Almond meal makes this pancake hearty, so blanched (fine) almond meal flour would probably make it lighter and fluffier, but I actually like the texture the meal gives but it is a balanced hearty mouth feel–hope you like it! I WANT TO CALL THESE BRUNCH ‘NANA PATTIES, BUT NO ONE WOULD UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS…!
INGREDIENTS
3/4 cup almond meal (has the skin and not blanched)
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/5 arrowroot flour
1/2 tsp Himalayan pink salt
1 tsp cinnamon
3 flax eggs
1 Tblspn vanilla extract
2 Tblspn apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup water
3 Tblspn olive oil or oil of choice
1 ripe mashed banana
WHAT TO DO
Mix up your flax eggs (3 Tblspns of ground flax with Tblspns of water and let sit until moderately thick and congealed)
Mash banana and add and mix all the wet ingredients together
Sift together dry ingredients
Thoroughly mix both sets of ingredients together…should be comfortable to mix and not too watery and thin, but not too thick either… a spoon stuck into it should slowly fall to side and not stick up
Pan fry with coconut oil a few minutes on each side until browned and cooked through
Add your choice of nuts, fruit, and maple syrup and enjoy!
tastes great warm, of course, but enjoyed a leftover one out of the refrigerator!
I had most of the ingredients I would normally use, but not in the portions I would like so adjusted quite a bit especially with the GF and nut flours. Adjust as you must!
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup shredded carrots (I liked the texture of grating by hand)
1/3 cup applesauce with about 3 Tablespoons of crushed pineapple if you have
1/4 cup warmed coconut oil or more applesauce if you prefer
1 Tblspn apple cider vinegar
1 Tblspn vanilla extract and dash of vanilla beans if you have
1 Tblspn cinnamon
1 teaspoon Himalayan pink salt
couple dashes of ginger powder
3/4 cup fine almond flour
1 cup of your GF flour preference (I made my own of 1/4 cup each coconut flour, buckwheat flour, tiger nut flour, and oak flour.)
(I also like to add 3 Tablespoons of tapioca flour for binding help, but totally optional)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup low glycemic sweetener like allulose or monkfruit granules (coconut sugar if you don’t have above)
1/4 cup dried date crystals
1/4 cup raisins
1/2 cup nuts or similar– I had some pistachios, but usually like walnuts
FROSTING:
1 cup raw, soaked cashews (needs 4 hours to soak and soften!)
1/3 cup melted coconut oil
1/2 cup warmed, softened coconut manna
1/2 cup powdered monkfruit (sub maple syrup if you don’t have)
1/4 of lemon’s juice
1 tsp lemon zest
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tblspn vanilla extract
WHAT TO DO:
Turn on oven to 350 degrees
Sift together GF cup of flour(s) and nut flour in big mixer bowl
Add and mix together rest of dry ingredients in mixer bowl
Combine all wet and warmed to liquid ingredients and add to dry ingredients stirring until well incorporated into a batter with your mixer
Add your nuts if you are using last
Pour into 8×8 lined pan
Bake for 35 minutes until the tester toothpick comes out clean
Let cake cool while mixing frosting
Blend all frosting ingredients in high speed/power blender until luscious, thick, spreadable consistency… but if it is a bit too runny, put in fridge to give it it structure
When cake is cooled, cut in half, frost and stack…and frost the whole thing.
Sprinkle while frosting is still setting with shredded coconut or what you feel like!
I personally think this cake loaf tastes most divine while still a bit chilled and not room temperature.
Aisles are less crowded and shelves are emptied of essentials to keep loved ones safe and healthy in these concerning COVID-19 times. So, I wanted to make and share this recipe with variations to make your own sanitizer spray.
Granted, if you are not able to get 99%+ Isopropyl Alcohol or Aloe these days, don’t fret, a trusted MD says studies show alcohol as low as 30% of the overall solution will work. I count my blessings that I was able to find and buy a one gallon bottle…albeit it was a whopping $44 dollars. (Shocking.) But, it is worth having for the next few months and onward as we weather this viral storm here in California and around the globe. Plus, a personal friend who is an ER doctor says the anything above 90% for alcohol hard to find even in normal times and that the highest you can buy commercially outside of medical supply houses is 90%. So, this makes me even more grateful to have found some! So, get a bottle if you can and make your own sanitizer!
