Rogue: One Woman's Unconventional Healing of Cancer

By Susan McKenna

Rogue: One Womans Unconventional Healing of Cancer tells the story of Susan McKennas rejection of conventional treatment of cancer and her brave, intuitive path to self-healing. Compellingly written in essay form, Rogue is funny and poignant, lyrical and bold, daring and revealing. This gem of a book is for anyone whose life has been touched by cancer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504358118

Susan McKenna

Susan McKenna healed from breast cancer using a holistic approach focusing on whole foods, detoxing, and spirituality. She is a certified health coach and raw food chef. She holds a B.A. in dance and a J.D. in law. She is also a licensed EMT and firefighter. Susan resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Copyright © 2016 Susan M. McKenna.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Cover art and author photograph courtesy of Velleda Schervee, 2016.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5810-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5812-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5811-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908505

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/22/2016

Contents

1.   Introduction

2.   Another Sleepless Night

3.   What Am I Afraid Of?

4.   Help, Thanks, Wow

5.   Secrets to Reveal

6.   Love Hurts But Heals

7.   Truth or Illusion

8.   God Struck Me

9.   In The Thick Of It

10.   Having a Shitty Day

11.   Looking Good

12.   Ode to My Mother

13.   Walking Home Together

14.   Fake It Til You Make It

15.   Dream Believer

16.   Losing Control

17.   Reward/Punishment God

18.   Trust, Belief, Knowing

19.   Hello, This is John of God Calling

20.   Movie of My LIfe (complete with soundtrack)

21.   Boobs

22.   Slipping Away

23.   Money Equals Food

24.   Forgiveness

25.   Hi John, Welcome

26.   Cellular Boundaries

27.   Here We Go Again

28.   Soul Journey

29.   Ageless Soul, Timed Body

30.   The Toll It Takes

31.   Making It Worse

32.   Dumped

33.   John of God

34.   Casa Day 1

35.   Casa Day 2

36.   Casa Day 3

37.   Guided Imagery (Casa Day 4)

38.   Casa Day 5

39.   Happy Birthday to Me

40.   Casa Day 6

41.   Casa Day 7

42.   Casa Day 8

43.   Casa Day 9

44.   Casa Day 10

45.   Crossroads

46.   Ode to Max Gerson

47.   Homage to Lauren

48.   God and My Cells

49.   Epilogue

This book is

dedicated to my mother who dared

to heal right along with me.

And to Velleda for giving me my first

home and picking up my pieces.

Acknowledgments

Of course I owe the deepest acknowledgments to my family, especially my mother and my brother, Kevin. I can’t thank you enough.

I’d also like to deeply thank the Klatch for their continued help. Thank you Erin Thompson, Thern Anderson, and Sher Demeter for singing to me on my front porch. Thank you Erin, Thern, Sher, and Becky for your help with all the surgeries and all the juicing/food preparation. Thank you Becky for weed whacking and mowing my lawn, vacuuming my house, changing my sheets, and for the lovely dance classes. Thank you Thern for gardening help, holding my feet, and Feldenkrais lessons. Thank you Erin for a constant supply of kale and apples and for being the first person I told and dropping everything to come over. Thank you Sher for breaking in that juicer with me, for acupuncture and heat lamps, for giving me rides after surgeries, and for all those long phone conversations. Thank you Judith for dance classes and giving me a safe space to find my body again. There deserves to be a film made about you all. Oh, wait, there is one!

