To start the story from the beginning go here.
In May 2015 I received my now annual blood tests and MRI. All the results were negative for cancer, thyroid issues, and any other disease. It had now been 2 years since my cancer surgery. According to everything I had read and been told by the research literature and oncologists, I shouldn’t be alive at this point. Leiomyosarcoma (especially stage 4) rarely has survivors, let alone no recurrences after 2 years. My survival began to be considered a miracle by many.
Because this diet cured not only my cancer but also my autoimmune disease, I started to believe that it would be effective at curing many other diseases and ailments that people suffered from. In fact, I could find instances of a vegan diet curing multiple sclerosis, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, food allergies, and even migraines. When friends would complain to me struggling to lose weight or not feeling good, I would recommend juicing this or that vegetable, or avoiding sugar and meat. I thought that if they could just do these things they would feel a lot better. I felt like I had all the answers, if only people would listen and follow my advice.
By this point I was also feeling more confident that my cancer was not coming back any time soon. My scans and blood tests confirmed this in my mind as well. As my son’s birthday approached, he decided he wanted a chocolate cake. I was okay with the kids having treats occasionally, because we supported a healthy diet at home to compensate for it. I found a really good recipe before my cancer diagnosis from the Hershey website. (Jeremy is very partial to Hershey, having been born in Hershey, PA.) The cake always turned out perfectly moist and chocolatey. I decided to make it. I felt so guilty buying sugar from the grocery store. I felt like such a hypocrite. What if someone I knew saw me buying it? Everyone that knew me knew I wasn’t supposed to be eating sugar. What would they think? I hid it under some other items in my cart and proceeded to check out, scanning around me for any familiar faces. I made it out without being recognized.
I made the cake and we sang happy birthday to my son. After he blew out the candles and we passed out the cake, I admitted to Jeremy how delicious it looked. I wanted to eat it so bad. Jeremy helped me rationalize: my scans have been good; the cancer isn’t growing, the rest of my diet is full of nutrition–I should go ahead and have a piece. The internal battle was raging, but I gave in and ate a piece. It was so sweet, so moist and so delicious. The first bite just melted on my tongue, it was so good. Chocolate cake has always been my favorite cake and this one did not disappoint. I even had a piece the next day too, because there was plenty leftover and it really was amazingly good. But I stopped after that and fed the rest to my kids, giving them bigger pieces than I probably should. I wanted the temptation gone.
I began jogging again. It was a cheap way to get in a cardio workout and it caused me to excrete toxins through sweat, which was more important now that I knew my body struggles to rid itself of toxins due to my genetic mutation. I was never fast, but I always felt good afterwards. I had one friend who termed it “slogging” because it was a very slow jog. Jeremy had always been much faster than me, having run cross country and track in high school and placing in the top spots in many 5Ks and 10Ks that he raced in. So when some friends invited us to run the Ragnar del Sol with them, I was a little intimidated. I knew I would be the “weak link” in the group. I also was concerned about the food I would be eating. After eating the cake and realizing that I didn’t develop cancer afterwards, I was feeling more confident that I was in the clear. But that didn’t mean I could just stop eating my diet. The story from Colleen Huber’s website Natureworksbest.com continued to haunt me: the man with pancreatic cancer that initially showed a lot of progress with his Vitamin C cancer treatment. He had two tumors, one of which disappeared completely and the other shrunk to half the original size. After a few weeks a new pain arose. Dr. Huber’s questioning revealed that he was doing everything the same except for one little outlier: every night after dinner he reverted back to eating a few cookies. Just a few cookies every night kept this man from a full recovery and he ended up developing new metastases and passed away 2 weeks later. Just a few cookies! He couldn’t give up his nightly sugar to get better. I was determined not to follow that same path.
Jeremy assured me that I would be okay for two days. I made sure to juice before we left and I brought a beet juice and a green juice to drink before my first two legs of the race. We managed to talk our teammates into eating at Chipotle and getting food at the grocery store to make meals. I was still a bit stressed that not everything was organic, but it was a better alternative to McDonald’s.
