The Secret of Joy is Resistance

March 2020

Hi Friends,

I am sorry to hit you with this shocker, but your Nukewatch senior staff member, yours truly, has to take a leave of absence from regular official duties because of a carcinoma that has developed on my left tonsil. This is a treatable cancer that has already taken a hit with the application of a very strict diet, prescribed medications and surgery. The cancer is of a sort that is unlikely to spread to other places or organs. I can still blow the B-flat cornet like an eighth grader…

The industrial cancer system in the U.S. proposed treatment methods that do not appeal to my sense of well-being and are being mostly rejected by me. The Ear-Nose-&-Throat (ENT) experts I’ve seen in the U.S. say the recommended schedule is whole-body PET/CT radiation scans [using fluorine-18 “contrast” inside the body, the equivalent of 500 to 1,000 chest X-rays from outside], followed by surgery, followed by heavy radiation (one ENT told me “the PET scan is nothing compared to what you’ll get afterwards”… namely “radiation 5 days a week, for 7 weeks”), and then “chemo.” However, high-dose PET and CT scans, radiation treatments, and chemotherapy are not successful if one reads the statistics without wearing the proponents’ rose-tinted glasses.

After considering and declining industrial medicine’s suggestions made to me, I have returned to Germany, where the diagnosis was first made, for treatment by specialists in alternative methods (which are well-respected in Germany) that boost, support, strengthen, and enliven the immune system, while starving and killing cancer cells, and shrinking tumors. Although my insurance will not cover medical expenses in Germany, I now have the financial boost of a GoFundMe appeal.

In the next 6 months or so, I have to deeply focus on my health and on trying to learn enough German to do a blitzkrieg on this cancer.

Who says irony is dead? After 40 years of speaking out against poisoned weapons and reactors, cancer hits me right in the mouth. The profound Alice Walker was both demanding and affirmative to declare that “resistance is the secret of joy.” We know she’s right.

I am being lovingly looked after by my anti-nuclear family Marion Küpker in Germany, Bonnie Urfer, & Nukewatch Co-director Kelly Lundeen at home; and by my sister Peg (DON’T call her Margaret Mary!) from my good old nuclear family in Duluth, Minnesota. I am embarrassed by all the concern, although some of it is beautifully comic: recently I got a card from Arianne Peterson (co-editor of our book Nuclear Heartland—Revised), with a hog pictured on the front that reads: “As we say down at the pig farm … You cured yet?”

Well, “pretty soon” is what I say.

Thanks for your love and support.

P.S. Update: surgery was completed on March 5 and we are overjoyed to report that there is no sign of additional cancer.