Romeo: a cat and curcumin story…

February 19, 2017 / Margaret / 1 Comment

Before I begin, let me assure you that what I’m going to write today isn’t, er, fake news. 🙄

Mostly, I will be giving you more details of a story that I told here back in December of 2014, which is the story of how we adopted our seventh cat, Pammy. And I have a good reason for giving you these details…it has to do with curcumin, as you might have figured out from the post’s title…

So this isn’t just another cat story that has no other purpose than entertainment. It actually has a point. An interesting one, methinks. Therefore, please bear with me until the end…But first, I must introduce you to Romeo…

Romeo (see photo below) is a un-neutered male cat who has been living on our back terrace for more than two years now. He was born in a neighboring garden in 2007 (I actually wrote a post about him: he was the “lonely kitten,” the one in a litter of three that wasn’t picked to be adopted, probably because he has a stumpy tail, see: http://margaret.healthblogs.org/2007/06/13/lonely-kitten-and-cleaning-teeth-with-turmeric/ ).

Our neighbors (two houses down from ours) fed him until the summer of 2014. Romeo has always been an outside cat. He wasn’t allowed into the neighbors’ house. And, until I came along, I don’t think that he had ever been petted or loved by any human being. He is scared of humans. He now occasionally lets me come near him, slowly, and pet him, but then the next time he’ll run out of my reach. Go figure. Poor kitty. I never insist, by the way. If he doesn’t want to be petted, fine. I talk to him soothingly and let him know that he’s safe on our terrace.

Back to those neighbors. About 5-6 years ago, the wife died, and her husband put their house on the market, eventually selling it…in 2014. He moved to another city in Northern Italy and told my next door neighbor that he’d come back for one of the cats, the friendliest one. But he never came back. In fact, he never even called her to see how the three cats were doing. He never worried about how/if they’d survive.

You can imagine what we all thought of his behavior. But…no further comment.

At first, my next door neighbor fed the three cats. Then, after we returned from our summer holiday, I began feeding them, too. But she was concerned because of her two un-neutered male golden retrievers that absolutely HATE cats and might even be cat killers (we never want to find out! In fact, that is one of the main reasons I could never let my cats outside). She was afraid that, if she kept feeding those kitties, something awful might happen on their terrace. So was I.

So I took over. I became the main provider for the cats and set up winter (outside, but comfy) shelters for two of them, the two that were too “wild” to come inside to live with us and our other cats.

The third cat, the above-mentioned friendliest one, is our Pammy. Yep. You may remember that back in December of 2014 I wrote a post about Pammy, about how we adopted her. At that time, I decided to leave out the other two cats. Why I decided to do that…well, I don’t know. I guess at the time I thought it might just distract from the focal point of my story: Pammy, that is. Anyway, whatever.

The other two cats were: 1) Romeo, of course, and 2) his mother (who happened to be Piccolo and Pammy’s mother, too, incidentally). The mother was an elderly cat…at least 15 or 16 years old at the time these cats were abandoned. Like her son, Romeo, she was quite “wild” and wouldn’t let me go near her…And she disappeared rather suddenly last summer, unfortunately…made me very sad. I hope she found a better place… 🙁

Anyway, back to Romeo. After a cold spell here in Florence (back in January), a few weeks ago I noticed that his eyes were almost shut. You know when you wake up in the morning with your eyes all crusty and sort of stuck together? Well, that is what it looked like. Then I saw quite a bit of discharge, and when he tried to open his eyes to look at me, the corner of his left eye was red, really red. I mean, really. Clearly, there was a bad infection going on…

I was quite distraught. I went to read about cat eye problems on the Internet, but…how could I possibly deal with this? How could I catch Romeo and take him to the vet? And even if I succeeded in doing that, I knew that he would never let me put drops into his eyes every day. So…what could I do? When Stefano got home from work, he said “well, why don’t you put some curcumin in his food?”

Ah. Hadn’t thought of that.

Well, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

So that’s exactly what I did.

Every morning, after feeding my inside cats, I’d mix some of my curcumin powder with Romeo’s wet food. And he just lapped it up. 🙂 I checked his eyes as carefully as I could, at a distance, for days. At first, I didn’t notice any improvement. But then, after about four days, his eyes were fully open. No more discharge. In fact, I just saw him before writing this post, and the redness is GONE. If you look carefully at his left eye, you can still see something in the corner (near his nose), but it’s no longer fiery red. It’s pale. I don’t know what it is…But it’s not red!