To the rest of my dedicated team of juicers and preppers, I truly could not have healed this way without your help. Thank you for continuously showing up week after week, month after month. I am indebted to each of you. To Mary Crimi, I love you so much. Thank you for making healing fun. Thank you for asking such great questions and for such fantastic conversations. Thank you for the music, the dances, and the friendship for all these years. And, for sure, the laughter. To Becky Stanchfield, you are a game changer! Thank you for helping me to love myself way back then and for continuing to help me now. Our conversations were so integral to my new ideas and thoughts about disease, about God, about life. My deepest love to you. To Dana Kassel, thank you for your no nonsense, get it done and get it done right ways. You are completely dependable and that quality allowed me to rest when I needed it. I felt really safe in your hands. And that meant more than you can know in those early exhausting days. To Trudi Juncker, thank you, too, for your steadfast commitment to the schedule and for your continued support even though you don’t like the kitchen. To Janet Dahlem, you are amazing and delightful. Thank you for your love and healing touch, especially after all my surgeries. To Michael Maddox, thank you for being so consistent and generous in the very early days. You were such a great help. Thank you Jennifer Isles for drives to doctor appointments and walks in the woods to get me away from it all. To Greg Taube and Greg Torp, thank you for the beautiful garden and the nourishment it provided for me in so many ways. Thank you to Theresa Hawthorne and Liz Stehly for grocery shopping for me. Thank you to Lisa First for the very generous and amazing Alexander sessions. Thank you Therese Stanton for keeping my mom company and helping with big decisions. Thank you Shay Smyser for mowing my lawn and shoveling my sidewalk. And thank you to Liza Lawrence for all those trips to Costco for carrots and romaine lettuce. Best deal in town. And last but certainly not least, to Laura Lucas Silvis…my deep gratitude for guiding me back to myself over so many years. Your generosity and soulful compassion have been a God-send. I am eternally thankful.

A special thank you to some out of town friends. To Nina Weil who sent books to me in the mail that helped light my path. Your generosity astounds me. And thank you for the many fantastic emails that inspired me. You are an amazing Healing Touch practitioner and an even better cancer coach. I am so grateful to you. To Kevan Wood, I met you for a reason and now I know it what it is! Thank you for your inspiring emails from all around the world. They delighted me to no end. My favorite was from Malta! And to Sandy Bath, the most amazing, generous, intuitive healer I know. I am so blessed to have you in my life. May we someday meet in person because it feels like you’re one of my dearest friends!

To those who donated to medgift.com or in some other way I owe my recovery to you in so many ways. You changed my view of the world. Your generosity was the beginning of this miraculous journey. You simply changed my outlook on everything: Susan Olson, Kevin McKenna, Joanne Berry, Sandy Bath, Nina Weil, Becky Stanchfield, Judith Howard, Becky Heist, Kitty McClelland, Judy Kalb, Donald LaCourse, Mary Stallard, Laura Domyancich, Kim Gillespie, Pam Gleason, Susan Scalf and Amy Powers, Mary Crimi, Carolyn Tweedy, Sarah Campbell, Phuntsog Dhakpotsong, Patty Sullivan and Bill Grove, Bonnie Scheuler, Janae Scott, Kathy King, Diane Flanagan, Dan Tracy, Darrin Gregory, Janet Dahlem, Jennifer Isle, Kristina and Bill Graber, Kevan and Marlene Wood, Yumi Inomata, Michael Moriarity, Rosy Simas, Blanka Brichta, Melissa Don Carlos, Trudi and Dave Juncker, Michele Chin Purcell, Susan Galeota, Sarah Metzger, Dana Kassel, Joseph Bruce Hewitt, Ashley Tajadod, Tami Stiller, Christine McMichael, Brian Jacobsen, Michelle Bylsma, Rae Ann Emery, Ann Jensen, Robert Florio, Gary Heyer, Isabel Moreno, Terese Pritschet, Martin and Sandy Holden, Larisa Rakhlin, Carey Valenchenko, Katie Hilt, Laura Wicklander, Denise Culshaw, Shay Smyser, Jim Nico, Rita Baumgartner, Patty McKenna, Debi Joos, Pam Gubrud, Mary Maciolek, Heidi Erickson, Tracy Moore, Andy Rohrbach, Amy Theis DePont, Tracy Lewis, Ben Page, Dan and Theresa McKenna, Marianne Stiller, Karen Ginsburg, Kate Lynch, Carol LeBeaux, Dawn Keenan, Lois James, Anne Tielens, Mike Lanning, Fred Cudder, Jan Gregerson, Garrick Larson, Jacqueline Colello, Vicki Jung, Heidi Bryan, Theresa Hawthorne and Liz Stehly, Jymme Golden, Penelope La Rosa, Laura Pilon, and Su Smallen.