The following year Jeremy and I were again coaxed into running the Ragnar del Sol by a different group of friends. After the last race I was consistently running 3-6 miles about 3-4 times a week. I still wasn’t very fast, but I was running farther and faster than I ever had in the past. One morning as I was out running, I ran into a friend from church who was also out for a run. Sarah lived in the same neighborhood as I did so we ran back home together. As we were running, we were talking about the races we were training for. I told her about the Ragnar and she said she was training to run the Buckeye half-marathon. We decided to train together and somehow she convinced me to run the half marathon with her. We would do our own training during the week and then run our long runs together on Saturday mornings. I was feeling pretty good about it and we ran the Buckeye half marathon in December of 2015.
I continued to train on my own for the next several weeks until my Ragnar race in February of 2016. I did much better this time, though still slow compared to most everyone else. Luckily, my team was pretty fast and we placed better than the team we were on the year before.
A few months later I received a phone call from Sarah telling me that she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was surprised and disheartened. She was so lively, active, young and a mother of five–it just didn’t seem fair. But then again, I was also young, active, healthy and a mother of five. Cancer doesn’t discriminate. We talked about what I did to heal from cancer with the juicing and diet and treatments. But I knew from our discussions during our training runs that her husband was not as supportive and wouldn’t help her change her diet. I mentioned that the research shows that chemotherapy is most effective in treating lymphomas and testicular cancer. I told her that the choice was up to her. She should pray about it and do what she felt prompted to do. She mentioned that she was leaning more towards chemotherapy. My heart dropped but I told her I would support her in whatever she chose.
I kept in touch with Sarah and checked on her often. I went to visit her the night of her first chemotherapy infusion. She was a little tired, but she was still up and about with her five kids happily playing around her. I knew it wouldn’t last. I checked on her the next day and she was feeling awful. She was in bed and couldn’t keep anything down.
I had another friend who had undergone chemotherapy several years prior to treat breast cancer. I discussed Sarah and her chemotherapy treatments and side effects with her. She told me that she learned that if she drank a wheatgrass shot the day before, the day of, and the day after a chemotherapy treatment then she wouldn’t get any oral ulcers and it would minimize some of the other side effects of the chemotherapy. I had to tell Sarah about this.
I went with her to her next treatment to be with her and to listen to all of the instructions from the nurses on how to manage the side effects that were so disabling. I managed to get her a wheatgrass shot the day before from a local juice shop, and a wheatgrass shot just prior to the infusion. I sat with her as the nurse explained the procedure, how she would feel later that day and over the next few days. She talked about the Neulasta shot she would be given to stimulate the bone marrow to produce more white blood cells and to take Claritin the day after to manage any pain that she may feel after the shot. Sarah was listening, but this was while she was receiving the chemotherapy infusion and who knows how that affects memory.
A couple of days later Sarah called. She was feeling aching in her legs and couldn’t remember what medicine the nurse said to take for it. I was grateful at that moment that I went with her to her treatment and listened to all the instructions. I could remind her that her Claritin was for that. I still don’t understand why an allergy pill would help with the pain related to the bone marrow production, but she took it and it worked.
I wasn’t always able to get the wheatgrass shots for Sarah, but she noticed that she didn’t get nearly as sick or develop hardly any oral ulcers when she took them. I also tried to bring a few juices every few days when I made juices for myself. She was also avoiding sugar to the best of her ability and substituting it with honey. One of her friends made whole wheat bread with honey instead of sugar for her. She began to tire of the taste of honey. She did end up having a lot of hair fall out, but she had more energy than I would have expected from the strong chemotherapy drugs she was receiving. In fact, one Saturday morning as I was out running, I saw Sarah out running and I caught up to her and we finished our runs together. I was amazed and impressed that she had the energy to be able to go running at all.
Six months after her diagnosis, Sarah was declared to be in remission. She bounced right back into being an active mom to her five kids and started a new part time job as well. As I am currently writing this, Sarah is still in remission without any lasting effects from chemotherapy. While I don’t know how her lymphoma would have responded to the treatment I chose, I do know that she chose the treatment that worked best for her in her situation.
To continue the story go here.