Now, the fact that his eyes have healed, completely healed, might have happened anyway. I have no proof that it was the curcumin. But the fact is that Romeo’s eyes were worsening before Stefano suggested giving him curcumin.

Anyway, the main thing is: Romeo is fine now. Back to his former, skittish self. 🙂

And this is my story of the day. Again, it’s not a fake one, I promise. 🙄 I only wish I’d taken a photo of his infected eyes. But at the time my only concern was how to deal with this problem and make him well again. I never thought I’d be writing a story about it! I was surprised, too.

So all I have is the photo I took of him this morning, and his eyes look fine, right?

Anyway, whether it was the curcumin (as I suspect) or not, this is how it went…For me, the main thing is that Romeo is well again…

The new cat tower

February 13, 2017 / Margaret / 1 Comment

I know it’s been a while since I last posted, but that’s just…how it goes. Everything is fine with me, pretty much…I’ve been very busy…working (teaching English, translating; even this past weekend), and so on…

My post on our Austrian Xmas holiday is taking forever, mainly because I have to decide which–of my two billion photos!–to use. But the post is coming along…should be done soon.

I also received the negative curcumin review (see previous post), yes, the entire shebang, but I haven’t gone beyond a couple of pages. For one thing, reading something like this doesn’t put me in the right frame of mind (irritation sets in, e.g.); for another, it’s very technical, VERY!, and after a few paragraphs my brain becomes the consistency of melted marshmallows. But you know how determined I can be, so I WILL read the darn thing. I will… 🙂

In the meantime, I thought I’d put up a few photos of my kitties. So, here goes: we recently bought a very tall and sturdy cat tower. It’s almost 3.60 meters tall (almost 12 feet tall; yes, we have high ceilings downstairs!), mainly to try to solve a problem that our younger male, Prezzemolo, has had for the past several months. A “spraying” problem.

He began spraying a bit everywhere (yes, he is “fixed,” like all my cats, so it seemed very strange to us…still does) but finally decided he mostly liked a couple of areas: our living room couch and armchair, and the bed in our guest bedroom. _1190346 Oh, and he also likes to “mark” a few IKEA comfy chairs we have in a room downstairs…a room we don’t really use, so that’s “okay.” All of our furniture is now protected now by plastic covers, with IKEA cotton covers on top (easy to disinfect and wash)…You can see one of the dark blue covers in the photo to the right.

The first thing we did when we realized this was happening was take him to the vet. They ran tests to exclude any physical causes, a urinary tract infection, etc…

Result: he’s fine. A purrfectly healthy young male cat. He’s about 4.5 years old now, I guess.

We didn’t know what else to do until someone suggested we call a behavioral veterinarian (I think that’s what they are called…sort of like Jackson Galaxy, “My cat from hell,” except the person we called is not just a behaviorist but also a vet). We made an appointment before Xmas. The vet came over to our house and observed all of our cats–most of whom were taking naps!–for more than four hours. She concluded that our boy suffers from anxiety.

Great, that’s all we needed: an anxious cat.

Anything can, er, set him off, but his main problem is the other male cat, Piccolo (the big black and white fellow in some of my photos), who is older and, well, dominant. The alpha cat. Piccolo is the source of Prezzemolo’s anxiety. In the photo on the left, you can see Prezzemolo on top, rubbing his head on the cat tower shelf, Pammy is next to the big “mouse,” and then there is Piccolo’s head, bottom left.

In the wild, the vet explained, in a stressful situation like this one, where we have two males sharing the same territory, what happens is that the younger male lion usually leaves and finds a territory of his own. The same thing happens with two male cats who live outside.

But here all our cats, male and female, are confined to the house. Yes, it’s a big house, with lots of toys and scratching posts, and two loving human parents, and so on, but our cats can’t go outside (for a bunch of very good reasons. The vet agreed with us that they should stay inside the house, in fact). _1190090 So even though the cats’ “territory” looks huge to us, it isn’t so for Prezzemolo.

Stefano and I obviously want Prezzemolo to be happy, that’s our main cat-related goal right now, so we asked her for solutions…

Her main suggestion was to create a VERTICAL territory for Prezzemolo, a place that the older, heavier male cannot physically reach. We already have three cat towers in the house, but the vet told us that they weren’t high enough or in the right places (except for the one in my study, which is great).

She told us to put a tall one in the living room, floor to ceiling. And here we get to the point…and to the photos.

