Blessings that Bones Bring
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Blessings that Bones BringA spirited Myeloma patient tells his cancer story
by Palden Jenkins
An audiobook for listening (try the sample chapter)
or a text PDF for on-screen reading (lower down).
Sample Chapter
Audiobook
Blessings is free to download. An optional £5 donation is welcome (or choose an amount). It helps with copious costs. Thanks!
Text version
190pp, A5, PDF format, 2.7Mb
Best if you have an expensive internet connection, or you like reading along with it, or you simply prefer reading to listening.
Extracted and adapted from my cancer-and-life blog, Notes from the Far Beyond, this is my cancer story. In 2019 I found myself suddenly beset with Myeloma (bone marrow cancer), coming close to dying.
Initially shocked by it all, as chemotherapy treatment progressed my rapid positive response to treatment raised eyebrows amongst the doctors. I wasn’t expecting such good medical results, yet it made sense to me once it started happening – and I tell the full story in the book. This is the most personal and autobiographical book I've ever done (here are the other books).Partially disabled as a result of cancer, and once a fit mountaineer, camper and humanitarian worker, my life has changed completely. Cancer has affected my ability to move around. It has given me ‘chemo-brain’ and a variety of side-issues, one of which will fell me one day. That's life. It is as it is.
My secret seems to lie in acceptance and looking for the gift in all that comes. While I've lost much of my former energy and abilities, I believe in making the best out of a bad situation, utilising its virtues – as much as I can. Another secret is the combined use of modern pharmaceutical medicine and holistic remedies, helpers and supplements – integrated medicine. Another is to find healing and beneficence within, spiritually - and that's the key bit.
This is a candid story of the ups and downs, vulnerabilities, issues and hurdles of being a cancer patient. It delves into the deep search for meaning and for healing that one can go through when grinding through pain, fatigue, loneliness, fear and hope. You really do have to take each day as it comes. You have to make friends with death. I talk a lot about that.The story is unfinished, since I'm still alive, but it goes into some of those deep spaces cancer takes us into. When I was forty I was told I would reach my peak in late life and never really understood why, until cancer came and everything changed.
I'm now in my seventies, yet I've been fast-forwarded into my eighties or at times my nineties, often shuffling around like an old crock. I have become a lively, beat-up old veteran and elder wrinkled by history. It has given me a new role that I hadn’t anticipated. Yet somehow it fits.
Do enjoy the book. It's for you. With love, Palden.
For more audiobooks by Palden, click here.
Photos on this page are taken by (top to bottom):
Grace, Rebecca Brain and Penny Cornell.
Thank you to Sian Dodderidge for editorial advice.
About the Author
I was raised in 1950s Cardiff, Wales and 1960s Liverpool. I was involved in flower power and student activism (LSE) in the 1960s, and this was a life-changer.Since then, I've been interested in history, prehistory, social-cultural change, geopolitics and spiritual issues.
I have worked in counselling, education, community activism, event organisation, humanitarian peacemaking, book editing and internet.
Author of fourteen books, I've built several big online resource websites including Isle of Avalon, Ancient Penwith and the Meyn Mamvro archive.
I have started organisations such as Glastonbury Camps, Oak Dragon Camps, the Hundredth Monkey Project and Jerusalem Peacemakers. An archive of my written and photographic work is on this site.
I contracted cancer (Myeloma) in 2019 and am surprised to be alive today. Part of the reason I'm alive has been good medical treatment and part has been my psycho-spiritual approach and use of holistic remedies, meditation and inner-work. Being an avid communicator, blogging and podcasting about my journey has helped too.
Officially retired though still active, I live on an organic farm in West Penwith, Cornwall, a small Celtic country in the southwest of Britain.
A Palestine audiobook by Palden
Palden's cancer-and-life blog
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