To those who donated to CrowdRise, this book would not be in existence without you. I am deeply grateful for your support: Wendy Ruble, Erin Thompson and Byron Richard, Jeffrey Berger, Steve Kubik, Patty Sullivan and Bill Grove, Becky Heist, Becky Stanchfield, May Borello, Joanne Sakai, Eben Knowler, Janae Scott, Kevan Wood, Pam Gleason, Nina Weil, Joanne Berry, Terese Pritschet, Valerie Oliveiro, Tracy Moore and Renee Pardello, Trudi and Dave Juncker, Terrell Griffin, Kevan Willington, Judy Kalb, David Feinberg and Pure Juicer Company, Mary Stallard, Kevin McKenna, Wendy Ansley, Diane Moncrieff, Tim Perz, Lindsay Forsythe, Mary Crimi, Sarah Metzger, Denise Culshaw, Doug Reith, Velleda Schervee, Jennifer Arave, Renee Brune, BP, Dorothy Clark, Laura Pawlacyk, Donald La Course, Jackie Culp, Bobbie Sandgren, Rachel Selikoff, Kate Blair, Dan McKenna, Liz Plambeck, Nancy Gossard and Susan Hoffman, Clare Tallon Ruen, and CrowdRise.

Introduction

On April 30, 2014 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had found a lump in my right breast a few weeks before and had scheduled a mammogram. A few months before that my nurse practitioner had missed the lump. Then she missed it again. But something worried me just enough to schedule the mammogram. It was the beginning of trusting my gut. And of healing my gut.

Two mammograms, an ultrasound, a biopsy and a MRI later my worse fears were confirmed. When I think back on what those days were like, it feels like I was sleepwalking. It’s all so very real yet so surreal at the same time. Cancer isn’t the only thing that can shake up a person’s world, but it does a hell of a job at it. I was terrified and completely confused. I had no family history of breast cancer. I had spent most of my adult life living in a way that wouldn’t give me this result. I ate really well, I exercised, I did yoga, I was a creative, adventurous person in the world, I had great friends. I daresay I was happy, yet I feared cancer. I had spent my adult life fearing cancer, and cancer was what I got. I don’t know if there’s a connection. I just know I got a chance to face my biggest fear and overcome it.

In the beginning, I knew chemo and radiation weren’t for me. I had always known I wouldn’t choose conventional treatment if cancer was ever found in my body. I had given my fear of cancer enough thought to know this much. Upon the diagnosis, I chose to do the Gerson Therapy, a very labor intensive discipline that daily involves seventeen to twenty pounds of organic food, thirteen freshly pressed juices, five coffee enemas, and many supplements. It is neither easy nor cheap. Eating a raw food lifestyle for ten years, a vegan one for twenty-five years, and a vegetarian one for thirty-five years hadn’t kept me from growing cancer, so I felt I needed something even more restrictive. I needed to be able to do something, to somehow feel I was changing my inner ecosystem so that cancer couldn’t survive. I still needed the illusion of control, I guess. I did the therapy religiously for nine months, but it wasn’t all I did. I took cancer as an opportunity to look at everything in my life. It was time to clean house in all ways. Eventually I moved on from Gerson and transitioned back to mostly raw food. I had learned to trust myself and my own ability to heal.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have healed cancer on my own terms. It was an amazingly difficult and enriching time. I wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone, but I wouldn’t trade the experience, either. I had to dig really deep within myself, and it turned out I liked what I found. The essays that follow are thoughts I had while healing. There are time gaps between them because I didn’t always have the energy to write, but they were joyfully and also painfully true to my feelings at the time. I’ve resisted the temptation to rewrite them to express where I am now. I’ve kept them to their own truths at the time. I’ve learned so much more about life, myself, and cancer since these essays were written, and my thoughts and spirituality have continued to evolve. These essays, however, express the way I fumbled to that place of self-discovery. They also are written to stand alone, so that each chapter is its own little nugget, though they follow a linear timeline. This is my story of transformation. At least most of it. I could never have written the absolute entirety. You wouldn’t have believed it. The synchronicities in my life during this time were so many, I couldn’t keep track. I wish I had because it was all pretty amazing. Not easy but amazing. But these essays were what moved me, what felt so profound that I had to write it down. The experience of cancer changed me because it needed to. Because I allowed it to. Cancer doesn’t appear without reason. It shows up, in my opinion, to tell us something. I chose to listen.