INGREDIENTS: 99% Isopropyl alcohol, Organic aloe gel, essential oils of choice, and I like orange peel steeped White Distilled Vinegar.
MIXTURE: 3/5 cup of Alcohol, 1/5 cup Aloe, 1/5 orange peel infused distilled vinegar, 10-15 drops of your preferred essential therapeutic grade oil. (I used lemon, tea tree, and another mix that contained citronella and lemongrass.) (If you use 70% for alcohol, just use 4/5 of cup and 1/5 cup aloe and skip my infused distilled vinegar altogether. Or, the simplest version is just alcohol and water, but I encourage the essential oil for added homeopathic benefit.)
Note: If you are using organic aloe, you will need to filter out the fibers with a stainless steel sifter just in case the fibers get stuck in the sprayer. Or just scoop it out with a fork and squeeze out the crucial alcohol.
Please feel free to use this non-toxic liquid sanitizer with a sprayer you recycle from other used up formulations or fill the little essential oil bottles so it drips out carefully. This is, as one of my dearests friends described, pure gold during these times. So, this is a highly precious gift for those immuno-compromised or unable to get supplies.
Wishing you God’s blessings to provide, protect, sustain, and see you through onto much brighter days ahead!
2 Tablspn coconut palm nectar (similar to maple syrup consistency) and 5 drops of monkfruit liquid drops (or either depending on your glycemic index intake considerations)
1 dash Ceylon Cinnamon
1 dash of fine Himalayan pink salt
1 teaspoon of Vanilla extract (with no alcohol!)
1 cup cacao powder
optional: 1 teaspoon of ground Ramon Seeds –unique, subtle flavor
…then the dates:
25 whole medjool dates (pits removed…make sure no fragments, too!)
Use double boiler to gradually melt the cacao butter
Add rest of dip ingredients and whisk together
Once melted, carefully remove bowl from heat (turn off stove top) and add the monkfruit liquid drops and/or coconut nectar (maple if you don’t have) and cacao powder. Make sure you mix until all well combined.
Once melded together let sit if you have time off the heat. The cacao mixture needs to thicken before you dip the stuffed dates in it. Or you can pop in fridge and stir every couple minutes and take out when it becomes the right viscosity to dip the dates and cover nicely.
Split the pitless medjool dates like an open hotdog bun making sure the date still stays intact and nice cut open. Fill half with unsweetened almond butter and the rest with tahini. (The squeeze dispenser for each from Thrive Market really made this part easier than using little spoons.)
Don’t overfill since each date as to close up fully to dip and not have the filling bleed out of cacao covering layer.
Prep your parchment or silicone baking sheet to place dipped dates upon to chill.
Use little thongs to dip dates into cacao mixture, tap off excess, and place on your baking sheet. Sprinkle with coconut shreds and sesame seeds for the tahini filled ones and place almond slice atop almond butter filled dates. One is the hug and the other is the kiss… they really do make a lovely pair together…subtle, complementary tastes.
Freeze them and pull out 20 minutes or so before serving. It’s hard to keep from eating them all, but the motivation to do so is — they do make really adorable gifts!
1/2 to 1 teaspoon Himalayan salt depending on your sodium tolerance
What to do:
Soak Cashews in filtered water 8 hours (for a Bechamel style sauce) or quick hot water method mentioned in ingredients (for thicker mozzarella like consistency.)
Drain the cashews, and add them to a blender along with 2.5 cups of filtered water, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, nutritional yeast, salt and tapioca starch. Blend until very super smooth until no lumps! Watery consistency is good.
Pour the watery mixture into a small saucepan and bring the heat to medium. Stir with a spatula or spoon.
It will begin to get clumpy. Keep stirring, constantly until suddenly it will become super gooey, stretchy, thick and smooth. Take off heat as soon as it begins to form into one big mass of soft stretchy “cheez.”
Make prior to knowing how you want to use it… I love it atop pizza before you bake it… or atop lasagna. It will spread best when freshly made.