We ordered a huge, expensive cat tower in January, after researching every single sort of high cat tower on the market. When it arrived, it took us a while to assemble it and set it up. As soon as we’d finished, we figured the cats would jump on it immediately. But no, in typical cat fashion, they ignored it, especially Prezzemolo. I mean, TOTALLY IGNORED IT. They were more interested in the boxes it had been delivered in. I put his favorite toys on it, high up, inside the hammocks, and I hung strings to tempt him…but that didn’t work. Until…

Until a few weeks had passed (again, typical…).

_1190296 I began finding him on the tree, asleep in a hammock or sitting on one of the shelves, looking outside the living room window. I have also seen him climb all the way to the top (several times, including this morning). Impressive. Since he’s the youngest of our cats, he’s also the only one who is physically able to do that, although Pinga (photo no. 2) can almost get to the top.

That is the whole point: if he can expand his territory, a territory that the alpha male cannot reach, he should begin to calm down. Fingers crossed.

His vertical territory hasn’t stopped him from spraying yet, but the incidents seem to have lessened. And anyway, luckily for us and for our nose buds, his urine doesn’t smell unless you stick your nose practically right on top of the area where you think he MIGHT have sprayed. Of course, it’s still a bummer…I have to sniff all of the IKEA covers on a daily basis and replace them with clean ones if necessary. Well, fingers crossed that this is just a phase…

By the way, I should mention that Prezzemolo is an adorable cat. In addition to being absolutely gorgeous, as you can see, he is also very cuddly. The cuddle business didn’t happen overnight. We don’t know much about his previous life, before we adopted him, that is, but I know it can’t have been an easy one. It took a VERY LONG time for him to trust us. When we’d reach out to pet him, he’d duck his head and look frightened. _1190340 But we were patient…we didn’t push it…we knew it was going to be a slow process.

Our patience, mine in particular, was rewarded. A few months ago, one day, totally out of the blue, he jumped into my lap for the first time (note: he’s lived with us for more than four years now!). It was an emotional moment for both Stefano and me.

Nowadays he curls up in my lap at least twice a day. He always comes to me after dinner, while we are still at the dinner table. He rests his head on my arm, purrs, and looks up at me with his big yellow eyes, full of love. And by the way, he even jumped into my lap twice while the vet was visiting…to our great surprise, since he usually stays away when we have visitors…Well, that is changing now.

He has become much friendlier recently…with strangers, I mean. And, with the exception of Piccolo (who growls and wacks the poor kid if he gets too close), he also gets along with the other cats, including Pammy (and NONE of them get along with her…She’s a tough cookie, but that is fodder perhaps for another cat post).

In sum, he is scared only of Piccolo. And there is not much we can do about it…except give him heaps of love, of course. And play with him, and single him out for attention…and buy him a big cat tower…things like that…

Anyway, I have work to do, so I’d better get going. I hope you enjoy the photos. By the way, if you hover over them with your “mouse,” you can find a little explanatory note.

Take care, everyone, and…CIAO! 🙂

Have I been deceived, too?

January 12, 2017 / Margaret / 28 Comments

We’re back in Florence from our holiday in Austria (we got back last weekend, actually), and I’m trying to catch up with a million different things, including laundry…but a few days ago a big translation plopped into my lap. So my plan of sifting through my photos and posting about our trip has been postponed…until I get some of this big beastie translated, at least…

But I just read an article, a very negative article, about curcumin, one that I couldn’t ignore. It was published recently in the “Scientific American.” Curcumin is actually defined as a “deceptive spice extract.”

Deceptive? You’ve got to be kidding me. I was absolutely stunned…still am.

Where, in this review, will I find an explanation for my having managed to stay away from conventional treatments for multiple myeloma thus far (more than 10 years after my SMM diagnosis), in spite of being at high risk for progression?

Where will I find the explanation for the disappearance of my rosacea…although I am still prone to blushing easily (but hey, the horrendous pustules disappeared years ago, and my skin is smooth and soft).

And how would this review explain a host of other side effects that have made my life so much more comfortable? Just to mention one other thing: my recurrent, painful vaginal yeast infections completely disappeared after I began taking curcumin. I have written about this…

Oh wait, then there’s my familial hypercholesterolemia, which used to be really, REALLY, bad. My cholesterol levels aren’t back to normal, but I’ve reached the point where my family doctor has me tested only once a year.

Placebo effect for all this? Not according to my doctors…

But I felt I couldn’t simply ignore this article. After all, I don’t ONLY read and post about positive stuff about curcumin, That would be really silly of me. I mean, hello???, I don’t want to be taking something that will harm me!!!

So even though I think this article is potentially dangerous, in the sense that it might discourage people from taking curcumin, I decided to post about it. Here’s the link, by the way: goo.gl/iJSTLO

What do YOU think???

