A Path Forward: My Journey to Find Healing through Integrative Medicine

By Jocelyn Johnson

Diagnosed with vaginal cancer the year after her surgery for uterine cancer and disillusioned with the recommended treatment of radiation therapy, Jocelyn embarked on a journey to regain her health through holistic and natural approaches.

Through five years of in-depth self-care and personal growth, Jocelyn forged her own path

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885044288

Book preview

A Path Forward

My Journey to Find Healing through Integrative Medicine

Jocelyn Johnson

new degree press

copyright © 2022 Jocelyn Johnson

All rights reserved.

A Path Forward

My Journey to Find Healing through Integrative Medicine

Consult with your health care providers before beginning any health improvement program. Nothing in this book is to be construed as medical advice. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury, or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

The benefits attributed to the practice of yoga and meditation stem from centuries-old yogic traditions. Results will vary with individuals.

The Kundalini Research Institute (KRI) teachings, yoga sets, techniques, kriyas, and meditations are courtesy of KRI and reprinted with permission. To request permission, please write to KRI at PO Box 1819, Santa Cruz, NM 87567, or see www.kriteachings.org.

ISBN

979-8-88504-420-2 Paperback

979-8-88504-427-1 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-428-8 Digital Ebook

For whomever this brings empowerment and movement toward healing.

In honor of beloved family members who have passed due to their cancer journeys. My sister Julie, an avid environmentalist who would be tickled pink that I licked it. My mom Amy who would be proud and too effusive about my having written this, and a dad Winston so thoroughly lost to me to suppose even a nod.

Contents

Preface

Part I

A Full-Bodied Memoir

CHAPTER 1

Discovering My Cancer

CHAPTER 2

What about MMy Physical Health?

CHAPTER 3

What Was My Mental and Emotional Baggage?

CHAPTER 4

What about a Spiritual Sinkhole?

CHAPTER 5

Questing for Fulfillment

CHAPTER 6

First Round Healing Efforts

CHAPTER 7

In Pursuit of Deeper Healing

CHAPTER 8

Venturing into Holistic Treatment: Improving My Physical Health

CHAPTER 9

Creating My Cocoon

CHAPTER 10

Delaying the Decision on Traditional Treatment

CHAPTER 11

Emotional and Spiritual Ride and Reassessment

CHAPTER 12

Mindfulness Lifelines

CHAPTER 13

Two Weeks at the Ann Wigmore Natural Health Institute

CHAPTER 14

Settling into the Raw Realities

CHAPTER 15

Traveling Raw and Homebound Adventures

CHAPTER 16

I am Light Meditation

CHAPTER 17

My First Clear Follow-Up Exam

CHAPTER 18

Clearing a Path Forward

PCHAPTER 19

Postponing the Next Exam

CHAPTER 20

Looking for Parallel Knowledge

CHAPTER 21

Re-Engaging with the Estranged

CHAPTER 22

Persistent Re-Engagement

CHAPTER 23

Other Efforts for Better Health

CHAPTER 24

A Setback Scare

CHAPTER 25

Seeking Other Answers

CHAPTER 26

A Look at My Environmental Toxins

CHAPTER 27

Revelations and a Plan Going Forward

Part II

An Insider’s Reflections

CHAPTER 28

More about Healing Tools

CHAPTER 29

Reflections on Obstacles to Integrative Care

CHAPTER 30

Reflections on Mental Health Care

CHAPTER 31

Ethical Challenges in Health Policy

CHAPTER 32

Envisioning Changes to Reduce Cancer Risks and Improve Care

Appendix A: A Bit About Raw Foods

Appendix B: I Am Light Meditation

Appendix C: Healing with Affirmations and Meridian Energies

Appendix D: Kundalini Yoga Meditations

Acknowledgments

Terms and Notes

Resources

Bibliography

Preface

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Not in my wildest imaginings did I foresee myself writing a book about a personal healing journey with cancer.

