Why I'm Going This Route

Well, I broke down and posted my blog on Facebook, and the response has been waaaay bigger than I ever imagined. Which is more than a little mind-boggling.  Anyway, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about why I’m going this route and whatever possessed me to think I could actually win a battle with big, bad CANCER, and why am I giving up without a fight, and so on and so forth . . . and I realized that because I’d been telling so many people orally, I had failed to cover a lot of it in the blog. So for all you newcomers, here you go:

I am a massage therapist by trade, working in an office with two chiropractors. Between the three of us, we deal with the fall-out from surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation on an almost-daily basis.  For instance, take the person who had hip replacement surgery and ended up with one leg ½” longer than the other, giving him back problems for the rest of his life.  I’m not saying hip replacement surgery is bad – just that all surgeries seem to have unforeseen consequences. Like scar tissue that continues to grow inside the body of some people after abdominal surgery, adhering to the intestines and causing blockages, not to mention pain (which was the reason they had the surgery in the first place).  It doesn’t happen to everybody, but how do you know whether you will be one of the lucky ones?

I have worked with several people during and following chemotherapy treatment, and have gotten to see up close and personal the toll it takes on them. They’re miserably sick (to the point of wanting to die), and the poisons stay in their tissues for many years after they’re through with treatment (probably the rest of their lives).  They will actually have recurrence of the sickness they experienced during chemo (sort of a flashback), following a deep tissue massage because it releases some of the crap back into their blood stream again. And the really rotten part of it is that most of them have ended up dying of cancer anyway. (Or the treatment thereof, but that’s another story.)

Then there’s the person who had radiation for throat cancer eight or nine years ago and had to talk through a hole in his throat. Over the years, the radiation apparently continued to disintegrate his cervical vertebrae because he had to begin wearing a neck brace in order to hold his head up. He recently passed away as well.  And have you ever seen the burn scars left behind from radiation?

As an aside, what would you guess is the ten-year survival rate of all cancer victims?  50%?  25%?  Would you believe 2.6%?  Apparently published statistics are based on five-years of survival, but if you look at the ten-year numbers, they plummet. Why?  Because the cancer comes back. The underlying cause and environment that allowed it to grow in the first place are still there. And the second time around, the immune system is shot from all the prior rounds of chemotherapy, so it can’t fight, leaving the only options stronger and stronger chemo cocktails, and/or more radiation/surgery.  Think about all the people you’ve known whose cancer was in remission for a few years but came back and got them. Sad isn’t it? It’s because they treated only the cancer itself -- not the underlying cause. And they wrecked the body in the process.

I kind of wish I had kept a list of all the reading I did in the first month because it would be nice to be able to cite it here, but I was trying to get as much information into my head as I could and wasn’t thinking about things like blogs.  Anyway, at least one research study found that surgery actually increases the chance of metastasis (spreading to other areas of the body), for two reasons:

-           - Any time you cut into the body, it grows new blood vessels to the area to help heal the wound. This provides a new freeway system for any stray cancer cells to emigrate to a new home; and

-          - Anesthesia suppresses the immune system for – not days, but --  several weeks after surgery, so any cancer cells left behind have a chance to get re-established. 

I don’t know what ranking this next reason gets, but from a strictly practical standpoint, I suppose it’d be pretty close to the top: I can’t afford to go the traditional treatment route. In the first place, it costs the price of a rather large house; and secondly, I can’t afford to be sick and unable to work. The nice lady at the hospital assured me I could get on Medicaid, but I don’t understand why the taxpayers should have to foot the bill for my cancer.  It’s a moot point anyway, because I am so completely repulsed by the whole concept.

Which brings up another thing. There’s a very interesting book by Norman Cousins called “Anatomy of an Illness.” It spends a whole chapter talking about the placebo effect – how strong it is and how, rather than poking fun at it, we should embrace and use it to our benefit. In a nutshell, whatever a person believes will work, will work. People who thought they were receiving a drug (but who were in fact given a placebo) had the same chemical changes in their bodies as those who were given the drug! Pretty intriguing, yes? The opposite holds true, too. So my point is, because I don’t believe in the benefits of conventional treatment, it won’t help me as much as it might someone else. And because I do believe in the medicines God made for man, they will benefit me. 

Which brings up another thing. When God created Earth, he also created everything that Man would need to live on it -- including medicine.  He created herbs, plants and foods that would nourish, heal, soothe, calm, and even stimulate.  In the past 50 or 60 years, Western medicine has come up with “better” medicines. But are they really? Every one of them has side effects. And most (if not all) just cover the symptoms like a Band-Aid but do nothing to aid in healing.  Even antibiotics have a dark side. Anyway, over the years, I have come to trust God for absolutely everything and in every situation, so why would I not trust His creation over man’s improvisation?

Which brings up yet another thing.  (Okay, the connection is probably only in my mind, but let’s go with it.) Why is our society so dead-set against dying?  It’s part of living, right? Nobody survives life. So what is with this thing of keeping people alive  waaay past their expiration date, no matter how much it costs or how much misery they have to endure? Well, it’s malarkey, that’s what. So I will live my chunk of life the best I can – putting God first, and attaining as many of the characteristics of Christ as I can – and when my time is up, I will die with satisfaction, contentment and dignity.  That is the natural order of things.

So no, I don’t have a death wish. I’m not suicidal. I’m not taking the easy way out. (You try eating this way, then tell me it's the easy way out.) I’m treating myself with the medicines God made, and I’m leaving the outcome in His hands.

There’s more.

Our bodies were created with the innate intelligence to heal themselves. Did you know this? It’s true. It may retain a scar or the stump of a limb, but it will heal and go on functioning – if it has everything it needs to work with.  Take a set of Legos, for instance. If you have all the pieces, you can make about anything you want to. And if you’re missing a few pieces, you can usually make do. But if you’re missing too many pieces, or missing key pieces, then your project is doomed.  Think of the Lego blocks as nutrients. When we run short of nutrients for a short time, our body makes do. But if we continue to run short for years and years, the body can’t function like it should be able to. The heart, the brain, the digestive tract, the liver – all of these systems are vital to the body. If they don’t work, the body dies. So when things start to go wrong, something less vital has to be dispensable. And that something is the immune system.

When functioning optimally, our immune systems recognize and destroy viruses, evil bacteria, and sick or dead or mutated cells (think “cancer”).  When it can’t function well due to lack of “Legos”, mutant cells slink by the radar and set up housekeeping.  Which brings me to my main point:

It seems completely illogical  and absurd to carve up the body, leaving it scarred and defaced;  flood it with poison; and then drop an A-bomb on it – all in an effort to kill a few billion cancer cells that the immune system could take care of while leaving the body unscathed.  

Does it not make more sense to build up the body’s immune system so it will identify and annihilate the buggers like it’s meant to do?  I think so, too. 

So that's why I've chosen this way of treating my health. I feel very certain that I will lick this thing, and that I will come out the other side of this experience healthier than ever before in mind, body, and spirit.  If not, if it licks me instead, then I will consider that 50+ years is the extent of my lifetime, and call it good.