Darla in the Desert 🌵☕📰

A Healthier Gut Microbiome and Cancer Care: Why I'm Still Watching It After the Neurologist Said "Not for Parkinson's" When you're dealing with cancer, you start paying attention to everything that might help. Dave has lung cancer, and we're always looking for anything that might augment his treatment at City of Hope. You can read a recent news story about this topic here: A healthier gut microbiome may be the key to cancer care . Right now, we're getting ready for "zapping surgery" tomorrow — an image-guided ablation to destroy the larger tumor while hoping the immune system can handle the smaller ones. It's minor on paper, but cancer is cancer, and it still makes me nervous. Dave has done well with surgery in the past, even though Parkinson's adds some risk and a previous surgery left a hole in his upper jawbone, so this one brings up some pause. A few years ago, we asked our neurologist about CNM-Au8, a gold nanocrystal t...

Darla in the Desert: hard‑earned lessons from life, the internet, and a desert that melts your patience first. Send ice! Some conversations stay with you. I've had a couple recently with friends navigating scary medical news, and I kept saying the same things — things I wish someone had told us years ago. Time to tell our side more clearly. Dave was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma — ACC — originating in the maxillary sinus. Treatment was successful, and we had a couple of good years. Then whack-a-mole. It cropped up in the lungs — which is common with ACC. It's rare, slow-moving, and doesn't always play by the rules. It's not contagious, and no, it's not parasitic. The imaging makes that clear. Here's what I'd do differently. THE PET SCAN SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED SOONER. An FDG-PET is the scan that "lights up" active cancer. We didn't get one until this year. In my opinion, that should have been done much earlier. ...

We Took a Week Off | Darla in the Desert We Took a Week Off: Family, Medical Appointments, and What's Coming Next on Darla in the Desert By Darla  |  Darla in the Desert  |  Tonopah, AZ If you've been checking in and finding tumbleweeds — we appreciate your patience more than you know. The past week was one of those weeks where real life didn't ask permission. Daughter and grandkids came to town, and we weren't about to miss a single minute of it. We even managed to wrangle everyone into a movie — good clean comedy, which is harder to find than it should be these days. Worth every minute. On the medical front — questioning two oncologists on the possibility of cryo treatment for Dave's largest lung nodes has finally paid off. The pulmonologist and oncologist consult resulted in scheduling (with our whole-hearted approval) a procedure to attempt to kill the largest nodes with 30,000 volts of electrical shock. The hope is that the lar...

An honest update on cancer, faith, a last-chance medication, City of Hope, a new Honda CR-V, and why we chose family over Egypt Some moments are worth holding onto. 🌵 A note on Parkinson's & cancer — keep scrolling for our important update ↓ Did you know? Research shows Parkinson's patients have a nuanced cancer picture. Overall cancer rates are actually somewhat lower than the general population — but with one important exception: melanoma risk runs about 75% higher. For those carrying certain genetic variants of Parkinson's, risks for breast, brain, and blood cancers are also elevated. The relationship is complicated — not simply "more cancer," but a shifted pattern altogether. Sources: BMJ meta-analysis of 17+ million participants (2021); NIH Mendelian randomization study (2024) I share this because so many of us are walking similar roads. In my own circle of friend...