TOPIC:

Congratulations GT2! Time to relax a bit and take in the view from the other side of tx, on your way to SVR!

GT2....congrats, man. You started with a banged up
post and EOT'd with a healthy one. You have one of
the best body shops in the world.

Good luck w/SVR forever....e.

Thanks for the EOT well wishes.

Thanks Cheese. I'd rather go for a ride on one of your bikes than go on a treadmill ... riding in the Thai traffic will get your heart rate up ...

I loved the surfing clip Ariel. Sharks are a hot topic over here at the moment. Opinions are divided on what to do. All I can say without sparking it up, is that we never worried about sharks when we were kids, and now lives are lost all too frequently. Reverse the current fishing restrictions to what they were for decades through the ‘60s to ‘90s, and problem solved.

Cute little race car Pat. EOT is a wonderful feeling. Thanks for your fine tuning tips along the journey.

Great photo of a GT2 Fitz. It’s better than the one I have for my avatar … I might have to steal it … but then again, it’s not polite to stick your rear end out in people’s faces.

Thanks Re_roll. I agree, Dr Freeman’s body shop is the best in the world … we come in all banged up to various degrees and he puts us back on the road in a relatively short time with a new lease on life. As I said in my original post, it’s his virtual garage …

Cheers
GT2

Hi Matt

I enjoyed your summary of the current forum characters that we have shared a laugh with along our treatment journey. It’s good to have a laugh together as it’s a good distraction from our serious health issues. If we take ourselves, or life, too seriously we just end up being boring old sad sacks.

You reminded me of the Wacky Races Cartoon that I used to watch as a kid. I’ve taken the liberty to try and align some of the current forum characters with those in the Wacky Race.

The obvious choice for Peter Perfect in the Turbo Terrific is Dr Freeman. Gillead’s CEO John Milligan would be Dick Dastardly. Bill Gates’ recent mutterings about patent laws would make a perfect Muttley and join Dick Dastardly in the Mean Machine. The TGA makes a good Ant Hill Mob in the Bullet Proof Bomb who are always white anting Dr Freeman attempts to FixHepC. Gaj would make a perfect Sargent Blast keeping the forum law and order.

Pat1 and Beeches could join Ariel to form Team Penelope Pitstop, after wiping out their convertible, in Thelma & Louise style, on their road trip to the start of the Wacky Race. You could team up with Mgalbrai in the Arkansas Chuggabug. Re-Roll could be the Red Max. Cheese could team up with Fitz, the street fighting Rufus Ruffcut, as Sawtooth in the Buzzwagon so he could cut the cheese at his leisure along the way.

Others may have better suggestions, or identify with other characters such as the Slag Brothers in the Boulder Mobile, The Gruesome Twosome in the Creepy Coupe, Professor Pat Pending in the Convert-a-Car.





Have a laugh, and the world laughs with you …

Cheers

GT2

All I can say is, amen brother. Keep laughing and smiling... I'll give those cartoon characters a closer look but your assignments so far look good to me ... I gotta seriously tell you how often you've made my day with your posts. I always walk away smiling.
Thanks GT2

Matt

Congrats GT2! Awesome news

GT2 love Penelope Pittstop and yes it would be Thelma and Louise style crossing the Nullabor in her car I can't post the pic of her car it's bouncing back
But yes fun

Hi Ariel

Here's a picture of Penelope Pitstop for you.

Hi GT2,

keep posting - I like all the graphic stuff.

Jeff

P.S. hope you see SVR 12 soon (well at least in 12 weeks)

Pat1 and Beeches could join Ariel to form Team Penelope Pitstop, after wiping out their convertible, in Thelma & Louise style, on their road trip to the start of the Wacky Race. You could team up with Mgalbrai in the Arkansas Chuggabug. Re-Roll could be the Red Max. Cheese could team up with Fitz, the street fighting Rufus Ruffcut, as Sawtooth in the Buzzwagon so he could cut the cheese at his leisure along the way.

Hey GT2 man, rereading your posts, you have won your race. Very happy to join the Thelma & Louise Team Penelope Pitstop. Love your posts and your wonderful racy EOT finale. Look forward to reading bout the grande finale of them all all power to ya!

Here are a couple of newspaper articles on how exercise helps fight cancer.

I've noticed that some forum members have HCC and may have been told to rest and not exert themselves. Current research suggests they do the opposite.

Work out the best way to survive cancer
PETA RASDIEN
July 06, 2016

Exercise is a potent medicine in the fight against cancer, delivering results equal to some of the best therapies. The latest evidence shows getting the right exercise prescription can halve the chance of dying Rob Newton, co-director of the Exercise Medicine Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, says this does not mean people should forgo traditional treatments such as chemotherapy but instead use exercise to amplify their survival chances.