Too often, pride in my health allowed me to fall into judgment of others about their health struggles. This quality of willful blindness kept me insulated from cancer fears, even though both my parents and a younger sister had died of cancer. In September 2014, I had a total hysterectomy for uterine cancer. In December 2015, news came of a cancer recurrence in my vagina, and a carefully considered decision led me to not follow my gynecologic oncologist’s orders for treatment.

So far, I have gone my own way, on a successful journey through the terrain of less traveled cancer cures. With the recurrence, my initial state of terror was followed by the determination to survive. This fueled my motivation and commitment to the discipline of an alternate plan. Deciding not to go along with the medical standard of care heightened my resolve to follow through with the challenges of this plan.

When starting to write this book, I was in the early phase of learning the tumor was no longer visible; nothing evident via CT scan, MRI, and PET scan, or by my oncologist’s experienced eye. To meet the conventional allopathic medical criteria for the label cured, I had a dauntingly long way yet to go—years of watching and waiting with regular oncology exams at the prescribed intervals. Dealing with the uncertainty could be a source of revolving-door distress as my vigilance about body sensations readily raised the haunting question over and over: Is this a sign it’s back?

Sometimes the fear dominates my state of mind to a painful degree.

A nurse by training and a health enthusiast by passion and interest, I got into a health care profession by the back door. Raised in a family that placed little value on the sciences and viewed a liberal arts education as the only path to right livelihood, I chose an unfamiliar college major, causing unvarnished disappointment to my parents. After getting a degree in mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1979, my hopes of working in the emerging field of renewable energy were dashed when it became evident there were few to no jobs.

The promise of this new industry dried up with the political winds of the time, and President Jimmy Carter’s vision of developing technologies for renewable energy sources was pushed aside. I ended up in the aerospace industry and worked as a crew systems engineer for Hamilton Standard at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, as the final touches were happening for the first space shuttle launch. There was an excitement and headiness in working with astronauts through the space shuttle’s first few missions.

Back then, as one of only a couple of women working in a male-dominated setting, it was a tough work environment. The early 1980s engineering world, with its overabundance of male problem-solving energy, was ultimately not fulfilling and wouldn’t hold me. I wasn’t the kid who lived and breathed the adventures of space exploration. Without this passion, it was painful to stay in the heart hollowness of the work.

And the gender dynamics got to me.

The relentless ways males can spar with each other combined with subtle resentments directed at me for busting into the boys’ club became unbearable. Trying to ignore the persistent stream of sexual innuendos and outright harassment became torturous. Despite the difficulties in my job settings, I had developed practical skills and problem-solving logic that were gratifying, and my understanding of the physical world became satisfyingly demystified. The feelings of being out of place in engineering only increased with going through a divorce in the winter of 1981 and then through the death of my younger sister, Julie, from leukemia, in the spring of 1982. The choice of making a change away from how I was living took on a do or die urgency.

When Julie was initially diagnosed with leukemia a few years prior to her death, I was drawn to studying spirituality and alternative therapies with greater urgency than a dabbler’s pace. I was particularly drawn to learning more about the Native American way of being in relationship with the natural world. Within weeks of her death, my resignation ended the engineering job and, in time, ended the career path. Launching into a starkly different experience, I chose to follow a budding interest in Native American culture and lifestyle and tried living in an intentional community based on Native American values and practices.

There, I was introduced to different ways of knowing, different ways of relating to the natural world, and a novel lifestyle that seemed integrated and whole. Over my time there, I began to envision my life path turning toward a heart-centered lifestyle and career. The three years spent there weren’t easy in various ways, but they were also deeply rewarding. In 1985, the community folded, as many young intentional communities do, amid the adolescent growing pains that arise with moving beyond the rose-colored idealism driving the formation stages.

Like the path taken into an engineering education and a brief stint working in aerospace, living in an intentional spiritual community enriched my life, infusing a sense of possibilities for seeing the world from a markedly different perspective. These disparate orientations to what makes a life balanced and fulfilling have stuck with me. My particular choices to address cancer challenges were impacted by a number of life experiences, but these two differing life paths, which shaped the decade of my twenties, have remained influential in significant ways.

