Surviving and Thriving After a Life-Threatening Diagnosis

       Several nice things came into my life that helped me along the road my mind was already trying to take me. My oncologist was one of the kindest and most caring of men. Too often he treated me like a colleague, so his message about my prognosis was realistically dim. He said that the best he could do was give me two more years of life for my one year of chemotherapy. That was horribly distressing. But he also went along with my ventures into the alternative world. He never made fun of them, and he supported me in reaching out for other forms of care. The nurse, who drew my blood every week, was very kind and hopeful for me as well. This is so unlike a number of patients with whom I have worked whose physicians belittled their efforts at self care; who implied or threatened that the person would have to seek care elsewhere if they got into these weird things; and who blatantly said that they were wasting their time and money by taking vitamins or by going to an acupuncturist or another kind of healer. My doctor also recommended a book by a radiation oncologist, Carl Simonton called, Getting Well Again. This small book contained the very useful information that started me on imaging my disease into remission, a topic that I discuss in detail in Chapter 7.

        When my anxiety was still very high, Tom, one of my colleagues took me by the hand one day and said, “You have to take care of yourself. What vitamins and herbs are you taking?” Tom had AIDS, and in 1983, nobody knew much about what AIDS was, even for sure, what caused it to spread. He had decided, like many persons with AIDS at that time and since then, to seek out alternative forms of care. I was taking no supplements because I never believed that I needed extra vitamins, and I knew nothing about any alternative sources of help. He guided me to a place on Parnassus Avenue in San Francisco called the Vitamin Express where a very kind and knowledgeable man took me into a counseling room and went over all his recommendations. Some sounded bizarre to me then, but guess what? I took everything they told me to.

      This was the first I had ever heard of something called Antioxidants. I learned that Antioxidant vitamins and minerals were substances that attacked something called free-radicals, and that free radicals were largely responsible for diseases such as cancer. I devoured the limited amount of literature that was available 25 years ago, trying to find out more. The only real research available was from the Linus Pauling Institute. I learned that Linus Pauling with a Scottish physician, Cameron, a had done a clinical trial in Scotland, using only patients whose prognosis was so poor that they were no longer being given active treatment for cancer. They had been made as comfortable as possible and were expected to die quickly. Cameron put these patients into a special ward and gave them massive doses of vitamin C. They were matched with patients who were similar in every respect, except that they did not get vitamin C. The results were impressive and overwhelmingly positive. A few of these patients with terminal cancer actually recovered and went home cancer free. The rest all lived 2 to 3 times longer than their matched controls. In every case of those receiving vitamin C, the quality of life indicators were significantly higher than those who got usual care. I will discuss all my nutritional recommendations in detail in Chapter 10, and some of you may want to just skip to that chapter now, so feel free to do so, as I consider this information vital to recovery. Needless to say, I started on large doses of vitamin C as well as other antioxidants.