Never in a million years did I think I’d be writing a blog.  Honestly, I never thought I’d have anything inspiring to share.  If I use the analogy of a ship at sea, before 2010, I was lost without navigation or an engine.  I was one of those people that always appeared fine on the surface. The truth is, I was living a life not designed for me because I was too afraid to be my real self.   I was raised in a middle class family in Albany, New York.  I had 2 loving parents and 2 caring, older sisters.  I also had a lot of fear and self-loathing.  No one did this to me.  I did this to myself.  Until the age of 38, I lived what I had been conditioned to want -the ‘American Dream’.  It consisted of my husband, Mike, commuting over an hour each way into Boston every day while I stayed home with our kids.  The trouble was that I felt stifled and unhappy, I felt like something was missing, that I wasn’t in touch with my life purpose, and also exceedingly guilty that I did not appreciate the life that I had.  I over-ate to console myself and I drank a couple of white wine spritzers at 5 p.m. (what I deemed a socially-acceptable time) each night to dull my senses.  In most of my life, in fact, I was never truly happy.  I was ‘fine’ but not joyous.  I felt awful that as a mother I was not measuring up and that my children deserved better.  Most did not suspect my deep emotional black hole.  I was an expert at looking glued together (it’s part of the ‘cancer’ personality).  I remember often thinking  that I would be one of those people for whom nothing great nor nothing terrible would ever happen.  Can you imagine living your life with such low expectations?

Then, in 2009, my ‘safe’ but sad world came unglued.

My dear father was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.  Within a couple of weeks of starting chemotherapy he was a shell of himself.  He lived for one year, exactly the amount of time his oncologists had given him –textbook nocebo effect.  By Divine Providence, my hair dresser discovered a bump on my head while washing my hair 3 weeks before my dad passed.  I simply could not take any more surprises or fear.  I went to my doctor.  The nurse practitioner took pity on me. She scheduled me for an MRI.  Although the bump was nothing, the MRI revealed a 5 centimeter ‘white matter lesion’ in the left frontal lobe.  It could have been either tumefactive Multiple Sclerosis or cancer.  It was the latter.  So 9 days before my dad passed away, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  The second shoe had officially dropped…

I became more machine than human as my dad slipped away and I found myself facing my own mortality in the summer of 2010.  I simply went through the motions of his funeral, MRIs, spinal tap, planned my children’s birthday parties, craniotomy …  When the official diagnosis was given in mid-August (grade II astrocytoma), after the brain surgery, I finally woke up.  I decided I no longer wanted to be a victim.  I no longer wanted others to dictate what my life was about.  I decided that I could not waste any more time and I got my butt in gear.

I turned down chemotherapy.

This was a controversial decision for some in my life but for me it was absolutely the right thing to do.  I have never once questioned this decision.  Chemotherapy did not help my father – at all.  In fact, it made him incredibly sick.  The images of his suffering were fresh in my mind.  My oncologist told me that chemo could not cure me.  He also could not say definitively that it would extend my life.  What he did tell me was that Temodar was well-tolerated as chemotherapy goes but that I would be tired a lot, my immune system would be compromised and I would require blood transfusions.  I had 2 young kids at home.  Why would I begin a therapy with a 100% failure rate that was sure to make me weaker?   At that moment, I was a perfectly fine functioning human so needlessly poisoning myself did not seem like a viable option.

Doctors mean well.  My oncologist is a sweetheart; but western medical doctors are simply not equipped to support whole healing.  They are trained to diagnose, surgically cut or provide pharmaceutical drugs to alleviate symptoms. They are not typically trained to associate emotional, mental and spiritual health with physical health and have little to no training in nutrition.  Before I knew anything about holistic healing, and pretty much the moment I got the 1st MRI result, I KNEW that the tumor was related to my emotional state of being and the stress of my father’s illness.  With only my intuition to guide me, I went against the medical establishment and began to follow the path less traveled.  Was it easy to go against conventional wisdom?  No, but it was my life.  One thing I have learned with certainty is that we have authority over ourselves.  It is our birthright.  When we give it away and feel that others are more qualified to make decisions for us we dis-empower ourselves.  I am not suggesting that you not seek expert counsel, but once you have the information you need, you have the authority to make your choice. I didn’t know how I was going to heal but I knew it wasn’t through western oncology.  The oncologist was telling me he couldn’t cure me.  His role was to keep me going until, in his opinion, my ultimate demise.  This freed me to look elsewhere. Logic, in this case,  was on my side even if conventional wisdom wasn’t.  When I followed what my inner knowing was telling me rather than blindly following the orders of a doctor, I took back my power.

I had always loved research and became my own advocate.   A friend suggested I see a natural healthcare practitioner, Dr. Mark Mincolla, whom her husband’s cousin had seen after being diagnosed with breast cancer.  With absolutely nothing to lose (except some very destructive eating habits) I took the plunge.  My husband and I had had a few conversations about what might have caused the tumor.  I already determined that I had done myself no favors with my penchant for crystal light and microwave popcorn over the previous few years in my chemically-laden attempt to keep my weight down.  I figured my cigarette smoking in my 20s was less than helpful too.  I knew with certainty that the stress of my dad’s illness and my inability to deal with my emotional pain in a constructive way wreaked havoc on my body.  I also strongly suspected that the systemic fungal issues that I experienced in 2007 somehow contributed.  So at my first appointment with Mark Mincolla, knowing nothing about me except that I had a brain tumor, I nearly fell off my seat when he handed me an article with the title “Cancer is a Fungus”.  That seemed a very clear validation of my concerns and a pretty good sign that this guy might know what he was doing.  He stripped my diet of foods that fed the cancer (sugar and fermentation in particular).  He suggested I monitor the aggressiveness of the cancer with the AMAS blood test (a Medicare-approved cancer screening) and scheduled me to come back to see him after a month.  My diet looked a lot like South Beach phase II.  How had I disconnected food so much from my health?  If I put the wrong oil or gas in my car would it run properly? –but I expected my body to run on popcorn and crystal light?