With the news of my cancer recurrence in December 2015, I assessed my situation and weighed my choices before accepting the big personal challenge. My aim was to stack the odds in favor of improving my health, particularly my body ecology, without using the recommended treatment. This path to go against medical advice and reject the standard treatment isn’t a common choice, and the decision wasn’t made lightly. In a calculated gamble and armed with fierce resolve, I initiated my strategic plan by launching into the strict and disciplined regime designed to improve my overall health and make my body inhospitable to my cancer.

Clearly, my choices about how to address this cancer were unique to my situation and couldn’t be a prescription for someone else. Several of the things I chose to do haven’t been researched rigorously. This is a personal tale of healing, laden with both wisdom and follies, with times of relishing and despairing, a complicated mixed bag. Through it all, I have tried to hold on to hope and burn through the sources of my personal sufferings.

Generally lucky enough to live in relative comfort, to have been raised pretty well with the threat of violence and poverty nipping at my heels only briefly, I had mainly transcendable traumas and limitations, though some have taken a surprisingly long time to overcome. Grateful for the learning that arose through this cancer trial, I believe I am stronger and have more resilience to face whatever adversity awaits in the coming years.

I have great respect for the beauty and value of the scientific process and how the methodical study of natural, biological, and societal influences can further our collective knowledge. Yet we live in complicated times, as we see with the whole debate about climate change. Often complex, competing interests, and objectives make the money needed for research to give credibility to emerging knowledge hard to come by. Odd motives influence how emerging knowledge becomes integrated and tangible in societal norms and practices.

The assimilation of healthier lifestyle know-how into our daily lives, as it is disseminated through health professionals, is often a painfully slow process. Some of Grandma’s home remedies, though unproven, actually do work and don’t belong in the basket with the snake oil cures. In the health care sciences, certain health questions aren’t easily researched such that all doubts and confounding factors are eliminated. Some means and methods of improving health haven’t been formally studied because the monetary payback to biomedical businesses isn’t enough to justify the outlay. Various strategies, proven to have health benefits, are neither implemented nor disseminated.

In the fall of 2017, while starting to flesh out this book, I was glad to come across Siddhartha Mukherjee’s article The Invasion Equation in The New Yorker magazine. Mukherjee’s article makes a great case for looking at cancer more ecologically, such as we do when trying to learn about and solve environmental problems. He uses the metaphor of seed and soil, applying it to highlight an ecologic viewpoint for cancer. This expands the prevailing perspective resoundingly. This shift of focus, in the holistic (whole being) direction, looks at the cancer cell in the host environment and asks how overall health, immune system functioning, and genetics of the host creature are likely to push either to sustained health or to the progression of disease.

Using body ecology as a starting point is definitely more complicated to study. Mukherjee reflects on the failures of focusing on the seed alone (one type of cancer cell at a time) and the harm caused by overtreating a cancer if the ecology of the body is misunderstood. He reflects on the complexities of trying to predict who will have a metastasis that takes hold and, given this uncertainty, the resulting propensity to overtreat. He describes the small but growing community of researchers willing to wade into studying more complex questions about body ecology and holistic approaches to studying cancer.

He reflects on the tendency for both providers and patients to view the diagnosis and treatment of cancer from a binary perspective. With this mindset, you have it or you don’t, and you treat it according to the standards without weighing the potential for effectiveness or potential for harm done by the treatment as if metastasis is inevitable.

I also read David Servan-Schreiber’s book Anticancer—A New Way of Life. Servan-Schreiber’s viewpoint was in alignment with a hard-won ecological perspective based on his personal journey with cancer. His memoir is comprehensive in making a clear case of how the increasing prevalence of cancer is linked to dwindling nutrients in foods via modern agribusiness practices and the exploding use of chemicals in industry and agribusiness after World War II. This book is very informative in presenting why to take a holistic approach when confronted with cancer, but it also makes the case that we all need to do certain things to safeguard our health and prevent adding to our odds of developing cancer.

Sadly, incidents of cancer in younger people are rising steadily. He considered it an epidemic with certain cancers, specifically lymph, lung, breast, brain, and skin.