THIS WOULD BE GREAT TO HAVE KIDS TRY AND EXPLAIN THE SUSTAINABILITY AND HEALTH VALUE OF AVOIDING FACTORY FARMED ANIMAL PRODUCTS AND THE HEALTH VALUE OF PLANTS OVER THE OVERUSE OF DAILY 🙂 Use for simple grilled “cheez” with vegan keto bread… or plop and press down into your pizza slice or spread all over your lasagna as a last step of cooking…
You can just form and broil a clump of the “cheez” by spraying some olive oil evenly over it and brown by broiling 5-7 minutes.
Note: for the Bechamel style mentioned above, add a dash of nutmeg and black pepper and definitely a full teaspoon of salt.
Cycles of life, death, and resurrection are ever-present in me and in all life. And in this I celebrate by giving fully of all of me while surrendering totally to the process designed by the One who made me and all of what we see and don’t. I have unwittingly come to know fear quite well and what it takes to face it and choose to trust that my fallings are not failings. Furthermore, I have come to know and trust and choose faith–that in My Abba Father’s hands and plans, my lows are prophetic toward the highs coming based on perseverent pursuits of the promises of goodness and triumph secured by Christ’s completed mission He has given to me continue. And so I shall, empowered by a greater love and life than I could with within me alone. It’s not a simple pat of “do it afraid”… to me, it’s more a matter of being more certain of the why I must rise again and again and in the process fear will flee from me.
Jesus’ complete mission, you ask? It’s his Resurrection Power I get to make real — something I meditate to take in as my own daily. In reflecting upon the magnitude of the eternity-changing-reality. my knees buckle with joy. It’s true. In the secret places I get to hang out with El Elyon The most High G-D, I am not only stilled silent, but sometimes get a giddy feel-good grace that effervesces throughly (not thorougly, but throughly.) I have grown to recognize that my trials and crises have not molded and defined me. Rather, in laying wide open to God’s guidance through the wilderness, His ever-present being and implanted identity in me through the seed of Christ has made me like Jesus and more like him in time and by joint intentionality.
Many have asked me why I just didn’t get “rid of the “problem” and use radiation or surgery. It was often not worth answering because no one knows clearer than the One who made me what the most urgent, life-threatening, or worst problem was in my life that a cancer diagnosis may just by sounding alarms to bring attention to. Besides, G-D is the best surgeon and I believed that He could resolve and/or remove any “problem” and leave the adjoining, healthy life to thrive. Only He could best divide as finely as between soul and spirit as well as between bone and marrow (Hebrews 4:12) and it is in that fine of a wisdom and discernment I wanted to rest to be restored. All in His Time. And I’m blessed to believe and receive the intangible and then palpable Spirit-kissed Resurrection this day and every day. And now, a present-look at a part of my healing journey not too far past.
When many of us get a diagnosis of some unwanted kind, like cancer, most of us, me, included, wanted an action plan to tackle and take down the offender. While I share in this blog entry the entirety of my bullet points of what I did on a day to day basis and how it changed every few weeks or months, it is not a whole picture, so it one that can be informative or paralyzing. It really depends on where you are at in helping yourself or a loved one heal… The most important thing I learned is to get grounded within and quiet enough to really hear. For me, I needed to hear the quiet leading of my God through it all and sometimes I did and other times my humanness in its fallibility and desperation overruled that essential and often elusive place and position of being God’s beloved one held in Shalom. Sometimes that uphill climb to the mountaintop is a long, windy one, but one step at a time, right? I hope the document included in this post offers some help to your healing. Thank God for grace; I AM A WORK IN PROGRESS!
The goal in the first wave of self-administered therapies and radical changes was to make cancer cells commit suicide (apoptosis) and reset the landscape of my entire body to make it hospitable for proper life to be able to grow and flourish making it uninhabitable for confused and unhealthy versions of cells.
The attached .PDF document gives you just the bare bones of the all-out war against and for the two sides of life in my physical body. It is a lot to take in as it was a lot to do, but the deeper, necessary work did not come until I realized it would not be by my striving or force of will through which I would heal, but accepting the process by which I must journey to allow what is good and only good to remain. Much of the early steps outlined that I took were superficial in that light, but necessary to begin the growth and self-maturation process with gusto and drive. With great determination comes greater disappointments…and the deepest reckonings necessary to progress. This journey…particularly fraught by this reality in its beginnings.