“The chemo will obviously give them a survival advantage then, if they exercise, they are going to more than double their relative rate of survival,” he says.

Professor Newton says most patients were not being told of the evidence. Patients contact him quite upset because in the whole of their cancer journey they had never been advised to exercise, rather they were told to rest and not exert themselves. But lots of high quality research clearly demonstrates exercise is not only safe but one of the most highly effective synergistic medicines a patient can take.

“There is no evidence it will cure cancer but it will greatly slow the progression of most cancers because it actually rallies the body’s internal mechanisms to defend itself,” he says. This highly effective medicine to manage cancer can start immediately after diagnosis, with the right guidance.

“Where it comes into its real benefit is when it is given synergistically with other therapies such as chemotherapy, for example,” he says. “Chemotherapy in most cases will cure the cancer, it will obliterate the tumour, but of course there are enormous side effects from that.
“Many people will develop other conditions due to the chemotherapy which may in fact kill them.”

Exercise helps to reduce the risk of many of those treatment side effects. Professor Newton says drug developers are now pouring millions of dollars into researching immunotherapy, looking for new drugs that could wake up and supercharge the body’s own immune system. This is because, when it worked at its optimum, the immune system is highly effective at locating tumour cells or pre-cancerous cells and killing them.

“The interesting thing is exercise already does that very, very effectively and at the moment it does it more effectively than any drug we currently have available. The problem is getting people to do the exercise,” he says. And, exercise is not just for cancer patients who are relatively well. In fact, the biggest gains can be made for the sickest patients.

There are generic recommendations for all cancer patients to strive for 70-150 minutes of aerobic exercise each week. But many would not be able to achieve anywhere near that, Professor Newton says. “We would be happy if we could just get two reasonable resistance training sessions per week to try to stem the catastrophic loss of muscle. Patients with pancreatic cancer and mesothelioma, they just waste away. “We are trying to maintain muscle and keep them functional - so it is highly tailored exercise medicine.”

The Cancer Council WA has been a leader in promoting exercise among cancer patients, offering classes since 2007 and funding research into its effects to the tune of $1.1 million.

Sandy McKiernan, the council’s information and support services director, says exercise could deliver a range of other benefits alongside physical ones: Helping patients better cope with the side effects from treatment as well as the emotional fallout.

“The global benefits of exercise are still being understood and the research is really starting to delve deeper,” she says. “We’re starting to see the benefits of exercise during cancer itself.” Ms McKiernan adds the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy can be debilitating so it seems to make sense for people to go home and rest “but the evidence now suggests the complete opposite.”

The West Australian
health.thewest.com.au/news/2993/work-out...ay-to-survive-cancer

Exercising better cancer control

PETA RASDIEN
July 06, 2016

A growing body of evidence tells us exercise can be as effective in treating cancer as chemotherapy but the physiological reason is still not fully understood. Rob Newton, co-director of the Exercise Medicine Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, says it is partly because exercise helps to prime the body’s immune system.

Exercise increases the number of natural killer cells but also the signalling between the cells and their ability to seek out cancer cells in the body. It also heightens the effectiveness of existing treatments such as chemotherapy by increasing blood flow and therefore sending drugs directly to the tumour site. “Most tumours have a dysregulated circulatory system and so their capillaries are quite random and disorganised, blood flow is low, the tumour can be quite hypoxic, low in oxygen and other nutrients — so it is difficult to target the tumour and get the poison into it,” Professor Newton says.

When we exercise, tissues that are not being used shut down and the arterioles that supply them constrict in order to deliver as much blood as possible to the working muscles. “Because of this poorly developed circulation in tumours they don’t shut down, so they don’t constrict and the result is when you exercise blood pressure goes up markedly, that’s quite healthy, and results in greatly increased perfusion and more blood flowing through the tumour,” Professor Newton says.

“But also the body’s own endogenous anti-tumour medicines, things like cytokines, will also be delivered and hit the tumour, and natural killer cells and other innate immune system cells are delivered at a much higher level to where the tumour cells are developing.”
He encourages anyone having cancer treatment to exercise immediately before or after chemotherapy to maximise its effect, if they can, with advice from an exercise physiologist.

With colleagues, he is now looking into setting up a trial where patients exercise while they were receiving a chemotherapy infusion.
“It is a good time. They can do a little bit of exercise and it will help the time to pass but there are a lot of physiological reasons why it would make the therapy go better.”