Innovation in medicine comes from various sources. Knowledge about various influences and aspects of body ecology is ripening to the point where we’re making major leaps and will soon lengthen many lives. But this will require shaking up the firmly entrenched status quo. While attending a professional nutrition conference in 2007, I heard the rabble-rouser Jonathan Wright, MD, say, Often change comes only when the old guard dies. Why is this the case? Change shakes up the status quo, breaks with tradition, or threatens someone’s bottom line.

Many of us will be on a more urgent timetable and can’t afford to wait. For hopeful reasons, I am sharing my story and aiming to hasten the inevitability of change. The collective efforts of numerous well-being-oriented disciplines and modalities have great potential. Embracing our commonalities and our diversity willingly has the potential to bring out the creativity and kindness needed to create meaningful change. On many levels, we need to turn around the fragile state of our collective well-being, become a resilient and healthy society, and return to being a healthier and regenerative biosphere.

My wholehearted sense is that body ecology and genetics are intertwined in the how and why of many cancers. The ways I chose to pursue improving my physical health were largely based on goals for improving my inner ecology. The telling of deeply personal aspects of my experience—of being shaken to the core, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and out of my status quo—became a must for my healing on these levels. Expressing the pain, telling of the losses, and striving to heal became as important in this story as my efforts to physically address the cancer, as should be the case for transformation to take hold in such a crucible.

I had to repeatedly release the past, embrace the present, and be rendered open and willing to accept the future. Though forged by the unique particulars of my circumstances, aspects of this embrace of whole-being healing are common to many facing life-threatening circumstances and many beleaguered by chronic health issues. My hope is that by sharing this story, others will be heartened while pursuing their own healing path.

Telling the story of my deep dive for healing reminds me of an incident of getting lost on a duck-shaped island years ago with my daughter Virna and my niece Emily, ages seven and nine at the time. We had gone out for a walk with a group of family members in the early afternoon and separated from the group to look for shells and sea glass on a beach. As we walked along the shoreline of the duck’s breast, I was confident. If we stuck to the island’s edge, we would meander our way to a swimming cove on the duck’s back and could then take a path we had been on the previous day to the house near where we were camped.

As we rounded the head of the island, the coastline turned into boulders and the inland terrain became heavily forested. We were forced to move up above the boulders to clamber through woods and over fallen trees. In my awareness, the coastline seemed to remain on our right side, which would bring us down into the swimming cove and to the homeward path. When we came down again onto a beach, a fog had rolled in. Walking with the ocean on our right side, we headed up this new cove, but there in the sand were three sets of footprints, one big and two little.

Emily asked, Aunt Joce, aren’t those our footprints?

No, was my emphatic initial response, this is a much smaller cove than the one we walked in before. But was it really not the same cove? Then it dawned on me. In our inland scramble, we had looped around the duck’s neck and were back in a familiar place. It looked so different in the fog. Like Pooh and Piglet circling around a large tree on a snowy day in the Hundred Acre Wood, hunting for Woozels, the footprints in the sand proved it. Quite chagrined, I acknowledged Emily was right, and we continued to walk on around the head of the island again because turning around felt like the less familiar way, particularly in the fog.

The girls became tired and staged a protest. They would walk no further. With daylight fading and a brief rest that delighted the resident mosquitoes, my proposal of a mossy patch for our overnight bed was quickly rejected. The girls found new energy, and we were on the move again over the same obstacle course as before.

The fog had lifted, and twilight was upon us when we found our way to the swimming cove. With the light fading fast, we found the path and trekked through the darkening forest toward our worried family members. Stepping carefully over the root-laden path, night vision engaged, I used the owl bird call known to siblings from our forest adventures in childhood, Tu-whit, tu-whoo, hoping for a response. We were heartened when the call was finally returned.

We arrived tired and hungry, relieved to be back in the family fold. Our afternoon at the beach had turned into an eight-hour trek we wouldn’t forget.

This health journey is, in essence, an adventure of finding my way back home to greater well-being. The initial surgical pass-through and health improvements were followed by a deeper challenge, the return of endometrial cancer. This triggered circling back on familiar territory, seeing and addressing it differently, seeking the clarity to find my way through a frightening time, and calling on all manner of resolve and kindness for a scared but determined self.

