Life with Cancer

My adjunct differential equations professor asked the same question every class session, “What is the purpose of a corporation?”  He was getting transitioned out/laid off as the oil company, where he was the head of IT, had been bought out.  The answer to his question was to make a profit for stockholders.  I absolutely want my retirement fund to make a profit but I want my health care provider to have my best interests.

I don’t want to get sued by the healthcare industry so I’ll just say that my perception is that doctors work for a healthcare corporation.  Corporations’ fiduciary responsibility is to their stockholders and not to their patients.  Cash flow and profit are what drives the corporation.  In order to increase profitability each quarter there must be a consistent and growing bottom line.  Pills and referrals grow and perpetuate quarterly earnings rather than cures and successful therapies.

Your healthcare provider wants to keep their corporate job while at the same time striving to increase their bottom line and retirement account.  This is the cold hard cynical reality that I have developed as I travel this wellness expedition. 

A dear friend recommended a documentary to provide additional data to direct my expedition, The Game Changers.  Cancer patient or merely a living, breathing, human you must watch this movie!   While watching, the narrator, James Wilks, “elite Special Forces trainer and The Ultimate Fighter winner,” quoted Bruce Lee. That quote resonated with me just as if Bruce had kicked me in the gut.

Home

Since my referral to a urologist and subsequent MRI, biopsy, and PET Scan, I have not been contacted by anyone in my corporate healthcare system.  No one has followed up to ask how I am doing, if I needed anything, or to provide me with any information to provide knowledge or emotional support for my new paradigm.  My perception is that I am merely another asset in their corporate inventory to be counted and funneled through their highly structured paradigm.

Well, I’m rejecting their paradigm and creating my own.  My new paradigm is learned from Bruce Lee: “Research your own experience, absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own.”

The Game Changers features elite athletes who attribute a plant-based diet over an animal diet for their success.  A great quote in the movie from “world record holding strongman” Patrik Baboumian when asked how he could be as strong as an ox by not eating meat.  Baboumian’s response was, “Have you ever seen an ox eating meat?”

I don’t want to accept traditional corporate therapies that inhibit my body’s ability to fight disease by killing my stem and T-cells.  I don’t want the considerable downside from these therapies: incontinence, sexual dysfunction, my guts melted together through radiation, or destroyed by chemo, all with the same potential of cancer reoccurrence.

After reading Beat Cancer Kitchen by cancer survivor Chris Wark and A Cancer Battle Plan by Anne Frahm I realized how important it was to attack cancer on multiple fronts.  I’ve got to believe that somewhere in Sun Tzu’s Art of War there is a belief that you don’t weaken your own forces, that you attack with a superior force having differing specialties, on numerous fronts.  Foot soldiers, cavalry, artillery, paratroops, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines all attacking simultaneously from different sides are what I envision to be a winning strategy.  Surgery, radiation, chemo, may all be therapies for fighting cancer but my mind is telling me that they are of the last resort, the literal “nuclear option.” 

Strengthening your body’s ability to fight, suppress, and kill cancer, I’m thinking, is the most logical strategy.  Fortifying your God given immune system should be the perfect solution.  What could be any better than what God equipped you to fight disease?  Of course, living a healthy life before you acquire cancer is the best strategy of all.   Sun Tzu taught, “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Don’t wait to get cancer to begin strengthening your immune system.  Begin a regimen of diet and exercise now.  If you have diabetes, high blood pressure, auto-immune disorder, or any health issue consider those to be alarms for your worsening health.  You are headed down a tragic path.  It’s time to take the fork in the road to better health and a longer and enriching life.  

Many fronts

There are many fronts from which to attack your cancer.  Diet and nutrition are but only two.  Faith and mental attitude are two more.  While researching to write this blog I found that A Cancer Battle Plan author Anne Frahm died from cancer on February 5, 1998.   After being sent home from the hospital by her oncologist to die she survived another ten years.  Her husband and co-author Dave Frahm wrote a lengthy letter describing Anne’s perfect storm that finally overwhelmed her. 

Frahm writes, “Cancer, and all other so-called diseases, are really just symptoms of a system in disrepair–a body that has become so overwhelmed with a toxic buildup that it can’t perform the self-healing and protective functions God designed within it.” Mercury, aflatoxin, and botulism from decades old dental procedures combined with toxic iron levels from transfusion therapies overcame Anne Frahm’s ability to respond. 

Bitter Root Judgement

Frahm also attributes “bitter root judgement” to further exacerbate her fragile immune system.  Frahm quotes a doctor, “emotions impact tissues” as he explained the many factors that led to Anne’s death.  Frahm explained that factors in Anne’s youth and adolescence ultimately resulted in her bitter root judgement. 

So, I researched bitter root judgement and discovered that I had crossed paths with this killer before.  As an equivocal death investigator, I was called to a residence one morning.  I was met at the door by a psychiatrist who advised that the female occupant had committed suicide.  He explained that she had suffered from numerous maladies which she accepted as deserving “because she was Jewish.”  This woman believed because of her Jewish heritage that she deserved all of the bad health that she suffered ultimately ending it by her own hand.

Judith Doctor in What Is A Bitter Root Judgement? writes, “In a figurative sense, emotions such as extreme enmity, grudge, hatred produce a bitterness in the heart of man . . . Bitterness is a spiritual strongman that connects to unforgiveness, resentment, anger, hate, violence and murder.” If you believe that emotions impact tissues then you can extrapolate that bitterness is an emotion that will negatively impact your body.

The Frahms developed a ministry and expressed their faith-based approach to fighting cancer.  I have no data upon which to form an opinion or to make a judgement regarding Anne Frahm’s faith and devotion.  I can only ascribe to my own.  Judith Doctor’s explanation of Bitter Root Judgement draws on Hebrews chapter 12:15: “See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.”

It is horrible that Anne Frahm, her husband, and children suffered the tragedy resulting in her death.  We do not envision years of illness, pain, struggle, and death when we pledge our love and devotion through sickness and in health.  We must rely on our Faith to sustain and enrich us through our many blessings and grace or as expressed in Jeremiah 29:11 “For the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

There are thousands of books about the power of positive thinking.  I’m positive that they are all accurate.  I will leave this discussion with Proverbs 17:22:  “A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.”  Let not your spirit be broken.  Let your heart be merry and you will reap the benefit of good medicine and Galtians 6:7 reinforces my assertion, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

Sow a Godly spirit and a healthy body to receive a blessed life.