With that said, I’d like to say that I know nothing about cancer. I don’t know that anyone does. I don’t know how I got it. I don’t know how I healed it. I don’t know the path to healing. I don’t know what works and what doesn’t. I only know what I did for myself, and it somehow worked. I only know that I knew what was right for me. It’s more accurate to say I knew what wasn’t right for me. Finding what was right took a while. Each of us has to dig deep to find out what that is. It’s a very personal journey with no absolutes. It is the most intimate journey of trusting oneself. That’s really the only point I want to make. We are each our own healers. We can heal. We can learn to trust ourselves again. Healing from cancer is a lonely journey in many ways. No one can do it for you. No can really be there with you when the terror strikes. But people will try. They’ll love you back to yourself if you let them. They’ll show you how to love yourself. Healing from cancer can be an amazing opportunity to open your heart to the world. But first you have to open your heart to yourself.

Everyday there is more information on healing with unconventional treatment. Every day there is more hope. More stories of people braving a new path to healing. I don’t claim to have anything to teach you, but maybe adding my story of healing to other people’s stories will make cancer a little less frightening to the next person. Our stories of healing have to be told, whatever path we took to get there. And the unconventional stories really have to be told. All of us who were told there was only one way to heal have discovered otherwise. There are as many ways to heal as there are people who are healing. Trust yourself. Tell your story. Please tell your story. If this book helps to dispel even a little of the fear that the conventional treatment model instills in those who are diagnosed, I will be ever so grateful. It will have been worth it. Cancer does not have to be a death sentence. You do not have to live in fear. You can heal. Better yet, you can thrive.

If this book leaves you with any sense of hope, please pass it on to others who are dealing with a diagnosis or to their families. Help me and others like me spread the word that cancer is not an end to life. It is a call to life if you let it be. If you will dare to trust yourself.

Thank you for reading my story. May you always be well.

Another Sleepless Night

It’s almost three a.m. and I can’t sleep. Again. A cancer diagnosis does nothing for one’s beauty sleep. Absolutely nothing. It’s only been three hours and fifteen minutes since I cried myself to sleep. Not cried, really, more like sobbed. Like gut wrenching, audible caterwauling. This is the way it goes in the early days after diagnosis. My emotions can take me on a rollercoaster ride so fast I don’t even have time to fasten my seatbelt. This was one of those nights. It caught me by surprise and took me on a hell of a ride.

I’ve cried more than I’m proud of during these ten days since diagnosis. I’ve also laughed more than I think is appropriate. If cancer is superstitious, it’s gonna get me for all the laughing I’ve done in its face. It’s fine with the crying, I’m pretty sure. Expects it even. Eggs it on. Tonight it’s got me. I’m exhausted, puffy eyed, and completely and utterly awake. What brought it on was no laughing matter and saddens me as I write this.

While trying to go to sleep after doing my castor oil pack, one of the many alternative attempts to draw out toxins from my liver, I found my fingers at my right breast. I hadn’t really touched my breast since the diagnosis. Maybe it’s me that’s superstitious and not the cancer. But in the quiet of the night my fingers searched out the lump to make sure it was there. Since my primary care provider missed it in my annual exam four months ago and again last Tuesday in my pre-op exam, I held out a delusional thought that it wasn’t palpable to the touch. That I’d been mistaken when I found it myself. That every doctor, radiologist, lab technician and surgeon had been mistaken when they read the results of three mammograms, an ultrasound, a biopsy, and a MRI. That the constant phantom pain in my chest that I imagine to be my lump was just that—phantom. But then I put my fingers lightly to my breast.

My whole breast felt like the lump. Not the 2.0 centimeter lump they originally described, not the 2.6 centimeter lump revealed in the MRI, the lump that is a little larger than an almond. That’s not the lump I felt. I swear it felt like the whole breast was the lump. It felt huge. Mammoth. Like it was growing under my fingers, growing aggressively, invasively. In truth, that is how it’s growing, but how fast does an invasive tumor grow? This is what keeps me up at night. That the tumor is growing fast enough that it will spread to my lymph nodes by morning if I’m not vigilant. If I don’t keep watch in the dark of night I will wake with my pancake breast the size of a grapefruit because scary tumors are so often ominously described as the size of a grapefruit.