So, back to some nuts and bolts. You know now that a water fast was my 1st drastic decision, then going totally vegan, gluten-free, and eating only whole foods I could recognize from the good soil of our Earth… and then came a RAW FOOD only month to detox and reset my body even more. That was challenging, delicious, hellish, isolating, yet empowering… but since much of this journey is deliberate and by fully conscious choosing, setting up a reward system is quite valuable. I got child-like about it and was good to myself … I gave myself a happy-face each night for a day of raw food only eating. It made me feel good to see all the smiles as I stood strong each day knowing I was doing my body good. I still love seeing this pasted on the interior of a kitchen cabinet door.
I CAN AND WILL! … and DID 🙂
I caution you, though, not to just study this attached document and replicate parts of it in a vacuum. There is no formula and a healing process is so personal, it is as inextricable as the very breath of God given each of us. So, as you peruse the .PDF document, you will find some added journaling to mark the milestone moments along the way… MAKE SURE YOU NOTICE THAT CHANGES MADE EVERY FEW WEEKS AND MONTHS AS IT WAS DIRECTED BY WHAT I INTUITIVELY FELT I NEEDED OR SPECIFICALLY WAS TOLD MY BODY NEED PER MY BIOCHEMIST’S BODY SYSTEM READINGS. All the choices are to support life and naturally. Remember that our bodies are always changing and need to be addressed as a dynamic organism …and with great care!
After writing about a few more major big deal action items that I felt I needed to incorporate, I’ll begin to share why I went to a clinic in Mexico #HOPE4CANCERCANCUN to get holistic treatments and additional help… I committed to a larger facility for help even after some tests from a biochemist showed I no longer had malignancy readings on his tests. Lots of reasons for that.
Hope this nitty gritty daily list (of lists) of my round-the-clock healing regimens offers some direction and understanding that this approach of allowing one’s body to heal while disabled mechanisms that fuel chronic disease takes a willingness to change everything radically and never look back–no matter how long it takes.
2 Tablespoons turmeric – can increase if your pup accepts
11 full droppers of Hemp oil – each dropper being 6mL = bit more than 2 fl. ounces)
22 full droppers of CBD = 132 mL = more than 4 fl. ounces.
Pet kelp
Arnica Montana… each in 30mg portion of this homeopathic pill
WHAT TO DO:
in double boiler gently meld together peanut butter and coconut manna. It’s simplest if you warm water and add your glass jar of coconut manna and then put soft manna into a measuring cup, then add the softened peanut butter and mix together. You can put the glass measuring cup in the warm water and mix well.
DO NOT HEAT THE MANNA AND NUT BUTTER MIXTURE BEYOND THE MINIMUM WARMTH NEEDED TO SOFTEN AND MIX. YOU DO NOT WANT TO USE EXCESS HEAT BECAUSE IT MAY ALTER THE HEMP AND CBD EXTRACTS.
Add turmeric and cinnamon and make sure it is mixed together evenly and thoroughly.
After you make sure the mixture is only slightly warmed and not too cool (you need to pour into candle molds, so bit warm is easiest,) add all the HEMP and CBD to your mixture.
Pour into candle molds — this recipe accounts for 44-45 little candle mold servings and gives about 3mg of CBD and 1.5 of HEMP.
Sprinkle pinch of pet kelp on each molded mixture.
Drop on Arnica Montana pill into each as final add.
Chill to solidify in freezer and store there or in fridge.
Give one daily to your tender-jointed or muscle-strained pup.
NOTES:
Choose your favorite HEMP and CBD extract. I chose one called Dope Dog for CBD because of the wild caught salmon oil used to add other benefits of this darling little holistic goodie. In this recipe, I used Charlotte’s Web hemp oil, but may leave out in future and opt for just CBD.
They are simply delicious goodness added goodies for my furbabies.
Healing and real relief can take time, so consider this one part of your fur famiy’s food-as-medicine practice! We also balance between Holistic treatments like acupuncture and cold laser therapy… and westernized doggie pain meds when the pain is sudden and too acute to wait on relief. Health is a gift that requires balance, prayerful intuitive decisions, and some patience. Bless you and your family!
