The Dive

It’s been a long time since I’ve written in a journal. But I’m currently locked in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, where no phones, laptops, or electronics of any kind are allowed. So old school journaling it is… how primitive it feels!

For a perfectionist like me, writing by hand is hard. It’s messy, and I don’t like messy. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me when I was younger. Probably because the peak of my writing occurred during the adolescence of the digital era—the early 2000’s. Doing something electronically wasn’t the go-to means of anything. It was the “You’ve Got Mail” era when the AOL dial-up tone was still new and exciting. People still went to bookstores and people certainly still wrote by hand.

These days, I like the freedom that comes with typing. I like to try on different words and see how they fit. I like to move paragraphs around, using my pals Cut, Copy and Paste. When you write in pen, the words feel so permanent. You must either think very carefully about what you put down on the page or are otherwise forced into a more stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Since I only have 80 minutes in this hyperbaric chamber, stream-of-consciousness will have to do.  

I realize that I glossed over the whole “hyperbaric oxygen chamber” thing. Maybe I should have explained that before going into a long diatribe about journaling and the challenges of the handwritten form. See, if I were sitting at my laptop right now, I would have the freedom to move things around or think thoughtfully about what was even worthwhile in these above paragraphs. But there’s no time for that here. Ten minutes of my eighty-minute session have already passed, and I still have a lot more to write down, including what a hyperbaric oxygen chamber is, and why I’m currently in one.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber Therapy (or HBOT) is a holistic treatment that allows you to absorb more oxygen than normal by going into a chamber that’s pressurized higher than normal atmospheric pressure. In short, it’s a way of pumping more oxygen into your cells. This kind of therapy has several applications. Athletes, for example, use it to heal their injuries faster. It also treats compression sickness in divers who come to the surface too quickly. It is for this reason that HBOT sessions are often called “dives.”

This is my eighth dive. I’m doing a total of forty over the course of 8 weeks. I do these “dives” at a place called Aervita, right here in Edina, just one block from my kids’ daycare. This small but swanky office space packs a big punch. They offer everything from HBOT, to acupuncture, red light and sauna therapies, chiropractic services, massage, and food sensitivity testing. Aervita is a mecca for holistic treatment.

When I first started considering holistic cancer treatments, this is not the kind of place I expected. When I think of holistic medicine, my brain conjures up a room filled with crystals and incense fumes, run by a lady with big turquoise earrings and wearing a… (ugh, what’s the word I’m looking for. I hate not having Google to look things up. And I hate that I hate not having Google even more). Just picture a white hippie lady sipping matcha out of a gourd. Whatever she’s wearing, that’s what I’m talking about.

Aervita, on the other hand, is a brightly lit office that’s staffed with young- and healthy-looking gentlemen in crisp black uniforms. There are leather swivel chairs in an unpartitioned waiting area, the Aervita logo glowing above. It feels both clinical and ritzy at the same time, like a medical practice you might find in an upscale area of LA. I guess that makes sense since Edina could be considered the Beverly Hills of Minnesota… although nothing really compares to Beverly Hills.

Just past the sleek, underlit front desk are two bright-white metal cylinders raised a few inches off the floor. Since I’m currently in one of them, I’ll use my body as a reference and guestimate that the chamber is about 8 feet long, and 4 feet in diameter. There are two portholes on the sides and one on the top. These allow light into the chamber and let you communicate via hand signals with whomever is assisting you with your dive—either Jaron, Tate or Kyle. (Vanessa got fired the day after my second dive… she apparently “wasn’t being safe enough.” This made me wonder if she’d almost killed me during my dive. How ironic would that have been?!)

After your dive director watches you crawl awkwardly into the tube, he shuts the round, airtight door behind you. It’s like going into a mini submarine. Then you put on your oxygen mask and the pressurization process begins. I go to 2.0 atm, or the equivalent of 35 feet underwater. Apparently, that’s the cancer sweet spot. The chamber takes about ten minutes to pressurize, during which time it feels like you’re going up in an airplane. Your ears start to clog and your only job is to keep popping them.

Once you’re pressurized, you have an hour of forced screen detox to do as you please—you can read, write, color, make friendship bracelets, contemplate the meaning of life, nap… Once the hour is up, the chamber depressurizes and you are released from captivity, feeling rejuvenated after not having your phone for a full eighty minutes. I should do that more often, you think as you beeline to your phone to check your messages.

