The Stanford Inn by the Sea - Eco-Lodge & Retreat Center

We have been easing back into the stream of work - or at least Joan has. I have been spending my days and evenings at the Inn, which is on the same property. It is Saturday evening and Gypsy is resting on the floor facing the door. Kate and Joan have gone out and he misses them.

We are continuing the log of his meals and outings. What is not reflected on this log is his attitude and the extent of his appetite. On his walk, he trots along the road, once he has checked out every trace of other dogs, raccoons, skunks and opossums. And he is hungry - no question that his appetite has returned.

There have been no accidents. He is looking at me, now, as I type.

We are continuing providing 1000 mg 2X daily of Yunnan Baiyoa as prescribed at Animal Care Center and recommended by our local veterinarian Karen Novak. Other than this, Gypsy's only other "treatment" is a fotomaki roll, "nori" or "sushi," which he loves. We embed the Yunnan Baiyoa in the slices. The brown seaweed covering the roll provides sodium alginate which which bonds with such toxins as the cancer causing solvent trichloroethylene and heavy metals such as strontium enabling them to be eliminated from the body.

Wish him well.

Gypsy is doing well. In fact he is doing great. He continues to recover his strength. He loves being at the Inn, greeting guests and their dogs, taking walks with Joe, head of our housekeeping department, hanging out with our staff when they are eating lunch. It is hard to get him to go home - Murphy, on the other hand is committed to her dinner and will run home.

We are asked how we did this - heal Gypsy. We did not heal Gypsy - we have provided him with a healing environment, both externally and internally.

Below are brief recitation of his "treatment" that is best summarized as follows -

1. Diagnosis
2. Energy Work
3. Stabilization and Transfusion
4. Return Home
5. Treatment with Yunnan Baiyoa, seaweed, and algae
6. Play

First, we don't know what we are actually dealing with. We were out of town and did not see Gypsy before he was taken to the veterinarians. His diagnosis of angiosarcoma or hemangiosarcoma was inferential. There was no biopsy other than to determine the nature of pericardial fluid. We treated his affliction in every way we knew beginning with consulting with veterinarians who believed the best action was no invasive surgery, chemo therapy or radiation.

We had already began what we call "energy work" in Manitoba, Canada, at Matlock, on Lake Winnipeg. Here is a natural flow of earth's energy and working in Manitoba, some 2,000 miles from Mendocino (or Rohnert Park) was as if we we were there with Gypsy. The work starts with a short meditation and continues with movements flowing with the energies around the worker. This work can sometimes look like Tai Chi.

The veterinarians at Animal Care Center in Rohnert Park monitored Gypsy's blood count and transfused him from a happy lab. (Perhaps it was the boisterous lab's blood that began the healing process. Or just the lab, himself.) Dr. Kelley Hayes at the Animal Care Center suggested giving Gypsy Yunnan Baiyoa a herbal preparation to help stop the hemorrhaging. She sought out a source for the compound and began treating Gypsy and sent him home.

Gypsy arrived home on a Sunday night. He would not eat and we asked that he be fed fotomaki rolls which are wrapped in a seaweed, nori. We arrived the following Tuesday.

When we got home we added capsules of dried algae to his diet and continued serving him nori rolls. Nori contains porphyran which has been shown to cause the death of cancer cells. (We had read elsewhere that Nori is a brown seaweed and believed that it contained alginic acid which helps the body to remove toxins. Nori is a red seaweed. Red seaweeds are the source of carrageenen and agar agar.) Algae are also an important emergency food. Spirulina contains compounds which help the body extract toxins (similar to brown seaweed) and in a variety of ways assists in killing cancer cells. The particular brand we are using is BioPreparation for pets from Optimum Choices. If you are interested, you can check our their web site at BioPreparation_for_animals The founder of the company believes that the anti-cancer properties are due to realignment and re-balancing of the body through the metabolism of the algae.

There is no way to know which one or which combination of efforts are helping Gypsy. We do know that he is much, much better, that he has exceeded every veterinarian's expectations and that he continues to grow stronger and, by the way, hungrier.

To summarize, we did everything we could - Joan and I intended a healing environment - as normal as it could be, enhanced with the highest quality whole foods. We encourage his play with us and Murphy and with other dogs and our cats. We let him set the pace when we walk. We regularly check to make sure that there is no internal bleeding - and we have not found any symptoms. He has our attention, conditioned by our intent and energies flow to him. We do not, however, obsess. We both continue with all our other work. We are very grateful for the lessons and for his company.

A short update: Gypsy is gaining weight, too much weight.

We have been feeding Gypsy his normal diet of kibble, PLUS 1- 2 rolls of nori (vegan sushi roll) - about 8 pieces per roll, PLUS the occasional sea palm strudel - about a ¼ serving. Gypsy seemed to be able to take this additional volume without gaining weight. We discussed this - "is he using the additional calories for healing?"
"Is he still sick?"
"Are we walking him too much? He still isn't bounding up the stairs."

While we thought about it, Gypsy slowly filled out and now he is definitely heavy as is Murphy who at only four years needs more exercise. Today, the sea palm and nori diet remain and we have cut back the kibble for both Gypsy and Murphy.

More than 10 weeks have passed since Gypsy was sent home for us to say goodbye. Every day he reminds us that life is precious, wonderful and ultimately mysterious.

Gypsy barely got up. I helped him to the stairs. Before reaching the first step down to the living room, he collapsed, jammed in the stairway. We got him down the stairs. He was in pain and I immediately checked his mouth to see if his gum was pale or that when I pushed against the bone, if the blood returned. No obvious sign of hemorrhaging.

