Breast Cancer in men

So throughout all of this, the surgery, the chemo and the radiotherapy, it was just your wife that you were really getting support from?

 So that was it, and I was then tested and it was suggested I should have tamoxifen, and I had- they did all sorts of scans and things, and found that there was no cancer anywhere else. And at a certain point they said, “Okay, we’ve done the knife work, we’ve put you on pills, goodbye, come back in six months time”. And I came home, and I thought wow, I sort of feel quite on my own here [laughing] now. So I started chatting to my daughter and my daughter-in-law and various other people and all sorts of- my step-daughter, and all sorts of ideas came up, and I followed up on a lot of different things, and out of that, I developed really quite a change in my life. One of the obvious parts was dieting, and I found a very interesting Greek doctor, who helped me a lot with thinking about dieting and positively looking at my life. I had reflexology once, and the- interestingly enough the thing that person picked up most was my stomach. I’ve always had a bit of a weak stomach, and so this lady suggested I should use a type of colon treatment, and I use something called lepicol which is psyllium husks, it’s an inert powder, I’ve used it ever since, and it’s been incredibly good [laughs.]. It has an extraordinary effect on keeping my stomach comfortable. So that was another aspect. Then of course I had [name of lady] and in fact we went back to her and my wife has joined me, we’ve been going to see her once a year, ever since. So that was another aspect. I then met a friend who- oh and also my daughter, it was my daughter who started this, she said, “Dad you’ve got these nice warm hands, have you thought of Reiki?” And I said, “No, I’ve not really heard of it”. So we discussed it and to cut a long story short, I discovered a Reiki Master who lived just outside Richmond, so I went and was initiated into Reiki 1, and I’ve been using that ever since. I did in fact go to the level of Reiki 2. 

 And another aspect, which I got involved with also is through my daughter was meeting a woman who, I would describe as a spiritual psychotherapist in a way. And she had formed various groups, she gave various teachings, and she had a group called Wise Women, and women- my daughter belonged to that, and the women gather and get- discuss all sorts of things, and began to trust each other enormously, and it becomes in a sense a support group. And this woman was just in the process of forming a man’s group for the first time, so I joined that. This is back in ‘96, and we worked with her for quite a few years, and then she decided she wanted to go in a slightly different direction, so we had to choose, should we disband, or shall we carry on, on our own? And we’ve carried on, on our own, so there are about eight of us, eight or nine, and we meet once a month, we do a certain ritual together, but mainly it’s for support and help and it’s most, most unusual group, it’s very powerful, we trust each other enormously. So we can tell each other anything, and that’s rather rare for men. We can open up our deepest worries, we can explore with each other, and we’re very supportive, so people- quite different sort of people, so that you get views from different angles about things, and I’ve noticed that all of us, over these years have grown in stature, in sort of confidence, you know in feeling comfortable in yourself. It’s been very, very exciting and very powerful thing to belong to. So that was yet another aspect I would say.

 How do the crystals make you better?