In this telling, I have felt compelled to honor my family members and their cancer stories, to present perspective of ways cancer treatment continues evolving, to look at ways the US health care system has yet to meet the promise of restoring well-being for many and to share viewpoints from a career spanning more than thirty years as a health care clinician.

Now onward to my story.

In the interest of readability, you can find a Terms and Notes section containing medical and yogic terms and acronyms at the end of the book. After initial explanations found in a book chapter, I use an asterisk (*) in later chapters to designate the terms included in this section.

To sustain the flow of the story, Part I is a memoir; my journey through dealing with cancer, healing, and exploring alternative choices in medicine, health, and holistic living. Part II is a reflection on knowledge and experience of specific topics gathered in my years while working in health care. The Appendices provide greater details about a few select topics—from raw foods, meditation experiences, healing with affirmations and meridian energies, to Kundalini Yoga meditations I found helpful. Together, these parts make up the whole of my story. I hope by taking in what this telling has to offer, you can broaden and enliven your sense of possibilities for healing.

Part I:

A Full-Bodied Memoir

1

Discovering My Cancer

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In the late spring of 2014, I had subterranean suspicions that something wasn’t right with my health—a vague but concerning feeling. Having followed a seasonal variation in my diet for years, it always was easy to lose weight in springtime. By switching to a lighter diet, the extra winter pounds fell off. That year I was perplexed at the persistence of my winter weight, which hung on into the summer.

Trying various dietary strategies hadn’t worked. I had made the shift to more veggies and fruit with less dense sources of protein and fewer carbs. I had completed my customary spring cleanse of recent years—a thirty-day herbal regime to boost bowel elimination and aid liver detoxification. Usually, five to seven pounds of weight dropped off nicely, but now I was heavier than even my usual winter weight and carried a persistent ring of fat around my middle that seemed odd. Was this a post-menopausal weight creep happening eight years after going through menopause?

In late July, with increased concern something significant was wrong, I decided to see what a Kundalini Yoga kriya, Let the Liver Live, from the book Owner’s Manual for the Human Body, could do for my liver. To explain, kriya means an action that leads to manifestation and is generally a series of yoga postures sequenced together for a particular health intention. I was about to complete five hundred hours of training in Kundalini Yoga and had vetted many kriyas in my studies while helping to develop training materials for a specialty course. I had chosen this particular kriya because it had a series of postures that looked like they would be cleansing, raise my liver energy, and help with detoxifying. Hopefully, this would lead to dropping my extra weight.

Yogi Bhajan, a Sikh master of Kundalini Yoga, brought these teachings to the US from India in 1969 and taught internationally for thirty-five years. The paraphrase of his comments from teaching this kriya on January 30, 1985, is:

Try to understand: when you do not consciously relate to your body, your mind consciously does not relate to you… When you do not control your mind consciously, your soul has no relationship with you. Your actions can fall into the pit of depression, anger, and reaction. These are the three main things that bring pain into your life.

When I used this kriya, his words were a challenge to understand beyond an intellectual comprehension. His perspective later came to hold greater meaning based on my lived experiences of the interplay of mind and body while in the midst of living with the cancer.

One of the postures involved doing a raised back bend, the wheel pose, with only hands and feet touching the floor for three minutes. To stay in this raised posture for that long was difficult. I didn’t have sustained strength in my arms and legs, plus this pose was too much stress on my wrists. After managing about thirty seconds raised, the majority of the three minutes were spent on my back trying to muster the oomph to try for another thirty seconds. After a few weeks, I modified this posture by using a large exercise ball and draping myself backward over it. The sense of opening was fabulous. A quality of the splayed open chest sings of freedom, heart energy pouring forth with total unguarded abandonment.

About ten days later, I noticed fresh blood on toilet paper and knew it wasn’t from hemorrhoids. This sight hit me with a sledgehammer of fear. As a nurse, bearing witness to illnesses can be a grizzly deal, and I knew what this red blot likely meant.