In truth, I barely grazed my breast. I was afraid to touch myself. This is what made me cry. I couldn’t touch my own breast because I felt so betrayed by it. And then I cried harder because I felt guilty about feeling betrayed. I mean, I was about to lose this breast, both breasts in reality because my feeling of betrayal was so huge. If it lurked in one I didn’t want to take a chance it could lurk in the other. I wanted to love my breasts, to feel them gratefully while I had them, to have some other person feel them gratefully while I still had them. This last thought made me sob harder. To lose my breasts while single seemed so much more unfair than if I had a tender lover who could make me feel them passionately, intimately one more time before they were cut off. To lose them when that imaginary lover wouldn’t be with me when I woke from surgery assuring me I was still loved and whole, sort of, put me over the edge. It wasn’t just my breasts I was losing. It was my whole sexual self I was grieving. I’m not gonna lie, this was a pandora’s box.

I’ve always thought myself to be a sexual being. We all are, right? Now, I know some people are more interested than others, but we all are sexual beings regardless of how we may repress or express those urges. Regardless of whether we are mated or single, sexual urges exist. And in my quest to be a quasi good quasi Buddhist, to be good in general, I’ve tried not to misuse my sexual nature. This has only resulted in some major grief over not having the kind of sexual life I want. By that I mean one at all.

Having been single for three years, read that as inadvertently and accidentally celibate, I was already grieving being a middle-aged woman with waning prospects and soon to be waning desires as menopause was about to hit and alter my hormones. The dating world seems to exist only online, and I hadn’t tried that yet. I wanted the old fashioned kind of falling for the wrong person while imagining them to be right. Better yet, this time I really wanted the right person, to be spared the trials and errors of dating. I wanted to walk into, bump into that person at some clumsy moment, look into her eyes and fall head over heels in love. Maybe this time I even wanted to choose to love and not unwittingly fall into it. The falls were beginning to hurt.

Ever the romantic and never the pragmatist when it comes to love, I couldn’t bring myself to give online dating a try. And putting myself actively in the world was making me come up empty handed. I mean, really, it wasn’t like I sat home at night. I tried to meet people. I went to meet-ups, belonged to a rock-climbing gym, took dance classes most mornings, worked an extra part-time job where outdoorsy people like me worked and shopped, asked friends to set me up, traveled on group adventure vacations, and generally kept a constant eye peeled for a cute, sensitive, kind, and funny middle-aged hippie lesbian who preferably ate a plant based diet but who wasn’t too hippie as to be all new agey. That wasn’t too much to ask for, was it? Yeah, I know.

So prior to my diagnosis, the grief of trying to date was already apparent. It was already seeming hard to find datable prospects without adding cancer to the mix. Add to my dating profile having cancer, having a bilateral mastectomy with reconstructed breasts, doing three to five coffee enemas a day, and basically subsisting on juice for two years, and I was not looking like a fun date on a Saturday night. Having cancer made me feel like I would never date again, never make love again, never have a partner again. And if I did have a lover again, I wouldn’t feel anything she did to my breasts anyway. And that made me cry. Hard. Having cancer is hard enough. Having it alone sucks.

As I write this I’m wrapped in a soft robe given to me by an ex-lover. A really good ex-lover. That makes me cry, too. The loss of knowing what great sex is. I never wear this robe. I’m not a robe kind of girl. I’ve taken to using it to lie on on my cold bathroom floor as I hold the coffee enemas in for the required fifteen minutes. Now if that ain’t sexy, I don’t know what is. Maybe if I can finally stop crying long enough I can find someone who doesn’t mind fake breasts and a clean derrière. A girl can dream, right? And with that, I’m going back to bed with the hope that I can.

What Am I Afraid Of?

As I was walking with a friend around Lake Harriet, the conversation eventually turned to cancer, as it always seems to do these days. In my defense we were more than halfway around the lake before we got to this heavy subject, but it was to bound to come up. This particular friend is sort of a cancer professional. She’s a thriver of over twenty years, her sister is also a thriver, she lost her mother to breast cancer, and she’s been present to many, many, far too many friends’ bouts with cancer. She’s sat by their bedsides over and over as they lay dying, and still she shows up for the newly diagnosed to walk them through the insanity. She’s never forgotten the chaos of the early days. She remembers still how it feels to lose your identity in only a matter of months, how you have no normal to hold onto, how every moment contains the full spectrum of emotions. She just walks with you and waits until you are ready to talk. Then she listens and asks simple, revelatory questions that start you spinning all over again. Like she did today.