A new Italian study on the role of inflammation in myeloma progression

December 21, 2016 / Margaret / 3 Comments

Well, since I have a gazillion things to do before leaving, I was going to forget about blogging until next year 😎 , but this morning a just-published Italian study caught my eye, and I just had to write about it: goo.gl/77intB

In a nutshell, the study proves that inflammation and the evolution of myeloma are closely connected. This is not entirely a surprise. I mean, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the word “myeloma” mentioned in the same sentence as “inflammation.”

But I found this study amazingly interesting and worth much more than a cursory look. So I’ll do my best to report on it, considering I’m a bit distracted (by the above-mentioned gazillion things 😉 ) at the moment…Please forgive me for any repetitions, etc.

This group of Italian researchers came up with and analyzed a short list of twenty genes, eventually identifying eight genes that showed there were clear differences between MGUS, SMM, and MM. These genes were also associated with MM patients’ survival: IFNG, IL2, CCL2, LTA, and CCL3, VEGF.

The “bad” ones are the last two, CCL3 and VEGFA, which are linked with inflammation in the bone marrow microenvironment (BMM) and with a host of negative occurrences (MM cell survival, etc.). Bottom line: patients with a high expression of these two genes have a worse prognosis.

And here is a very interesting bit of info: compared to MGUS, in MM these two genes were consistently upregulated. That means that they are not (consistenly upregulated) in MGUS…

The “good” genes, that is those linked to a MM patient’s longer survival, are IFNG, IL-2, CCL2, and LTA.

The patients who lived the longest had high levels of Th1 cytokines (the above-listed IFNG, CCL2, IL-2) and low levels of CCL3 and VEGFA. Oh boy, now I am getting into deep water. I just spent about an hour trying to write a simple explanation of how all this stuff works and so on, what all the acronyms mean (LTA stands for lymphotoxin-alpha, e.g.), but it got to be too complicated and involved, so I threw it into the trash. I’m no scientist, after all…

Let’s forget about trying to understand every single detail of the study. After all, what really matters is for us to GET the main concept.

Basically, the process has to do with proinflammatory responses, which are okay under normal circumstances (e.g. in the case of a viral attack), but not under others. Indeed, too much of a proinflammatory response can be damaging. In the words of the researchers, “inflammation has a critical role in MM patient progression and survival.”

IMPORTANT: the MM patients who survived longer also had high albumin, low B2-microglobulin and low CRP (C-reactive protein) levels. To a significant degree. Food for thought!

And this paragraph provides more food for thought: “Although lacking the clinical features of symptomatic disease, both MGUS and sMM patients carry the same initial mutations and most of the chromosomal abnormalities of overt MM, suggesting that these events are necessary but not sufficient for disease progression. The evolution from MGUS to sMM and finally to MM relies on further complex conditions that include genomic instability, epigenetic and microenvironmental signals.” Well, well. Necessary but NOT SUFFICIENT.

And, further on, “MM cells grow and proliferate almost exclusively within the BM, where they produce an inflammatory/immunosuppressive milieu, which promotes disease progression, drug resistance, neo-angiogenesis, bone destruction and immune escape.”

The researchers “hypothesize that PCs progressively shift the BMM toward a pro-inflammatory and immunosuppressive shape, which drives disease evolution.” ( PCs are plasma cells, btw.)

Since not many conventional studies mention curcumin, but this one DOES, I thought I’d quote the entire passage: “Inflammation is an hallmark of cancer development. Indeed, different studies have already demonstrated a strong correlation between chronic inflammation and increased risk of cancer. Moreover, the chemopreventive role of aspirin and other NSAIDs has been clearly demonstrated. Along this line, recent clinical trials revealed a promising therapeutic activity of anti-inflammatory compounds such as aspirin and curcumin in both MGUS and sMM patients. Furthermore, inflammation could also reduce the activity of current anti-cancer treatment (both cytotoxic and immunotherapies), by impairing effective immune-response against tumor cells.”

The study highlights the best BMM conditions under which bortezomib, pomalidomide and other conventional drugs might be more effective. It also addresses the issue of its limitations—only certain genes were analyzed, etc. Those undergoing conventional treatments might want to check out and ask their specialists about that part…

Here’s the main thing I got from this study: REDUCE INFLAMMATION!!! And, of course, take curcumin…and perhaps aspirin, too.

Now I really must get going. Final thought: I hope everyone has a lovely and restful holiday. Take care!!! 🙂