Until it wasn’t.

The Pain

In February, I started having severe pain in my lower back. Initially diagnosed with a bulging disk, I started physical therapy, but six weeks later I was in even more pain. This was amid the beginning of the Opioid Crisis, so doctors looked at me suspiciously with my back pain with no clear origin. They were not going to dole out any narcotics, they told me. Plus, 80% of Americans have had back pain at some point in their lives, so why was I special?

Yet the pain just kept getting worse. My nurse practitioner kept looking at me suspiciously like I was just out to get narcotics. Except my pain was no joke. I had never been on any medications my entire life, and Advil wasn’t touching this. The pain got so bad that I kept making 3am trips to the E.R. where I would be hooked up to a morphine drip.

X-rays were taken, but nothing was found, and I was always sent home with that same suspicious look that said: there’s nothing wrong with you.

After several more weeks and several tearful phone calls with the nurse practitioner who was handling my case by subscribing nothing but physical therapy, I finally got ahold of her.

“I need an MRI. I KNOW there is something wrong with my body.”

She said it would just be a waste of $500, my copay. But finally, after several weeks of persistence, she ordered it.

The MRI

I had the MRI on April 16th, 2018. I was in so much pain, it was insanely difficult to lie on my back, and lie still. While initially the radiology tech told me I should hear back within 5 to 7 business days, after my MRI, he rushed to help me out of the machine with extra care as if I were his 90-year-old grandmother. As I finally stood up, he said, “Well you should hear back in the next 24 hours.”

That evening I got a call from the nurse practitioner, the one who looked at me the last 8 weeks like I was just out to get narcotics, the one who rarely returned my phone calls. “So, we found something on your MRI. There’s a 2 to 3 inch mass on your sacrum, about the size of an egg”

“A mass? What is that? Like a tumor?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “Most likely. We don’t know if it’s benign or malignant, but I’m referring you to the orthopedic surgeon…”

Benign or Malignant?

I couldn’t even think straight after that. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting this. A tumor? Seriously?

I knew tumors could be benign and that they didn’t necessarily mean cancer. Because me having cancer just did not compute. I was the girl that ran half-marathons, rarely went a day without exercise and put kale in her smoothie every morning. Cancer was for people who smoked, ate fast-food and drank excessive amounts of alcohol, all the things that repulsed me. I used to make my ex-husband eat his pizza outside; it wasn’t allowed in the house.

It had to be benign. Something the doctors would remove surgically, and then I could get back to my normal life.

After apologizing profusely to me, the nurse practitioner wished me luck and told me to call her anytime I had any questions or concerned. Funny how once she knew I had this tumor, she was suddenly reacting like I wish she would have 8 weeks ago. Even though I had just been hit with some potentially bad news, I felt a twinge of redemption: See, there was something wrong with me. I’m not out just to get your narcotics after all, am I?

By that time, the ER doctors had prescribed me Norco. Within a couple more weeks, I would get onto Percocet, and even then, the pain medication barely scratched the surface of the pain I was feeling: intense nerve pain firing up and down both legs and severe throbbing bone pain, as if my pelvis was broken. Later, I would find that this destructive tumor was eating away at the bone. It was also involving and getting wrapped up in all my root nerves that ran from my sacrum down to my feet.

The Bad News

A week later, on May 7th, 2018, the results of the biopsy came in and guess what?

“You have cancer.” Bone cancer, a sarcoma, but not just any bone cancer, the rarest of all bone cancers: Sacral Chordoma, which only affects about one in every one million. Which means there’s very little research or known treatments.

“What we do know,” said the doctor, “is that this type of tumor is slow-growing, and that means we cannot treat it with chemotherapy.” Good, I thought, I wouldn’t touch chemotherapy with a ten-foot pole. I was also soothed by the sound of slow-growing. “It’s also resistant to radiation.” Ok, I said. So surgery, right?

“Right. Surgical resection of the sacrum is the only known and proven treatment for this type of cancer.”

“Ok, sign me up,” I said. “When can we do it. Let’s get this thing out of me.” By this time, I had been dealing with intense pain for three months, unable to surf, travel, sometimes I couldn’t even drive. I was just so ready to do whatever I had to do to get my life back to normal. I was constantly high on pain medications, unable to sleep at night. My whole life for the last three months had been one long, horrendous nightmare and I was ready to get back to my life, or take the necessary steps to get back to my life.

Little did I know, I would never get back to my “normal” life.

More Bad News

“Unfortunately,” Dr. H said, “The surgery is quite invasive. It requires resection (amputation) of your sacrum from S2 to S5. Because we need to remove the sacrum, we also need to remove the root nerves which control bladder and bowel function.”

“Wait, what? Are you saying that surgery is my only option, and that with this surgery…I’ll need to wear adult diapers for the rest of my life? At 35 years old? That I won’t be able to control my bowel or bladder function?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. But surgery is the only way…” What happened afterward is a distant memory. I just melted into uncontrolled sobbing and let my mom do most of the talking.