He had been on low doses of aspirin since he hurt himself a month ago. Feeling better and better just before coming-up lame on Monday, he had been bouncing around the Inn and following Dana when she carried food upstairs to the offices. (Dana is the head of Big River Nurseries, the Stanford Inn by the Sea's California Certified Organic Farm).

Gypsy quickly "healed" by giving him a full aspirin tablet each morning and night, but his energy level remained low. Yesterday, Joan took him to Karen Novak, a wonderful veterinarian and animal acupuncturist. Karen found that Gypsy was anemic and told us to take him off the aspirin and then performed acupuncture. Today, Gypsy has noticeably more energy and only evidences pain getting up and laying down.

When Gypsy collapsed Monday, we worried that the cancer which had attacked him last August might have returned. The fact that aspirin eliminated the symptoms suggested that the pain was from ligament damage, arthritis or some other cause of joint inflammation. Karen's acupuncture treatment suggested to her that he was suffering from inflammation in his hip.

He is laying beside me and just woke-up. A couple of other things: he is hungry, happy and remains intensely curious.

Fluffy: Unfortunately most of last month we were also dealing with Fluffy our nineteen year old cat who grew progressively weaker and there was nothing that we could do for him other than hydrate and feed him baby food. Joan was particularly close to this cat, and so, too, Gypsy and another cat - Ginger Cat. Saturday, before Gypsy became lame, Fluffy died. We buried him in the garden and later that afternoon, Ginger Cat was rolling over the grave.

Tonight Ginger Cat is in the Barn. While he was grieving he would not come in.

Cardy Update.

Last night Cardy stood silently, eyes neither open nor closed. Her nose inches from Scooter's tail. I walked by the horses who were either unaware of Murphy and me in the middle of the night or chose not to acknowledge us.

Cardy is not walking in circles. When I let her out of her tiny paddock this morning I noted that she didn't pick up her feet. She shuffled over to the other horses and then through the larger paddock sniffing the ground thoroughly to check out who had visited during the night. She's not picking-up her feet. And I wonder if she is eating. She certainly likes to smell her hay but smelling hay provides little nourishment. Cardy is dropping weight.

Gypsy Update

Every night a family of raccoons comes to the deck. They ffinish any remaining cat food, play in the cats' water and then sit down on the mat, watching us watch them. They are actually waiting for the last walk of the night. To get Murphy and Gypsy past them without killing them, I throw cat kibble onto a corner of the deck, and the raccoons scurry over and eat, now out of the direct pathway to the stairs down to the ground.

On this last walk, Gypsy was sniffing at the margin of the grass and driveway in front of the Barn. The raccoons were finishing when a marauding racccoon attacked them creating a loud disturbance, The lame Gypsy began barking and ran over to the stairway, and quickly trotted up one-third of the way up the first flight before stopping when I called him. We usually have to help him by tugging on his harness to get up the steep stairs.

By the way, raccoons are part of the bear family. They are closely related to pandas - no surprise in that pandas and raccoons are both masked. The European and North American bears are one line of descent from common proto-bear - pandas and raccoons are another.

We came home after watching a wonderful movie "Dot.com" one of the outstanding selections of this year's Mendocino Film Festival. Before leaving for the movie I had prepared a bucket of chopped hay and molasses and alfalfa pellets to give to Cardy after dark. Ravens love her food and spread it around her paddock.

When we returned, I went into her paddock to deliver dinner. Cardy was not in sight. I saw Storm, a pinto lying down near the fence and a dark form lying near him on Cardy's side. Cardy was resting! The day had not been easy for her. She had spun around occasionally, struggling to keep her front and back legs coordinated. She suffers from ataxia. I retreated, not wanting to disturb her leaving her food at the Gate, where she often likes to stand.

On Wednesday, a veterinarian came form Willits to care for Cardy. She found Cardy to be in reasonable condition, but with very bad teeth, undernourished, and ataxic. The vet prescribed a diet of chopped hay with molasses and the alfalfa hoping that Cardy becomes strong enough to undergo dentistry. Cardy was clearly happy to be led away from this caring woman: she didn't like the taste of worming medicine.

I am selfish - I hate to see any being suffer and I will do anything to avoid this - call in vets, buy medicines, find energy practitioners: whatever it takes so that I don't have to see the suffering. In Cardy's case, there's not anything we can do. I have no concrete idea if she is hurting - only that it is very hard for her to deal with the lack of coordination between her front and back. I don't know if she's eating. I do know that her food disappears. I do know she will trot away from me when I bring "bute" paste. Clearly she's not always ataxic.

It hurts, literally, to see her running from me.

Gypsy and Joan, August 3, 2009, at Matlock, Manitoba.

For those following Gypsy's story, here he is at the Lake not shown is his extended Manitoba family. He's a happy boy!

February 6th, Saturday night, on my way to bed, I passed Murphy, our lab-cross, in the hallway. I climbed the first flight of stairs to our bedroom and in the near darkness, a dog flew passed me. Rounding the winding staircase, I looked up and watched as a white tail wagged in front of the bedroom door. I was totally confused. Murphy doesn't have a white tail. I looked down the stairs and looked back-up - no tail, no dog.

I called Murphy; heard her coming behind me. I stopped, stunned.

The first dog up the stairs? Gypsy!

He had died the night before. Months ago, when he was able-bodied, he would run ahead and wait at the door to go to bed. He hadn't been up-stairs since early October.

That first February week began auspiciously. For the first time in several months, Gypsy was nearly able to get up on his own. He begged for treats and played with his toys. That was Monday. But quickly he grew weak and by Friday, he was failing and after four months of near immobility due to arthritis his heart gave-up. He died as I was petting him.

I didn't know how to announce his passing. He is already missed by our friends and staff and by guests returning to the inn.