Moist Heat

For the last couple of days, my knees have been much better. I can go from sitting to standing in one quick motion, without the intermediate stop in suspended animation. They still feel creaky when I go up or down stairs, but it's still been a rather dramatic improvement.

I don't think it's attributable to the Motrin, which I have been taking mainly at night.

I'm wondering whether this very stubborn heat wave has anything to do with it. After all, I've been out and about quite a bit, and during those times, it's felt very much like I was swathed in wet washcloths with heating pads on top. Not the cool comfort I would have preferred, but maybe the hot, humid air has actually done some good.

Again, stranger things have happened.

I've struggled with my cholesterol for a long while now—probably close to 10 years—and my total has surged as high as 282, mainly due to high triglycerides. I actually have lots of good cholesterol and not too much bad cholesterol, relatively speaking, but those pesky sugars have wreaked havoc on my numbers. And while I didn't regress to Yankee Doodle-eating the last time I went through chemo, I assure you that my diet back then was not exactly sugar-free.

So I held off on getting my cholesterol monitored until well after I'd finished chemo—and radiation, too, just to play it safe. And I girded myself to hear a figure that would lead inexorably to a lecture by my doctor, followed by a prescription for one of those cholesterol-lowering drugs that I'd successfully avoided thus far.

But when I called for my lab results, I was told that everything was normal.

I assured the doctor that he had overlooked something on the lab report and suggested that he double-check the cholesterol numbers.

Nope, he said. They were fine. My total was a perfectly safe 169.

I was stunned. Without making any effort at all, I had succeeded in dropping my cholesterol figure by more than 100 points.

It made absolutely no sense.

And then I wondered whether the chemo might have something to do with it. After all, the stuff was toxic. Maybe in addition to killing cancer cells it also attacked sugar molecules and fat cells.

I became convinced of it. How else to explain this remarkable turn of events?

And then my doctor disabused me of the theory once and for all.

If chemo could dramatically reduce a person's cholesterol, he said, don't you think the drug companies would have entire ad campaigns touting it as a feature of the treatment?

He had a point.