I’m always tired!

[Kimhice]

The chronic fatigue is really getting to me. I’m stage one, with running an 130 acre farm, plus working 40 + hours a week. Is the anything I can do to give me more energy?

[Hidden]

Has your red blood cell count changed. Could you be a bit anaemic? I started getting very tired too and a bit pale/sallow looking. Just had my latest test results and I need a blood transfusion. GP also checking B12 and folate levels as they are implicated in the anaemia/tiredness I've been told.

[Ghounds]

It might be worth getting your thyroid checked plus B12, folate and Vit D. Unfortunately fatigue seems to be a fact of life for many of us.

[mdsp7]

Those sure are gorgeous horses! Can you find someone who needs a place to live and a job to come and live on the farm and help out? It could be a win win, if you can find the right person!

I would be very tired even without CLL doing all that! But if you love your job and the money makes it worth the exhaustion, having the camaraderie and insurance does reduce stress even as time pressure adds. Or. Maybe you can reduce the number of hours you work? Have one halftime day and spend it resting? Also there are dietary things you can do to help your health improve.

Enjoy the gorgeous farm and fresh air! I had horses as a child but live on a small property in Pasadena, CA now. The air is full of smoke! I miss having horses! They will give you lots of love. That is good for you too. Be well!

[mdsp7]

What do you eat usually? Diet can make a difference. Some foods (like sugar) feed the cancer. Other foods (like carrots) do not. Feed your healthy cells and starve your cancer cells, but not all at once, because when the cancer cells die it is a burden for your liver to clean them up. Slow and steady wins the race. Green tea in the morning, and turmeric in food or tablets at night, and lots of vegetables and no refined grains or sugar or alcohol (except a small glass of red wine sometimes) helped me a lot!

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to mdsp7]

Body cells, including cancer cells, can derive energy from carbohydrates (sugars are just water soluble carbohydrates which taste sweet), fats and proteins. It's a fallacy that sugar feeds cancer, even more so with CLL, which has been shown to use fats as its primary energy source.

healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

According to Wikipedia, carrots are 88% water, so for 100 grams of carrot, the remaining 12 grams is:-

Carbohydrates 9.6 g, broken down further to:-

- Sugars 4.7 g

- Dietary fiber 2.8 g

Fat 0.24 g

Protein 0.93 g

Ash 1 g

So most of the nutrition in carrots is carbohydrates, half of which is sugars - water soluble carbohydrates. Eating carrots is healthier than eating just carbohydrates/sugars, because you can become sated from ingesting mostly water, plus you get some valuable dietary fibre (indigestible carbohydrate).

Exercise seems to be a far better approach to doing better with cancer than dietary changes, though most of us do use a cancer diagnosis as a wake-up call to improve a poor diet, which does provide benefits: healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo...

Kimhice,

You wouldn't be lacking in the exercise component for a healthy lifestyle, so I suspect your fatigue issues are just related to the cytokine messaging activity of your CLL cells in your nodes. (This is why fatigue is unrelated to the absolute lymphocyte count part of the CLL tumour burden.) Cytokines are the messenger proteins of our immune system and their overproduction with CLL gives us flu-like symptoms of fatigue as if we are constantly fighting off an infection. M D Anderson ran a trial with CLL patients using ruxolitinib (Jakafi), a JAK2 inhibitor to combat this cytokine overproduction: patientpower.info/chronic-l... but it's very expensive and doesn't always help.

Neil

[Canuck901 in reply to AussieNeil]

There is a big difference between simplex and complex carbs .

Natural carbs that contain fiber are a much healthier choice than your sugary processed simplex carbs which is also a significant cause of diabetes and obesity in young children in North America.

I’m not sure about sugar feeding cancer cells but something must feed them. I just believe healthier whole foods vs processed are a much better choice