More and more, studies show that our heart sends more electrical signals to our brain, not the other way around… So how and how intensely we feel about what we deeply, truly believe, changes our entirety. Our hearts produce EMF. Our hearts are the body’s strongest electric field generator- 5000 times stronger magnetically than our brain (according to #drmarkhyman! Imagine how much of an impact we have on ourselves and one another… So I now so value my Father God who cared so much about the state of my heart and my emotions that He would speak to me in such a way to help me see a way forward to how He wants me to heal unto complete completeness. I share this today because it is a special week of celebrating miraculous life from Palm Sunday to Resurrection Sunday.
So, as you know form my last blog, I had the promise from that prophetic song that I would indeed overcome, but when here feels so far from there… what’s the bridge between the now and then?
As much as I believed and believe more as years go by that the mind is a most powerful mechanism to change our world, it can also get mixed up with striving by an ego-driven outlook to achieve and that was something I knew I could not intuitively afford in the precarious situation I felt I was in. I needed something beyond what I could muster on my own at the time and I much more than just practical answers of changing diet, lifestyle, and well…changing everything. I needed to know that doing all that it would take to heal in totality would be worth the who-knows-how-long process it would become. I got my uplift in what some would call the night watches.
Sleeping was never a forte for me and it was one of my first struggles to change my lifestyle for healing. I needed to get over the guilt over sleeping more than 5 hours as I felt there was always so much to be done and so much I could be doing instead of unproductive dormancy. I drove myself around the clock and even when I tried to sleep, it would often elude me until I starting taking medical-grade cannabis oil and suppositories for the anti-cancer benefits that I started to sleep a lot. But before that, I would toss and turn and then return to my computer to work… and one week morning, I felt that this notion of suffering through life matters wrestled with me until I came to terms and at peace with this :
In fact, once I finished this meme, I felt an instant release to be able to rest and I wandered into bed with a great sense of peace. And my next night visitation came and confirmed my sense that suffering can often be changed by a choice to be wielded for our utmost good. As I dozed I had this otherworldly sense of pure joy rise in my heart and core area… almost to the physical extent that I felt I was holding a big bouyant beach ball… I was nearly awake in this state of sleep stupor and in my deepest being, I knew I had received a big gift of strength through joy for the journey of choices before me. Then that beach-ball lowered into my core and into my being…a strange enmeshing I was wide awake to know it was not just my imagination. There is the unseen more real world that loves the world we can touch. To overlook this reality is a shame that I had done for much of my life.
In my humanness, I still pressed for more in my recurrent dismay that I needed a reason or many deeper reasons to keep on going when the last decade of living in obedience and trust of my Maker was relentlessly crushing and often devoid of much earthly reward. The answer I was sent surprised me. And it’s often when the spiritual message I receive is not logical to me that confirms to me that it is indeed not me, but from beyond my limited flesh.
Of course, the answers I get from God often come in times when my resistant conscious brain cannot protest very much and since my Creator God knows me well, I got a dream. In this very vivid dream, I saw myself at a table signing things for visitors. it was not headshots being autographed. They were books I was signing … they were books where my rescue pups were the stars… and this is the main thing–I FELT HAPPY. I actually felt something other than sad or mad or nothing. I felt something. I felt happy. This reminded me that happiness was a real palpable sensory experience. I had been without it for so long, this guided me toward a productive creative outlet that could keep the happiness going and growing in my life. How I felt awakened me out of sleep. That was it! I knew that I had a future that would include working on books about my pups even though it had been 6 years since my first charitable book about them.
This dream awoke me… that I could be–that I would be happy once more. That was what I really needed–that an all out fight to live would be worthwhile and that my life indeed has purpose and value…even more so perhaps because of this process of refinement. I held on and continue to hold onto that powerful dreamlike vision. I realized that I also needed more happy in my life overall. Don’t we all?
I was and still am quite happy (yes, HAPPY!) that God chose to answer my earnest pleas so sweetly. Thank you Abba.
So, as you have read thus far, I am rather intense… I see things in black and white, yes and no, go or stop. Ironically, health matters are often NOT that cut and dry in real life. Cancer is particularly wiley in character and it is in the negative space lacking black and white that I chose and choose to fight, because it supports my absolutes while inadvertently scoffing at the minds of what has been established as sound doctrine in medicine. I don’t mean to be rude, but I understand that sometimes, my stubborn stand over certain matters can seem gruff and unreasonable. No offense intended, but it’s my life and I take full ownership of it … and someone’s best intentions won’t persuade me off my conviction! Stubbornness can be a saving grace, so thank goodness that this “attitude” can actually be a step toward healing! In my flawed ways, it certainly was at first.
