When I was in Thailand during 2013, my doctor showed me my blood as it looked in the clinic’s dark field microscope. I was appalled!
This situation has the eponymous name of “coin roll” blood. Or if you are Francais, “rouleaux”. The red cells are stuck to each other; their membranes unavailable to carry oxygen. The white cells are too numerous. They’re dysfunctional leukemic white cells and are bigger than normal ones. When they build up high in numbers, as they did in my case in early 2012, they clutter the blood so much that they can cause a stroke. Mine did.
As a little background information: our circulating blood keeps us alive by delivering oxygen and nutrients to body cells, carrying their waste product carbon dioxide to the lungs for out-breathing, and carrying other waste products to the kidneys and liver for eventual elimination. The blood also cleans itself out in an ongoing fashion and will quickly stop or slow bleeding if the skin is cut. There are three main types of blood cell that do all this work:
Red cells: to carry oxygen to the body cells
White cells: to chase down foreign bodies and engulf or disable them; and
Platelets: to begin the clotting process when necessary.
These cells can all be filtered out of the blood in which case what’s left is the blood plasma (which carries nutrients to body cells).
Delivering the Oxygen Supply
It’s not very obvious in the above image, but red cells are flattish discs like donuts with the hole somewhat filled in. They have many receptors on their membranes (outer skins) to which oxygen attaches. In healthy blood, the red cells are therefore all separate with their membrane receptors available to pick up oxygen molecules.
This image (from Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby’s page at http://www.alternative-doctor.com/bloodviscosity/) shows coin roll blood on the left and normal blood on the right. Those are red cells all separate and doing their job and just one white cell, normal size relative to the reds. The dark spot could be a platelet; at least it seems about the right size relative to the reds and white cell.
Coin roll blood is too viscous which greatly reduces the amount of oxygen that can be taken to body cells.
Oxygen and Cancer
One hundred years ago, one Otto Warburg, a German scientist, discovered that cancer occurs when the body cells have insufficient oxygen. In a survival move, those body cells change from aerobic functioning using oxygen to anaerobic functioning using glucose for energy instead of oxygen. This is why cancer patients should avoid sugar and strictly limit all carbohydrates because they digest down to glucose and thus feed cancer.
When my stroke happened, I was in Costa Rica with no access to appropriate medical care. My son Dmitri came down from New York and took me to an Arizona cancer clinic in April 2012. I was very ill at that point, very anemic, unable to walk, or even stand without help, and the first thing the doctor did was put me on oxygen 24/7. After two weeks of that, I was able to walk and push my new walker to and from the clinic.
Look at Your Blood
What does your blood look like? If you can get access to a dark field microscope, have someone prick your finger and put a drop of your blood on a slide. You can then watch your blood cells moving around. If your blood is healthy, the red cells will be all separate and moving around vigorously. The white cells will also be moving. You might see one chasing a pathogen, weaving in and out of the many red cells, until it catches that pathogen and engulfs it by curving itself around it. The small platelets do not move around much. At some point, all these cells will become still. They will run out of their stored energy. In my case, they became still after seven minutes. Healthy cells can keep moving for a half hour or more.
Preventing Blood Viscosity
One helpful simple thing to prevent your blood becoming too viscous is to always drink enough water. Divide your weight in pounds by half, and that number is how many ounces of water you should drink daily. For example, if you weigh 140 pounds, you should drink 70 ounces daily.
Another way is to move the body around. You probably have a favorite activity like dancing, skiing or hiking. If not, just take a half-hour walk most days. Our bodies are made to move. Living a sedentary lifestyle is counter to good health.
Another way is to use Phototherapy and I’ll blog about that next week. Meanwhile, if you know anyone with cancer who is wondering what to do, give them an outstanding gift: My Cancer Survival Saga And How You Could Star in Yours. It’s my personal narrative along with my sense of humor, interspersed with sidebars giving facts about various alternative cancer treatments such as Hyperthermia. There are three glossaries to help with medical terminology and even a chapter on Offsetting Chemo Harm. All very informative.