After 3 months, my AMAS came back normal…and really good!  Anything under 100 was considered a normal, non-cancer result.  My score came back a 15.  This did not mean the tumor was gone but it meant I had reactivated my immune system and that the cancer wasn’t growing.  I attribute that to diet changes, natural supplements to re-balance my body and a raindrop treatment with Young Living Essential Oils that kick-started the purging of my body’s toxic (physical and emotional) overload.  More importantly though, I attribute my return to wellness to the power of my own mind, my own thoughts and my own hope.  I had rediscovered hope in my ability to heal physically and also began to address emotional and spiritual healing as well.

I am one of those people who must have the rug ripped out from under her in order to make a change.  It seems to me that most people need to have their butts kicked before they are willing to make serious changes.  We just get comfortable with mediocrity.  We get comfortable with pain because it is what we know.  I am grateful for the painful events I experienced because they forced me to look at my life, and the choices I was making, and decide what it was I really wanted.  If before I was a machine, now I am a thriving and purposeful fully alive human.  The tumor is still present (perhaps) but it is in the background of my life.  I am happier and healthier than I have ever been and I have no doubt that someday an MRI will show that the tumor is gone.  I am not delusional when I say this.  There are many who heal cancer naturally, including brain cancer, it’s just that we don’t hear about them through the mainstream media, who’s sponsors are the very corporations that profit enormously from cancer.  The success stories always include major changes in diet but they also, ALWAYS, include healing the underlying emotional self.   I have found, for me at least, that healing is about reconnecting with my true self, and disconnecting from the persona that I had been assuming.  I think this is true for many of us.

The tumor was the best gift I could have ever given myself.  I woke up and got fully engaged with myself for the first time in my life.  Although I felt scared, I also felt energized.  My own body created the tumor.  It was my soul’s desperate attempt to get my attention to change my life.  Nothing is accidental.  Nothing is random.  Louise Hay, noted self-help and metaphysical author, shares that all disease of the body begins as thoughts and feelings.  Where the disease presents itself is also a strong indicator of what message the soul is trying to convey.  In the case of cancer, it is a “deep hurt, longstanding resentment, deep secret or grief eating away at the self, carrying hatreds,  a what’s the use mentality.”  Getting even more specific, brain tumors represent “incorrect computerized beliefs, stubbornness and refusal to change old patterns.”  I can check almost all of these boxes.  My thoughts and feelings about myself started this chain reaction.  Choices that I made about diet, exercise, lifestyle (mostly based on fear and self-loathing) kept the momentum rolling until the climax of ‘terminal disease’.  I don’t blame myself at all and I am not sorry for any of it. At the time, it was far easier for me to live in quiet desperation than stir the pot for fear of what might arise.  I was doing the best I could at the time. But at that critical moment, when my life was on the line, I chose to re-engage rather than watch it slip away.  Only when there was nothing worse that could happen to me did I finally feel free enough to spread my wings. 

Our bodies are amazingly efficient biofeedback tools.  They let us know how true we are being to ourselves and whether we are on the right path to our own joy or whether we have strayed.  Nothing is accidental.  I created this state of imbalance (tumor) in my body and I have the power to change it.  I used to treat it like a war on cancer but then I realized I was fighting myself!  I don’t want to fight myself.  I equate a tumor to a pearl.  The oyster creates the pearl in response to toxicity.  The oyster, in order to protect itself from something it considers a threat to its survival, begins to create layers of nacre around the toxic substance that over time becomes a beautiful, highly-coveted pearl.  Something truly beautiful out of a response to irritation and toxicity. A tumor is the same as a pearl.  My body, in its infinite wisdom, built a shell around toxicity to protect me.  I choose to learn the lessons that my soul is conveying to me through this experience.  When I get scared or angry, I allow myself to truly feel it so that I can let it go.  I think lovingly of my body, including the tumor, and know that when the toxicity is no longer a threat, the tumor will dissolve, having served its life-saving purpose.

My days, now, are filled with inspiration, hope and a sense of wonder at how much there is to know about our power as humans and our ability to transcend our self-created limitations.  My greatest joy is being in service to others.  I serve by encouraging others to recognize how much power is within them and to never give that power away.  We may not always be able to control the situations we are presented with but we most certainly have authority over how we respond to them.  My hope is that you walk away KNOWING that out of the darkest moments comes the greatest gifts.  The brain tumor was the gift I needed to get busy thriving in my life, not just surviving.  It brought what wasn’t working in my life to the forefront so I could change it.  Please don’t wait as long as I did.  Instead, think about something that isn’t working in your life the way you wish it would. Muster up the courage to change it by taking incremental steps in the direction of your dreams.  Small changes yield big results over time and hurt a whole heck of a lot less!  Today, I encourage you to take a step towards your true self.  It is never too late.  I am living proof.