I felt cornered and like a wild-eyed beast being preyed on while another attacker refused to let me breathe whilst that figurative knife stayed fixed to cut my throat and drain me of real life. Every M.D. who gave me all their reasons why I should just get rid of the cancer and the gland in which it was found probably saw my growing impatience and rage in my gaze while I politely declined. It’s kinda comical, actually…
After all that I had overcome in fighting to resuscitate a long suffering marriage, restore some brain health after an accident (which we will fully tie into this decade-long battle a bit later,) and struggle to fuel the hope by faith in my future, this did not seem fair. I kept hearing this from well-meaning friends and beloved ones–what kind of karmic flow was I experiencing that I had to pay for by fighting cancer (on top of everything else)?! When my soul was weakest and most wounded, this most sincerest of sympathies drove me to the woe-is-me pit. It felt so good for a few moments and then when I really thought through the logic of karma, it made no f-in sense and woke me from my depressive doldrums… Sure, many things can come through bloodlines and bad choices, but karma in this case, like a thyroidectomy felt too easy and obtuse an answer for me. F*** karma…and F*** any entitlement to whatever “fair” is or could be.
Until I knew where I was to be led with rooted, inner certainty, I found myself driven to keep my promise to myself–that I would win not just my bout with cancer, but every health obstacle that has tried to sideline me from my calling and life purpose in the healing process. I didn’t know how, but I knew this would be what would happen.
For those who believe in God and have a faith of some kind, this may make sense to you… The same year of my cancer diagnosis, I received a fitting word some call prophesy. I did not know what it meant at the time. I thought it was talking about my electrical injury, or plantar fasciitis, or my marriage… I was not sure, but the message was surely for me and one given in a place of peace and sweetness that I hungrily awoke to.
A voice had been singing over me one night that I recognize as one from the heavenly throne room of my Abba YHWH. Upon waking, I wrote it on my prayer white board: “Hush now, this won’t be the first time you’ve overcome.“ It came upon such a beautiful melody that it harmonized my entirety of body and mind and emotions into a whole-being-brightness. So encouraged was I that I didn’t even care what it was referring to… when God speaks (or sings) to you directly, there is no greater gift but to be awed and bask in the moment. That was March of 2017. It was not until after my cancer diagnosis 7 months later that it seemed this prophetic song came fully alive. Even though I was crashing between overwhelm and complete numbness, I knew that somehow I would overcome. And that this attack on my life that felt like a knife to my throat would be neutralized. No, not just neutralized, but turned over in some triumphant fashion that would make all hell shudder. I knew so little, but I was certain of what mattered: “Hush now, this won’t be the first time you’ve overcome.” A forth-telling and foretelling of truth said in advance to secure my future of promise.
What drove me to seek more than the usual attention I don’t typically demand? A strange little lump in my throat that made swallowing annoying and sometimes difficult. It seemed like a simple case of post-nasal drip after months of the horrid respiratory trouble and a serious flu with endless coughing. The odd swallowing issue lasted too long after my flu left for my comfort, so I sought an Ear-Nose-Throat specialist–one of the best reputed.
Nothing. There’s nothing there. Nothing is wrong with you. For those who have exhibited no tell-tale signs of sickness, but know something is wrong, receiving this pat answer to an earnest seeking can be outrageously maddening. It was for me and has been during the years of various physicians telling me I “looked” fine, slim, becoming, and very healthy even when my neuro-hormonal symptoms and some tests suggested otherwise. But that was and is the quandry–reconciling whole body, holistic wellness and compartmentalized, often-organ-specific perspectives on regaining health. It is in the grey area that isolation, hopelessness, rage, as well as soul-saving resolution happens…over time, of course. Even after several visits and scopes sent down my breathing passages revealed nothing, I refused to accept that I was behaving as if I had Globus Hystericus–the name itself obviously suggesting it was “all in my head.” Irritation… yes, absolutely. While various factors that may have caused this might show in the years to come, in this moment, I resisted this mild-mannered dismissal and I persisted until I was sent for an ultrasound, just in case.