Free classes

Free exercise classes for cancer patients and their carers are available for up to two years after diagnosis as part of the Cancer Council WA’s Life Now program. And don’t wait until treatment has finished. With medical clearance, people can start as soon as they begin chemotherapy. “There isn’t a bad time (to start exercising), the sooner we get people engaging in that physical activity we know they can have a better outcome,” Sandy McKiernan, Cancer Council WA cancer information and support services director, says.
In some of the research trials on exercise and its effect on cancer currently under way patients are hitting the gym immediately before or after their radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

“There is a lot of research going into ‘pre-habilitation’ — working people up to get them strong so they can endure what is to come through cancer treatment, in particular some surgeries,” Ms McKiernan says. “Our Life Now program not only gives cancer patients an opportunity to work with an exercise physiologist and have a tailored program but they meet other cancer patients and their carers and engage with our other programs and get a broader support than they might have on their own.”

Among the classes cancer patients can access through Life Now is a one-off, 12-week program run by an exercise physiologist. Each participant receives an individual program to complete within a group setting.“Before anyone commences they have an assessment by an exercise physiologist to make sure they understand any potential limitations, depending on the cancer and what treatment they have had there may be some things they shouldn’t be doing, just like if they have an injury,” Ms McKiernan says
.
About 500 people attend the exercise program each year, a further 500 attend other classes offered including meditation, mindfulness, yoga and tai chi. “If you can get someone through the whole course of Life Now, 12 weeks of exercise treatment, then you can see really positive outcomes and people can continue with what they have learnt and build their exercise regimen,” Ms McKiernan says.
For more information call 13 11 20 or go to cancerwa.asn.au. To find an exercise physiologist who specialises in cancer, go to essa.org.au/find-aep.

The West Australian
health.thewest.com.au/news/2995/exercisi...etter-cancer-control

Tailored Exercise plans

Exercise is not a one-size-fits-all plan for cancer patients. How it is prescribed in terms of dosage and frequency can have vast differences in benefits, according to Professor Rob Newton.

The co-director of the Exercise Medicine Research Institute at Edith Cowan University says the form of cancer and the type of therapy patients undertake have an impact on what kind of exercise works best. Each person must be assessed to figure out the issues affecting their survival and the exercise should then be tailored to fit.

“One of the greatest problems with radiation and chemotherapy is overwhelming fatigue,” Professor Newton says.

“Patients report that is the most difficult thing, harder than the nausea, harder than the pain because you just have this overwhelming disability in terms of fatigue, so the exercise prescription has to be very careful in terms of design in order to manage that.”

This could mean focusing the exercise more on resistance or high intensity intermittent training.

Professor Newton says sometimes clinicians recognise that exercise is good and advise patients to go out for gentle walks. However, continuous low-level exercise tends to exacerbate fatigue.

“We found that if we get the patients in the clinic and put them on a stationary cycle and have them do two to three repetitions of flat-out cycling for only 10-12 seconds they get enormous benefit but it doesn’t exacerbate their fatigue — it suppresses the nausea and suppresses the fatigue,” he says.

One example where different exercise delivers different benefits is in a trial of men with prostate cancer who undergo testosterone suppression. Professor Newton says these patients tend to suffer bone loss.

“We gave them aerobic and resistance exercise; in every other population that I have worked with that would totally stop the bone loss but in men on androgen deprivation therapy it has totally no effect at all on bone loss,” he says. “It was only when we gave them impact loading that we actually stopped the bone loss.”

Another example is in women with breast cancer who suffer the relatively common side effect of lymphoedema, where a build-up of fluid causes swelling. “Only about four to five years ago exercise was contraindicated for lymphoedema and the therapist would advise against it, and in particular any type of resistance training,” Professor Newton says.

“But work from our team, which was a world first, showed that resistance training didn’t exacerbate and in fact it greatly improved the strength and function of these women with breast cancer.”

The West Australian

health.thewest.com.au/news/2994/fit-to-beat-cancer

GT2 I am a rookie here and have only caught some of your last trials of treatment, awesome they are! You hit the proverbial jack-pot with the UND and I am so proud to hear your enthusiasm through your writings. I know you are done now and I wish you all the best in your new life and thank you for sharing your thoughts so eloquently I have enjoyed following along.
In good health my friend.

I don't have the big C (shanks be to dog) but in my experience high intensity exercise and resistance training really helped me deal with Hep C.
I went to a personal training gym to get fit and lose weight and I swear the trainers' mission is to kill all their clients. They work you HARD.

Looked really good for a while but at the moment the fat kid that lives in my body is a bit too dominant.

Unfortunately I ended up with a low back issue and extreme, horrible sciatic nerve pain (resolved by Network Care Chiropractic, acupuncture and very specific restorative Yoga (the last really accelerated the recovery))

It's under control but while I am very observant of any signs of any possible recurrent issues I'm starting to feel the need for cardio that is more intense than ocean swimming (which really is fun more than exercise).