As we walked I began to speak of how I had been afraid of cancer virtually my whole life. I lost my father to cancer at a young age. He was forty-five when he died, only three years younger than I am now. I was nine at the time. Losing a parent at that age has some pretty profound implications. I’ve met so many people like myself who lost a parent when they were young, and frankly, we are all messed up in pretty much the same way. We felt abandoned. Plain and simple. How abandonment plays out in different personalities is another story too long to address here, but the underlying feeling is pretty much the same for us all. No one saw us. We got lost in the grief and didn’t know how to navigate our own way through it. Maybe the adults around us thought we were too young to be affected in such a pervasive way. Maybe they were too lost in their own grief to communicate to a child what grief is. I don’t know. I just know I’ve heard the same story over and over again from people who’ve lost a parent so young. We became invisible.

So when my very experienced cancer friend asked, What is it about cancer that makes you so afraid? I thought about my dad. About how he died in the hospital six weeks after diagnosis. About how he walked into the hospital thinking he had food poisoning and never came out. About how he could have lengthened his life by about a year but chose not to do treatment and died quickly thereafter. I thought about how we didn’t have enough time with him in the end. We didn’t have time to process what his dying meant. We didn’t have time to heal the childhood wounds that my siblings and I have carried around all of our adult lives. I thought about how angry I was for many years that he didn’t try harder for us. I thought of all of this in an instant because I’ve carried it on my back for so long, but I didn’t say it. Frankly, I didn’t say anything. The question sort of struck me dumb.

As I thought about my friend’s question I was a little stunned that I had no answer. I thought about it for awhile. Eventually I said, I guess I’m afraid of the obvious. It was a lame response, and I knew it. My friend called me on it immediately. She said we’ll all die eventually. I must know this, so why was it cancer specifically that I feared. I mumbled something about having to look death straight in the eye. About how getting struck on my bike or having a heart attack would be easier because I wouldn’t see it coming. But even as I said these things, I realized I didn’t really have a good answer to her question. And she called me on this, too. She pointed out I ran into burning buildings for a living, so it couldn’t really be facing death I feared. She asked again, "What it is about cancer that you fear?"

As the day went on I found myself pondering why it was, exactly, that I feared cancer more than any other way of dying. It couldn’t all be about my father. He went relatively quickly once he made up his mind to die. I say that with all seriousness. I don’t think my father wanted to live. I think cancer was an easy out for him. It was an excuse to leave this world, and no one could blame him. But I did. In some ways all my life I’ve wondered why he didn’t choose life. Why didn’t he try to last longer for the rest of us so that we could adjust to losing him? Would it have been less scarring if we had time to take in his illness? Or did he think he was making it easier for us to not drag on what he accepted to be the outcome? And why did he accept that dying had to be the outcome? Why didn’t he have the strength to look for another answer? The Gerson therapy was already in existence. There were other ways to treat cancer, even then. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the answer is to these questions. I’ll never know with certainty what he was thinking upon his deathbed. I was too young to understand all that was happening then, but I know this now. He didn’t want his life. And being diagnosed with cancer myself made me wonder if I wanted mine.

Not knowing why cancer scared me so much saddened me. It really bummed me out. I suddenly realized how much time I had wasted fearing something so greatly that, in some ways, I wondered if I had manifested it in myself. Now, don’t get upset about that statement. I’m not saying we give ourselves cancer by fearing it. I don’t know that. But I am saying that I spent a lot of energy, made a lot of choices, and geared my adult life towards avoiding the very thing I now was facing. And I didn’t even know why. Why has cancer been so frightening to me?