Inside the tube is a mattress and two pillows, the pressurization panel with your oxygen mask attached, a red-alert button in case of emergencies, a walkie-talkie, and an emergency lever that allows you release the air pressure yourself in case (as Kyle explained it to me) everyone in the office has a heart attack at the exact same time and no one can get you out.

There’s also some free reading material. Today’s reading material includes two outdated “Edina Lifetime” magazines, a crossword puzzle book, and a laminated how-to sheet titled “Emotion Freedom Tapping (E.F.T).” After skimming, it looks like E.F.T. helps with the anxiety that may occur when you lock people in airtight metal tubes.

The last book in the hyperbaric library is called “Oxygen Under Pressure” by Jason Sonner. I read this book on my first dive, mainly because I didn’t know to bring my own reading material. But I was also curious to know more about what I was signing up for. After all, aside from my functional medicine doctor telling me I should do hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy, I didn’t know anything about it or how it worked.  

So, how does HBOT help with cancer exactly? It’s a little complicated to explain, especially for a handwritten essay. And I only have 30 minutes left in my dive, but maybe this book can help me paraphrase a bit…

For the last forty years, cancer has been studied as a genetic disease. And we still don’t have a cure. New data strongly suggest that we’ve been looking at the cancer problem all wrong—that cancer is not a genetic disease but a metabolic one. Cancer represents a cell function issue and immune system weakness.

Unlike healthy cells, which use oxygen for their metabolism, cancer cells ferment, sucking in more glucose than normal cells and needing higher glucose levels to survive. This is an inefficient use of energy that ultimately causes the cells to breakdown. In sum, sugar feeds cancer and it isn’t supposed to do that.

Due to this respiratory problem, pumping extra oxygen into the body through HBOT doesn’t feed cancer cells the way it does normal cells. Quite the opposite. These high oxygen levels help to control and kill cancer, while also preserving and even improving the health of surrounding tissue. Chemotherapy, on the other hand, kills cancer cells and the healthy tissue surrounding it. Thus, HBOT presents a much less toxic treatment option. (Don’t worry, I’m still doing the chemo, too).

Using this new theory about cancer as a metabolic disease (although, this isn’t a new theory at all since it was first published by Dr. Warburg in the 1920s but has just recently started to breathe new life in Western medicine), HBOT can theoretically help patients fight cancer with less chemo through a natural—versus chemical—process.

In the United States, HBOT is FDA-approved to treat a mere 14 conditions. But in other countries, that number is much higher. In Russia, it’s somewhere around 130. While cancer isn’t on any of these lists, it’s not because it doesn’t work. It’s because the data is just starting to compile, thanks to this new perspective on cancer as a metabolic disease. It’s going to take time for this data to be applied, but it’s there. Change is bubbling under the surface.

Whew, that was a lot to write by hand! If I had been at my laptop I could have just included a link!

You’d think that my doctors would tell me about all this stuff. That I wouldn’t have to learn about it in some beat-up text sandwiched between a crossword puzzle book and an anti-anxiety guide. But legally, their hands are tied. Anything off-script, anything that veers from medical protocol, is not up for discussion. I mean, the fact that oncologists don’t even urge their cancer patients to change their diet is beyond baffling (the subject of nutrition will be getting its own post soon). Some of it has to do with liability. Some of it has to do with insurance. At the end of the day, you can just call it “red tape.” And because of this red tape, it is unfortunately up to the patient to go digging for answers. Or, in my case, diving for them.

I’m all for taking the time to thoroughly research drugs and treatments before making them commonplace. But as someone who has been diagnosed with incurable cancer, this red tape is in my way. So, I’m tearing it down. I’m going to study cancer treatment through every lens, not just the ones that my doctors allow me to look through. Mainstream medical experts are not gods. To me, they provide a foundation, but it’s up to me to build my house of treatment.

I have a say in my treatment. I can ask questions. I can have gut feelings. I can use my intuition. I can advocate. I can research. I can study.

I can change my diet. Or not. I can take supplements. Or not. I can climb into a metal tube and do crossword puzzles. Or not.

At the end of the day, everything is up to me. And, yes, that can feel a little stressful at times. But it’s also empowering. Autonomy opens me up to a vast world of cancer treatments. And a vast amount of hope…

Time’s up. My ears are starting to pop, and I can see Kyle through the porthole starting the depressurization process. A good thing, too, because my wrist is very tired. My hand isn’t used to writing this much. Let’s hope there’s a book out there somewhere that posits how writing by hand is an effective way of curing cancer!

Eight dives down, thirty-two more to go…