my life as well which has been fantastic. I’m not going to do any lifting that puts me in a vulnerable position though, like bench pressing just in case I do seizure.


Senses

One thing I’ve noticed is heightened senses, my sense of smell and taste are much stronger. Not sure about hearing but I’ve been hearing my heartbeat in my ears since surgery. I’m going back to London in april for my post-op appointment and scan and genetic results, so that will be a big day because the genetic mutations present that cause the tumour can have large effects on the growth and transformation of the tumour.

  

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