Wish my intuition was wrong–the imaging tests showed suspicious spots on my thyroid. And then a fine-needle aspiration (biopsy) confirmed papillary carcinoma. And getting the results was not easy either as the doctor who initially told me the results since my main ENT doctor was unavailable didn’t know how to really tell me. It was awkward and I had to pull it out of him since more than a week had already gone by and I no longer wanted to wait to get the confirmation that I already felt in my gut. Just say it and tell me I insisted. So he did. Cancer. He said the only solution was removing it…and actually, that meant removing the thyroid. Unacceptable to me.
That weekend (after the biopsy results) I was scheduled to participate in a 3-day martial arts survival training program…and it was brutal. I wondered if every strike with hand or knife from throws and falls or practicing self-defense moves would make me worse or break free the cancer from its current location. I remember resisting hard not to spontaneously cry in the middle of the massive mental and physical learning curves… my pain was emotional, but the physical challenges were tough, too.I’m a fighter I kept telling myself… I did make it through the 3 days and weathering the onslaught helped me curry a deeper, inward warring spirit which I innately knew I would need for all that was ahead.
When I finally let the news settle and set an in-person meeting with the ENT doctor I initially sought for an annoying lump, I didn’t tell others. I was not in a place to tell my husband either as he was very busy and traveling so much, I just didn’t find and want to add another stressor to his already busy life. Yes, I know, this is also not a healthy situation. Nonetheless, it just shows how difficult to swallow a medical diagnosis like cancer can be and how much resistance can come in the place acceptance must be to allow for empowered decision-making.
As I mentioned, I promised myself I would fight cancer naturally and avoid conventional go-to solutions of surgery and radiation. That’s precisely what I told the doctor when my husband and I went to discuss my options. He said he would only have to take 1/2 my thyroid and would monitor the other half and the remaining parathyroids hoping they would not go into shock and also be felled to death. From an outsider’s perspective, it was reasonable– a fair-enough compromise, with very little risk, and a speedy way to get rid of the “problem.” In violent opposition, my psyche refused and my body tensed, square against this sending a feverish revolt through my body up to my head. I could not take this simply proffered option. I said no and politely asked him to take me on as an “experiment” to watch and see as I wanted to explore other options.
Such explorations will be shared later, but for now, the main matter is the diagnosis and the response to it. I felt disappointed that I did not react as positively and resolutely as I promised myself I would should I become part of the 1 in 2 or 1 in 3 to be diagnosed with cancer in America. And I see now that I was not being fair to myself and beating myself up for what I perceived as lack of bravery and failure in adequately taking care of myself. It was understandable in that I was already tired from my uphill battle to recover from an electrical brain injury which became the chronic inflammatory assault on my entire body that brought confusion within my cells including cancer. I was trying not to be angry at the woman (a medical practitioner and medical machine manufacturer) who was responsible for my electrical injury… I was trying not to be sad at feeling so alone as most medical professionals had dismissed my need for help saying I “looked fine” for years… I was heartbroken and didn’t want to face how upsetting it was that my husband was too busy to be an actively involved part of all this… I was hard-pressed from every side from external and internal pressure. I just did not want to feel anything… at all. It was too much and too hard for too long and this last drop of an added trial nearly pushed me over the edge. To simply function, I refused to process fully or let myself feel anything at all… Not for many months, actually.
I squelched every rumbling of rage and capped sobs into silence and unfortunately, I let my soul fester with all these poisons for a while before I even asked God for His direction and hope and listened. All I could think of was pounding everything into submission like mixed martial artists in a blind rage do to their opponents. Kill-kill-kill. Destroy, destroy, destroy. Not much finesse in denial, hurt, and fear…and that is where I remained for a while. I had to grow quite a lot to face my brokenness and broken heart so I could see a way forward unto life. All I knew was I was determined to win and do it my way and that no one was taking my body apart. Radiative dissolution or surgical removal of this powerhouse hormone modulator felt tantamount to letting the Devil cut my throat and drain my life. Yes, it was that insanely dramatic for me. All I could do, think, or say was that I would not be beat….not by anything. Funny how such denial of a full perspective could masquerade as determination. At least I still had that… and that is where I started.
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. -2 Corinthians 4:8-9
JOIEdeJANE 