And so begins my journey of learning all about this funny thing called life and living with cancer. Where did the cancer come in you ask? Well, I had my lung removed next. I just had the lower left lobe of my lung removed. (Which in itself is major surgery...one of the toughest on the body!) After the removal, I went into see the doctor to see what was up. They told me that there were some atypical cells in the actual lung and they were cancerous so they said I was going to have to do chemo. So being the strong-willed person and I think semi-intelligent person I said what the @#$%? I am not doing chemo!!! When you do one of the most difficult and hard on your body surgeries there is (cardio-thoracic surgery is one of the most dramatic surgeries for your body) and I was like no way am I doing chemo after that surgery, my immune system will be completely shot. (We'll talk more about the immune system because that's something I really want people to know about. You need to understand that the army that is called the immune system in your body is one of the most well-defined systems in your body. There is a really excellent armory of cells that are strong with several different regiments and battalions and it can fight off anything and I mean anything that you run up against in your body ! It is an amazing system and will talk more about that in the future blogs but let's just say I didn't want to annihilate my my immune system by doing Chemo.) So I told them that I didn't want to do chemo I went to three different oncologists. I even talked to the surgeon about it and she said well I think we removed all that we could. I thought then I am NOT doing chemo.
So if not chemo then what? This is where it gets interesting! I started looking around into more stuff and I found Naturopathic medicine. I asked around to see if anyone knew about naturopaths and if they knew of people who used them. One of my friends said she had a neighbor that went to Dr. Allison Becker, ND in Janesville (who recently moved to Evansville). I remember the first time I went into her office. I thought “oh boy this is going to be really weird” because she does acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (also known as TCM) and I thought this is going to be really strange for me because I am such a conventional person. Going in to meet Dr. Allison I was a little bit scared. My life was about to change drastically and this was the start. The first motto of Naturopaths is Do NO harm. This helped me to relax! The Naturopath treats the person not the symptoms or the condition. I was not a cancer patient to Dr. Allison I was a person that was out of balance!! So I started my journey to figuring out what the heck I could do to get this cancer out of my body.
I have learned more about the things that I really could do to help me deal with the cancer and to get it out of my body. Some of these things include juicing, eating my vegetables, the mind-body connection, yoga, finding balance in this crazy world we live in and peace!! I would love for you to follow my journey as I am just getting to the good stuff!!
Peace and lots of love,
Leslie :)
PS. This is my first post! Many more to come!