And just in case that wasn’t enough bad news…

I would go on to get a second opinion and then a third. And then a fourth. All four doctors (3 orthopedic surgeons and a radiologist) suggested surgery. “It’s the only way,” they said. “We’re so sorry.” I also learned that I would likely have to have a colostomy, and with all the hardware that would be going into my pelvic region, I was told I most likely would never be able to surf again.

Never surf again? I don’t know what was more devastating, that with this surgery I’d lose bladder/bowel control for the rest of my life, or that I’d never surf again. I was a beach girl who lived to surf. After each and every medical opinion, a loud and defiant thought kept running through my veins over and over again like a song stuck on repeat: there’s no way I’m getting that surgery.

Find out what happens next in My Story: Part Two

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The post My Story: Part One: You Have Cancer appeared first on Cancer Free For Life.

A Day I’ll Never Forget

On May 2nd, 2019, the very next day after my MRI, I had just finished doing my morning meditation when I heard my phone ding from a new email. When I opened the email, it was the Give to Give Foundation telling me that I had won the scholarship to the 7-day Joe Dispenza retreat! I couldn’t believe it. I was so elated!

Less than one hour later, I came home to and just as I walked into the house my mother blurted out the words that I have wanted to hear for so long.

“The oncologist called with your MRI results. Your tumor shrunk. By a lot.”

What? I couldn’t believe it! I quickly beelined to my computer to look up the report, and finally, saw the words written “a decrease in size from the previous study” and sure enough, the tumor had shrunk quite a bit. Instead of being the size of a honeydew melon or a cantaloupe, it was now about the size of an orange. It had shrunk by about 30%. No wonder I had been feeling so much better.

What a relief! I celebrated the good news with my family. I figured, along with almost everyone else, that the proton beam radiation was finally doing its thing. A delayed response. (And I still think that’s somewhat true.)

Divine Downloads

Two nights later, I woke up at 3am, sitting straight up with a powerful thought that hit me suddenly, what I now call a divine download. The thought was this: You’re healing because of the meditations. Don’t you see why the two things happened at the same time? On the same day? (The scholarship award and the news that my tumor had shrunk) There’s a connection! I had previously thought this was a coincidence, but later I would learn this was a synchronicity.

The term synchronicity was first coined by psychologist Carl Jung “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.” In other words, a synchronicity is not mere happenstance or a random coincidence. Many believe that a synchronicity is a sign from above that you’re on the right path.

Wow. So meditation was doing way more for me that I had thought. I won’t insist that meditation alone was responsible for the shrinkage, but I do believe (at the minimum) it was a powerful facilitator in getting my tumor to respond to the treatment. Perhaps, it cleared away the negative thought patterns or fear and anxiety that blocked my healing.

I have always known that disease is more than just a physical process, that it stems from our emotions and subconscious thought patterns which we may or may not be aware of. Meditations taps into that, disrupting our subconscious programming.

The Role of Meditation

In the meantime, everyone wanted to take responsibility for the success on the last MRI. The oncologists at the Oasis of Hope cancer clinic, the radiologist, the naturopathic, even my chiropractor. “You see? It’s just a delayed response to the treatment.” I didn’t argue with any of them; I’m sure all of those aspects played a part.

I allow people to come to their own conclusions, but the undeniable facts are that the tumor was growing and growing and growing and did not start to shrink until I started meditating. I had started meditating with Dr. Joe’s meditations in February of 2019 and three months later (May 2) had my first positive MRI, along with the synchronicity that occurred.

And I cannot forget Paul, the “random” stranger on the beach who “randomly” came up to me on the beach weeks before I would find out that I, myself, had cancer and told me he’d healed himself from cancer with meditation. 

Divine Interventions

About a year later, chills would run up and down my spine when I heard Paralympian Amy Purdy’s interview with Oprah when she describes a man who, two weeks before her near-death experience in which she would lose both her legs to a meningitis infection, told her “not to be afraid when she crossed over to the other side.” Watch the three-minute clip below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6XjLyeDcKY

Whether these not-so-random strangers are angels simply or humans with divine messages, these types of stories convince me that we’re not alone in our journeys. You may have also heard stories in which a random stranger saved someone’s life, yet they could never find this person—they just disappeared.

Soon enough, July rolled around and I was ready to head to the 7-day Joe Dispenza meditation retreat. By this time, I was still on my pain medications: morphine and Gabapentin. But I had finally kicked the steroids and the other supplemental pain medications.

Reducing the morphine little by little, I was able to sit long enough to go out to eat in restaurants, stand long enough to cook and make my own meals and take long walks in the hills behind my parents’ house though I still walked with a limp due to nerve damage in my left leg. I was starting to put my normal life back together, looking to move back out on my own again. I even went back to work part-time, teaching ESL classes at UCSD in June of that year. 

Continue to My Story: Part Eight

The post My Story: Part Seven: Synchronicity appeared first on Cancer Free For Life.