It’s a classic symptom of uterine cancer in post-menopausal women.

I quickly called and got an appointment in my primary care provider’s office for Monday of the following week. The days leading up to this medical appointment gave me no hope as the spotting continued. At the appointment, the doctor took tissue for a biopsy and ordered an ultrasound, and then one of the nurses wished me good luck. Usually a benign salutation, this landed on my ears like a warning bell of doom, knowing nursing culture as I do. Having seen and known too many wounded bodies creates a shorthand communication. In tone and inflection, her words rang of disaster looming large.

The biopsy results would reach me in a few days. I waited, aware the doctor would communicate directly with me if the news wasn’t good.

Two days later, around noon on Wednesday, August 18, 2014, a wave of fear hit me strong enough to induce a sweat while sitting in my chair at work. I heard a clear and distinct voice coming from outside of me say, Everything will be alright. It struck me as comforting and credible. At home after work, I listened to voicemails on my home phone and discovered at about noon the doctor had left a message. The biopsy indicated cancer, likely in an early form, based on the pathology report and the ultrasound screening. She referred me to an oncology specialist. I sat in the shock of this for a few days before calling my daughter, Virna. She came home to spend the weekend with me.

A few weeks later, I met with a gynecologic oncologist, Dr. Knight, and liked her manner and approachability. She took the time to answer my questions about the specifics of my cancer. She proposed a laparoscopic hysterectomy as with this intervention a full cure rate was 90 percent likely if the grade and stage were low. Her confidence helped to calm my anxieties. I learned my cancer’s grade, from biopsy tissues, was 1 (scale of 1–3, depending on what the cells look like under a microscope; 3 being notably abnormal). My cancer stage was presumed to be low, but the final determination would come from checking peripheral tissues taken in surgery. The stage of a cancer is measured on a scale of 0–4, which rises as the cancer spreads beyond the initial site of occurrence.

Undoubtedly, the experience of getting diagnosed with cancer shook me out of my status quo. Seeing health as a continuum, a balance and resilience in various aspects of my life, I knew I could do things to increase my overall health. I was invested in figuring out where to focus my attention and make improvements. Becoming cancer-free wasn’t my sole goal. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual—I rolled the aspects of my health over in my mind trying to settle on what I needed to improve my overall health. Spinning into self-reflection to root out any hidden self-deception about well-being and bring it into the light, I decided to find ways to heal my thought pattern liabilities, resolve emotional wounds, deepen my devotional practices, and strengthen my physical health.

Given the great odds of cure, I didn’t investigate alternatives to having surgery and held high hopes that the surgical biopsy results would indicate no concerns about a spread of the cancer. Cure seemed likely with the surgery but it wasn’t the only thing to strive for.

Once the plans for surgery were in place, I shared my health wrinkle via an email and calls to immediate family and friends. Settling on a plan for investigating and improving my health, this round of healing from my cancer began.

2

What about My Physical Health?

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Did something go on in my body years ago and start the development of cancer in me? The short answer is yes. The long answer would never be definitive.

In the common understanding of how different cancers develop, cells with mutations are produced on an ongoing basis. But genes within these malformed cells limit their reproduction and certain cells within the immune system are equipped to identify aberrant cells and destroy them. These physiologic means normally keep a cancerous cell from gaining enough replication traction to become a problem—a detectable tumor.

Research into tissue cancers finds multiple safeguards within cell replication processes and immune system function. All these safeguards must fail before a cancer can progress into a detectable cluster of cancerous cells producing symptoms. Research has shown that the failure of the chain of safeguards can take years to develop—as long as a decade in various cases.

So what did that mean for me in regard to my overall health and where did I need to begin for improving my physical health?

Simplifying my foods and adding supportive supplements was one way to start. I made dietary changes toward lighter and easily digested foods. Taking on these diet changes wasn’t a hardship, but this adaptability had developed over a long time, years ago.

As a child, I was an obsessively fussy eater. It took finally becoming frustrated enough by unsightly acne in my early twenties to start developing a more exploratory style with food. I gradually settled into dietary habits that felt healthier for my