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Her replacement was a young doctor, whom I grew to genuinely like and appreciate. Although he did not always agree with my holistic healing plan, we worked together and respected each other.
Because I was already bald and handling the chemo drips amazingly well, I asked if I could do another three months of chemo. He agreed, explaining that Taxol was often prescribed as the sequel to 4AC. I wondered why his predecessor had not mentioned Taxol.
In early November, I started the Taxol drips and, like the 4AC, I experienced no seriously adverse reactions. I felt fine, had adjusted to my complex, integrative healing regime while also running my self-employed business at home, and was eagerly anticipating that my tumors would be gone after three months of Taxol. My January 2007 MRI showed no change in the size of my tumors. I was profoundly disappointed and confused.
At my next acupuncture appointment, my D.O.M. was far less concerned about the MRI results than I was. After reviewing my entire healing program, he suggested that my tumors were likely “dead” and that the body simply needed more time to dissolve and discard the dead cells.
I needed a few days to assess my options. I had no idea whether the chemo drips or the various holistic therapies were largely responsible for the shrinkage of my four tumors. The oncologist advised me that no more chemo options were available to me. I replied that I wanted to continue my holistic therapies for three months and then have another MRI. If, after my three-month healing experiment, my tumors had started to grow again, I would then decide how to proceed. All I needed from him was an order for an MRI in late April. I offered to sign a paper, releasing him from liability, if my experiment were to fail. He said a signed release would not be necessary. Despite initial resistance from my insurance carrier to authorize an MRI after a period of no treatments at the cancer center, he somehow convinced the carrier to allow it.
During this experimental period, my days were spent as they were during the previous six months, minus trips to the cancer center for chemo. I continued my self-designed, holistic health program and my education about healing foods. I added another supplement, which I was not permitted to take during chemo: high-catechin green tea extract, a potent antioxidant proven to inhibit breast and other cancers by preventing vascularization (blood supply) to tumors. During these three months, I felt great and had an impressive level of energy. My hair started to sprout, although it was at first “chemo hair,” gray and straight where it had previously been brown and slightly wavy.
During this same period, cancer center staff contacted me to make another appointment with the surgeon. I was ambivalent but, in mid-March, I met with her, to hear her new assessment of my status. She still recommended bilateral mastectomies because this is the “standard of care” and because “we need to get out every cancer cell.” I responded that getting out every cancer cell was not possible. After eight months of reading and studying cancer initiation, promotion, and healing, I understood that cancer cells are always being produced in the body and that a healthy immune system is the best defense to kill mutant cells. I ended our session by saying I could not yet make a decision to have surgery. Her scare tactics and heavy pressure to have surgery were, as I wrote in my cancer journal, “traumatic!” After that appointment, I had her removed from my case.
In early April, I returned to the cancer center for removal of my chemo port by the same surgeon who had installed it. The same social worker who held my hand during the installation held my hand during the removal, although her fingers were not so stressed this time.
In mid-April, one week before my scheduled MRI and full-body CT scan, I was reading a book recommended to me by one of my close friends, the recently published Living Time: Faith and Facts to Transform Your Cancer Journey (2007), by Dr. Bernadine Healy, a well-known cardiologist, academic, and former head of the National Institutes of Health. Within the narrative of her brain cancer journey a few years earlier, Healy referenced physicist David Brenner, Ph.D., who had been quoted in an article in U.S. News and World Report magazine as saying that a full-body CT scan is the equivalent of 500 chest x-rays or standing just 1½ miles from the atomic blast at Hiroshima. I read those words several times, trying to comprehend the implications, and was appalled that I had been so casually scheduled for a full-body CT scan.
The next day, I contacted the oncologist and impatiently described my concerns and my refusal to undergo the CT. He responded that, last summer, suspicious spots had appeared on my liver, and he needed to ensure that those spots were no longer present. I said I would have the MRI and, then, depending on the results of that scan, I would decide whether to proceed with additional tests.
In late April, as scheduled, I had the MRI. On April 30, 2007, just six weeks after the surgeon recommended I have bilateral mastectomies, the oncologist faxed a copy of the MRI report to me. The findings read, “Current MRI shows no significant areas of contrast enhancement in either breast…and previous masslike and nonmasslike enhancements in the right and left breasts have resolved. No adenopathy is identified, and visualized liver is normal.” We were both thrilled that the MRI showed that I was cancer free. At the same time, I was relieved to have refused the CT scan, given that the MRI captured the image of my spot-free liver.
Chemo finished, I refused all other conventional treatments: surgery (invasive and disfiguring), radiation (carcinogenic and scarring), and post-cancer drugs (side effects and potentially carcinogenic over the long term) including the routinely prescribed aromatase inhibitor Arimidex or endocrine-therapy Tamoxifen, both used for estrogen-receptor breast cancers. All of these treatments were, in my mind, using my body like a battleground instead of a matrix for new cell growth and physical renewal.
I understood that cancer center staff performed the kind of medicine they had been trained in, and that they were constrained in their ability to offer or participate in non-Western protocols. Still, I was dismayed at their overall lack of interest in integrating all types of therapies, as if the arena of non-Western treatments was inferior owing to its low-tech, nonpatentable therapies.
During eight months of appointments, I had become intimately familiar with the cancer center and its treatments. Knowing that I had survived my cancer experience—and thrived without its high-tech treatments—I became alarmed at the vast and growing number of cancer patients who were led through the Western medicine assembly line of chemo, radical surgery, radiation, and post-cancer drugs, never realizing that the necessity of those procedures was questionable. I keep contemplating the ethics issue of performing disfiguring surgeries and infusing highly toxic drugs to patients, when teaching patients to change their lifestyle and eating habits would decrease trauma and increase long-term survival. Attacking the tumors is, at best, a temporary strategy. Without changing the internal environment in which the tumor originated, the patient retains a system in which cancer will likely return.
Responses to “How breast cancer helped me know who I am”