Take Charge of Your Cancer: The Seven Proven Steps to Healing & Recovery from Cancer

By Norman Plotkin

How to take a consciously mindful role in your own healing and recovery—from a cancer survivor and hypnotherapist.
 
A cancer diagnosis can bring with it shock, anger, and fear. Add to that a feeling of disconnection from the body and the prospect of facing a mountain of technical information, and it’s hard to know what to do next. Take Charge of Your Cancer offers step-by-step direction for managing the journey of healing and recovery.
 
Coach, cancer survivor, and former health policy lobbyist Norman Plotkin has mastered the key steps that give cancer patients the power to influence outcomes and make their bodies their business. Take Charge of Your Cancer is for cancer patients who want proven tools that make a real difference, including tools that engage the power of the subconscious mind.
 
Being an active participant in the healing process is critical for recovery. People who feel more in control of their own wellbeing are more likely to make sustained lifestyle changes to improve their health. Reframing cancer to be an opportunity for personal growth—a challenge rather than a threat—can transform a cancer diagnosis into a positive turning point, one that redirects toward healing, surviving, and thriving.
 
Take Charge of Your Cancer is the guide for that journey.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781683509820

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.

Henry David Thoreau

What if I told you that you could reframe cancer to be a challenge rather than a threat? Life whispers to us, and if we do not hear it, or, worse, if we ignore it, life will yell at us. When this yell takes the shape of illness, it is a message to change. The challenge and message of cancer is a siren call, an opportunity to undergo personal growth. In this personal growth lies the prospect for true and lasting healing.

I’m not alone in seeing my cancer as an opportunity for personal transformation. Many cancer patients use the experience as a turning point to expand contemplation through techniques like meditation; to radically change their diet; to deepen their spiritual connection; to follow their intuition and establish rapport with their subconscious; to release suppressed emotions; to take control of their health; and to embrace a reason to live instead of a fear of dying. These are the people who survive and thrive.

My mother had a plaque that hung in the hallway of our house when I was a kid that read: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The saying seemed so simple at the time. In retrospect, a single step is a deliberate move, a conscious act. Too often, our journey begins the way I was taught to swim at two years old: thrown in the water and told to find the side, reach and pull, kick, kick, kick.

I swallowed a lot of water. And I barfed. But I learned to swim.

And so, our journeys begin, often less with a deliberate step and more with a plunge, reaching and pulling, kick, kick, kicking.

And you swallow water. And you barf. And sometimes you are so busy keeping your head above water that you miss the wonder, the beauty of life in what truly is a paradise if you only have eyes to see it.

And sometimes you miss the gifts that life has given to you because they are unwrapped, disguised before your very eyes but in plain sight if you have the right perspective.

There is a Taoist saying that the journey is the reward. Insofar as the journey itself is rewarding, it can be made more so when you embrace a perspective of gratitude that will allow you to see gifts in all of your experiences, even those that on their face might seem awful, even tragic.

But in order to get to the place where you can have this kind of perspective, you need to know yourself. While this may seem obvious, think for a moment about the fact that in modern society, we have drastically reduced the use of our senses for survival, and so they are being diminished. We turn instead to external sources like the Internet, which is perpetually at our fingertips on our increasingly powerful personal devices, and we rely on government and institutions for health and safety. When sick, we turn ourselves over to a medical community that usually removes patients from the planning process while the experts decide what is wrong with our bodies and decide what to do in order to fix them.

There is a school of thought, however, that is characterized by the belief that the body has an innate, intuitive knowledge regarding what it needs in order to heal. Those who subscribe to this belief system believe that the body can also let you know why you got sick in the first place. And while there are powerful lessons to be learned from your own body if you listen, you must be careful regarding your thoughts simply because you are listening.

You are reading this book because you have cancer, or you know someone with cancer, or you do not want to become a cancer statistic and would rather make changes in your life and behavior that will lead to a healthy and vibrant immune system, capable of doing its amazing work repelling the external threats posed by the toxicity of our environment and surroundings. If you have cancer, you are undoubtedly overwhelmed by the very notion of the diagnosis, as well as the world of scientific, evidence-based medicine and decisions such as the surgical, chemical, and radiological therapies that make up the tumor model of Western medicine. And while it can be very reassuring to have highly trained, competent, and talented medical professionals doing their professional, medical best to get you to a positive outcome and a restoration to quality of life, they don’t go home with you at night when the questions really cross your mind and the doubt and fear can creep in.

Adding to this disjointed, episodic care is the fact that medical professionals, by training, remain at arm’s length. If they didn’t, they couldn’t cope with the enormity of all of their patients’ hopes and fears. And because so much of medicine today is scientific and seemingly beyond the layperson’s ability to understand, the medical community tends to be a bit paternalistic and reluctant to involve patients in their own treatment plans. There is a tendency to just go along with the program, to do as you’re told and be optimistic.

Because of these underlying conditions, you are likely and rightly feeling like, I don’t want to be a helpless victim, so I’m looking for direction in order to play an active role in my own healing and recovery. Intuitively, you know that your active engagement will increase your chances of survival and recovery. But engagement isn’t part of the tumor model of medical therapy for cancer, a model that includes tests, scans, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Nevertheless, your intuitive desire to take an active role in your treatment is the first step in establishing the foundation for your healing and recovery and a return to your normal life.

I know this because I am a cancer survivor. In 2011, I was diagnosed with papillary carcinoma and underwent a radical thyroidectomy and nodal neck dissection (five lymph nodes removed), followed by two rounds of radiation therapy. I rode the roller coaster of fear, anxiety, depression, and the gamut of other emotions that accompany a cancer diagnosis. Along the way, I had teachers and guides appear, and I learned to listen to my intuition. The single biggest thing I learned was that no one had more skin in the game than me, and my survival depended on me taking control of my healthcare plan and making changes in my life. In short, I needed to take charge of my cancer.

In the following pages, I will share my story and what I learned from it. Further, because the experience was such a life-changing event, I will share what I have found in my research during my recovery, research that has yielded a framework for action on your part that has the power to lead you into healing and recovery.

CHAPTER 1

MY WAKE-UP CALL

Action cures fear, inaction creates terror.

Douglas Horton

Iwas raised on a ranch, and from an early age adopted a pretty solid work ethic. I worked hard and played hard. I did not go directly to college after high school, opting instead for the Marine Corps. When I got out, I went to work on a drilling rig and worked at various other oil field jobs. When the price of oil dropped and the fields were shuttered, I went to work at a rock plant making little rocks out of big rocks, kind of like Fred Flintstone, operating various pieces of heavy equipment. About the time I had mastered every process at the quarry, there was a change of ownership, and I used that as an excuse to move on. I then went to work for a cable television company in the small community where I had grown up in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. I had moved from in-house with the cable company to subcontracting and was toiling along when my younger brother was killed in a car