Maybe the reason does has something to do with my dad. Losing a parent at such a young age leaves a lot of living to do without that parent. Suddenly the world is no longer a safe place. His death made me different from the other kids who still mostly had intact two parent families in those days. I was now the kid without a father. While their lives went on, mine had splintered. As the youngest of five significantly older siblings who all had two parents much longer than I did, I was now left alone a lot. I was alone and I was scared. Scared of the dark. Scared of the quiet. Scared of the emptiness. Scared that my mother would be taken without notice, too. Scared that I could be whisked off this planet just as quickly. Suddenly at nine years of age, I understood that nothing lasts. No nine year old should have such a deep knowing of this.

I spent a lot of time alone as I grew to adulthood. Life seemed inherently lonely. I viewed life from the lens of hardship for my early adult years because my childhood years had been so empty. So without laughter or guidance. Death was always so glaringly present. I understood it too early, yet I misunderstood it, too. Then, it was a dark, bleak thing that terrified me in the night. It led to nothingness. And cancer was death’s biggest ally. For me, cancer equalled death and death meant cancer. I was terrified of both, but all I knew of death had come from cancer. Cancer was what killed.

It was really only in the last ten years that I felt I was gaining some clarity. I finally had returned to a spiritual practice that comforted me, and this took the edge off of my fear of death. I intellectually accepted death. I finally learned to enjoy the silence, the quiet, my own company. I had finally figured out that whether life was joyful or difficult was in my own head. I had the power to change my thoughts, to change my perception of events, and to view life from a place of gratitude. And with the practice of gratitude at the center of my recent life, everything had changed. I started living. I dared to be who I wanted to be, to do the things I wanted to do, to travel to foreign countries alone, to figure out how to be alone and like myself. It sounds trite, but it took a lot of work to get to a place of self-love. To enjoy my own company. To enjoy the silence. It took a lot of years to really get to a place of being healthy. Of living life to the fullest so that when death did come, I would have no regrets.

I’ve talked a lot in the last couple of years about really wanting to heal myself. I wanted to be healthy in body, mind and spirit. I wanted to heal everything. I said this one too many times out loud because the Universe heard me. Big time. So it asked back, Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure you really want to heal all of your wounds? Because you’re asking for a doozie. This is going to be big.

Which leads me to here. The thing I’ve feared most is before me. I’m facing my biggest fear. Staring it straight in the eye. I’m telling it to leave me because I’m not my dad. I’m not making his choices. I want life. I have to heal everything in order to live. There’s not a lot of room for error this time. It’s not the first time I’ve had a health crisis. I was hospitalized twice when I was a teen for pretty severe anorexia. I healed from that. I healed my abandonment issues. I healed my heart over and over. I healed my mind and its negative thinking. I was well on my way to happiness when the Universe gave me this opportunity to clean house completely. It’s now or never. Here or on the other side. Be careful what you ask for.

I don’t really know what it takes to heal. I have ideas. I’m following a path. My path. There are many paths to healing and no right way. But I’ve made a choice I believe will give me the best chance at a long life. I know my conscious mind wants this. What I’m unsure of is my subconscious mind. I listen to a lot of Louise Hay these days—filling my subconscious mind with thoughts that will pull me through. I’m aligning my two minds so we are in agreement that the outcome of this journey will be a long life filled with love and light. But it’s hard to know what I really feel about cancer. I believe I can completely heal in an instant. I also know I still fear death. I worry if there is any chance that fearing cancer manifested cancer in me then fearing death can do the same. This terrifies me. This is what I couldn’t say when my friend asked me why I fear cancer. I fear I have drawn it to me, and my fear lurks in places I don’t know. I’m spending a lot of time using affirmations these days because I’m just not sure if my subconscious is on board. I really hope it is. I want to live a full life without checking out early. I want the strength to face whatever life brings me with grace and dignity. I want to be fearless in the face of adversity. I don’t want death to feel like adversity.

So what is it exactly I have been afraid of? That I don’t know makes me grieve all the choices I’ve made out of fear. Am I really afraid of death? I know I’m uncertain about facing it, but do I really fear not being here? Do I even believe I won’t be ‘here’? Honestly, I’m not sure death itself would feel much different than life. I’ve read enough Universal love, parallel Universe, Divine Matrix and Vortex kinds of books to believe something magnificent happens when we leave our bodies. Even though I know my death is an eventual certainty, I don’t want it now. I was just getting the hang of loving life. I have so much more to learn, to do, to create. I have all of this love inside me for people who’ve