Day 9 – My Healing Journey

After receiving the news about needing chemotherapy AND radiation, I still couldn’t wrap my head around any of it. My mind was swirling with all of the things I’d read, all the podcasts I had listened to, all of the books I had read, and I just shut down completely.  Who had the answer? Who was telling the truth?  I surely didn’t have a clue.

I had my son and my sister speaking from the “Western” medical side of things, textbook scenarios, graphs, charts and other factual things that meant nothing to me at the time. I was on information overload and in my mind, it was much safer for me to NOT make a decision at that time.

I didn’t want to be pressured either way, but it seems like that’s what was happening day after day.  My family had nothing but the best of intentions, but it wasn’t until I decided to sit down with my oncologist one on one, that I finally opened my mind to the possibility of chemotherapy.

We had a heart to heart conversation about the reality of the situation, the magnitude of the situation, what I feared most and what I wanted for my future.

She was very patient and very understanding and listened to my concerns.  She understood my desires to engage in alternative and holistic practices rather than the standard chemically laced chemotherapy protocol.

I told her about the studies I had read about on specific products and showed her some of my research but the bottom line was that none of them were FDA approved treatments and the paperwork and evidence for each were split 50-50 for longevity within the first 5 years.

She knew what I was talking about as many of her patients had brought up some of the same subject matters and studies.  

Then she broke out my scores again, which to me, were just a bunch of meaningless numbers. She went over every one of them in detail and told me what the percentages meant in layman’s terms so that I could understand my situation without anyone else’s input.

The bottom line was that using alternative and holistic methods, I only stood a 50-50 chance of survival within the first five years with a very high percentage of reoccurrence within that five year period.  That did not sound appealing at all

WITHOUT the chemotherapy, I stood a 35% chance of recurrence within the first five years, but WITH the chemotherapy, I had a 90% chance of living beyond 10 years.  I realized I still had a lot to think about.