News You Never Want to Hear

Where to begin? I’ve been putting this post off.

Seventeen days ago my mom was told she has breast cancer. She’s 46. And none of us like this. I don’t necessarily want this blog to be a personal diary, but this is such life altering news that I feel it’s best to share so that you can understand the context of my life at present.

A week before the news was official I got a call from my mom, Lisa, saying she’d just been at her annual exam and had been told she’d need to come back right away for a biopsy of a mass they’d found, that it could be breast cancer. The doctors’ urgency and her worry affected me intensely, now I realize that the shock of being faced with this possibility was also a big factor. I cried, I worried, I reached out to a wonderful Facebook group I’m a part of to help us pray. When the news was official a week later I was unsurprised. It was still a horrible reality. At that point I reached out to a few close friends and shared with them what was going on, trying my best to keep my voice steady and the tears at bay as I roamed Home Goods and Whole Foods attempting to stave off the urge to just crawl into bed with my sweet pup. The consensus among those I contacted was that my mom is as strong and as sweet as they come, a fighter, and they expected things would be alright. We all want to believe they will.

Plans are being made for her to undergo an aggressive surgery to remove the cancer and along with it both breasts – the chance of recurrence is 40-80% depending on her BRCA genetic test results (determining whether she carries the gene for the cancer mutation) and with those odds she and her doctors feel this to be the best course of action. After she heals from the surgery and reconstruction she’ll likely have to start chemotherapy treatments. I’m grateful for modern medicine, so grateful. I just wish nobody had to go through any of this. It’s unreal to go from having a healthy family one minute to being thrown into this vortex. I can only imagine being the one told it was her own body. What is the most upsetting to me (and her I believe) is that she feels just fine, really good even, and these treatments are probably going to change that. She is the most vibrant, lovely person I know and it breaks my heart to imagine her in pain of any kind. {Excuse me while I go get the box of Kleenex . . . okay, that helped.} Being an only child with youngish parents, my mom and dad and I are very close. I’ll likely be heading down to Florida in the next week or so to be there through her surgery – I just can’t get my arms around them both soon enough.

If the BRCA results are positive I’ll be tested too. As far as we know there isn’t any history on my dad’s side, my mom was adopted so her genetic background is more unknown. I’m told that the Air Force health insurance, TRICARE, covers the expensive test if a direct relative is positive – something I didn’t expect but am glad about.

Coincidentally, two weeks prior to hearing my mom would need a biopsy to determine if she had breast cancer I spent a few hours on Netflix watching two documentaries I’d been hearing about on Facebook, Forks Over Knives and Fat Sick & Nearly Dead. Forks Over Knives examines the “American diet” (mostly processed and super high in animal products) and its effects on our bodies, even on our country’s cancer rates. It also shows the extreme benefits of adopting a “whole foods, plant-based diet” and follows a number of individuals who embark on this new lifestyle and in turn rid themselves of their ailments and medications. Without knowing what was coming I was really intrigued by the whole thing – and let me tell you, my whole life I’ve been all about the animal products. I could live on cheese and crackers alone. Filet mignon is my favorite meal, and I’ve always loved milk. I couldn’t shake the claim they made, though, that dropping those things along with all the “convenience foods” we eat could lower a person’s risk of cancer, even reverse it, besides all the other general health benefits.

After Forks Over Knives I decided to continue on the same subject (Netflix’s suggestions will do that to you) and began Fat Sick & Nearly Dead. This documentary follows an Australian named Joe Cross, a business man carrying about 100 pounds of extra weight and suffering from a skin disease that had him on a multitude of medications. Joe decides to go on a TWO-MONTH juice fast where he drinks only vegetable and fruit juice that he juices fresh himself throughout each day in an attempt to heal himself of his disease. The idea is that our bodies are so starved for real nutrition that they literally start to fall apart. Juicing (and not just buying juice at the grocery store) extracts the essential and powerful nutrients from the fruits and vegetables that work as natural healing and repairing agents and by drinking just the juice (and leaving all the chewing/fibrous elements to the juicer) our bodies are able to very quickly absorb the goodness and get to work on improving themselves. The documentary follows Joe on his journey and throughout it he shares what he’s doing with people and even meets a fellow, Phil, with the same skin condition but in even worse overall health. The whole thing is really inspiring and educational, and after these two movies I was convinced. I needed a juicer. I shared about Forks Over Knives and Fat Sick & Nearly Dead with my parents and my mom watched them both and was as intrigued as I was. Gary was quite difficult to win over on this one, he was convinced a juicer would be just another appliance on our counter, unused and forgotten about after a few weeks. Well, with my mom’s news he started to come around, watched both movies with me and we had a juicer by the next weekend. My parents got one too, the day she received her diagnosis. My dad is now the juice master of their house :)

This explains the fruit, vegetable and juicer posts that have recently populated my Facebook page and Instagram feed . . .

As I sit here writing I’m halfway through my morning juice, Gary takes his with him in the car on his way to work. I’d highly recommend both documentaries to anyone and everyone. Our Whole Foods here in Colorado Springs has Forks Over Knives available to borrow, and both movies are on Netflix Instant Streaming. When I mentioned earlier about calling a few close friends with the news about my mom’s diagnosis and was at Whole Foods, I was there stocking up on our first collection of fruits and veggies for the arrival of our juicer the following day. I still can’t believe how this all happens to relate . . . I wish this kind of nutrition was taught and implemented and embraced more widely.

I leave you with these quotes from the first documentary:

Let your food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.
– Hippocrates

There is no money in healthy people or dead people. The money is in sick people.
– Bill Maher

The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
– Thomas Edison

To keep up with my mom Lisa’s journey, visit her Caring Bridge website. We plan on posting updates as things progress.

Lots of love,

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