My first night in the hospital after surgery is incredibly peaceful. My nurse, a young sweet man named Kevin, blushes every time he walks into my room to check on me. Because as soon as I see him I smile adoringly and say, Hi Kevin. I’m not being flirtatious, I’m still high on After. This is pure blissful gratitude. I am so grateful for every moment of this night. I am grateful that I am through the surgery. I am in no pain whatsoever. The ward is quiet and peaceful. I have a private room all to myself. I am wonderfully hydrated thanks to the fluid drip. And Kevin is here vigilantly making sure I have everything I need. He says it is rare he is spoiled by such an easy patient. This is something I continue to hear during my time here. So many people must be so afraid and so in pain when they are here. A happy patient at peace, I am learning, truly is rare.

The terrible thing is gone from my body. I am fixed. I am being watched over. It is After. There is no reason to be discontent. 

It is a lovely night. I sleep on and off. I think. I ask Kevin to retrieve for me my drafting paper and pencil from my overnight bag and I design a house I had been creating in my mind as I lay here.

The next morning, everything changes.

At around ten a.m. as my surgeon stands over my bed to see how I am, the room teeters a bit and I put my hand to my forehead. A wave of nausea rolls over me. The effects of the anesthesia are kicking in. She leaves me alone and says we will talk later.

Kevin is now replaced by a rough no-nonsense middle-aged nurse who wrestles me from the bed with no warning saying I have to stand up and walk around now. I am appalled at her manner. She yanks me from the bed against my protests that I am starting to feel ill. Instead she grabs a plastic tub and hands it to me. After two assisted steps my legs collapse beneath me and she lowers me into the chair. Then leaves me sitting there with the tub in my lap. I just want to lay back down. The room is spinning now and I start dry heaving.

Finally someone returns and helps me back into my bed. But for the next few hours the room spins and I dry heave off and on, despite the anti-nausea medicine they put in my IV and the sea sickness patch they placed behind my ear. This nausea continues the entire day and through the next night.

My doctor returns the next day when I am feeling better. She sits down this time. This means it is time to talk about what she saw when she was inside my body. It is time to discuss the true state of my reproductive system. The worse than we thought details. 

Your ovary was in a very diseased state, she says. It appeared to be pre-cancerous or maybe even cancerous. 

This does not surprise me or make me feel afraid. In fact, it is suddenly quite ridiculous to think something could be so overgrown for so long and not have turned very rotten in one way or other. She seems surprised that I am not more upset. She moves on.

The appendix was still fine, she said, but she felt it was important to take it because she is so sure it could be a problem down the line. I am upset. That wasn’t the deal. But I do not say anything. Too late now. 

And finally, your fallopian tubes, she says. Both were badly scarred, in rough shape, had been for years. With stumpy ends. Covered in endometrail tissue. You have had silent endopemtriosis for years… and it has been collecting on everything in there, it was even on your bladder, like spider webs covering everything. 

What the f*^%?

And there it is. The answer. The eggs that I felt release every month, they never had a chance. Never could have even made it down a tube to become anything. Everything had been blocked all along. 

There is relief in the knowing. In hearing the reason. It does not make me feel sad. Not yet. It is a great big sigh of understanding. I know now. I know. And I am grateful she has cut the horrid thing out of me.  

You’re husband already informed me that you would not do chemo, she says.

Correct, I say.

And there is nothing I could say to change your mind, or talk you into it…? She waits, to see if there is any chance of persuading me. There isn’t.

Correct, I say again.

She pauses a long moment, sagging visibly with the disappointment. I see the wheels turning in her head. 

But I have a very different perspective on this. I happen to know Chemotherapy, a multi-billion dollar industry, it tossed around as liberally as antibiotics. They give it to people they know it won’t help. Suppressed statistics show that Chemotherapy has killed more people than cancer ever has. That Chemotherapy specifically has little to no effect at all on ovarian cancer anyway. That alkalizing and fasting will cleanse from me any residue left behind by the offending organ. Nuking me will only kill, hurt, poison, weaken the rest of my body. Taking Chemotherapy will almost certainly ensure that I will get cancer somewhere esle in my body, possibly many places later in life. Because it creates a wasteland of a person. It leaves a barren scorched wasteland of a body behind, a post-apocolyptic site where disease thrives and health has been annihilated. People can live with cancer in their bodies for years, even a lifetime, but can often only survive treatment for a matter of months. That when we look at images of grey bald people who look like death walking, we are not seeing someone on cancer, we are seeing someone on Chemo. It defies wisdom to destroy and tear down and poison to heal. They want a weapon to launch at illness, they do not understand that there are few weapons needed when you really know healing. When you really know how to lift up a body cell by cell, you can’t stay sick. 

She doesn’t know I know all of this. 

We have a stare-down. The poison-wielder doing her job to upsell. You just saved my life and now you want to kill me? Me, silently marking a boundary for my body: No. You cannot destroy me now that you have just healed me. 

A few moments pass and she brightens. Oh well, she shrugs, that’s okay, this kind of cancer does not respond to chemo anyway.

I am shocked that she openly admits this to me. She has made a decision and I am grateful for it: Now I will not be labled in my records as a patient resisting medical advice. Instead we are suddenly in agreement. She recants her treatment recommendation. In the medical report she sends later is written the patient says she will not undergo Chemotherapy, and I agree that I would not prescribe this type of treatment in her case. 

How many people? I wonder. How many? How many nuked bodies ruined, weakened, damaged, for no reason? 

We each have a job to do in the world. I came to her to do what she does best: Please cut this thing out of me. And she did it so very well. 

And now, I need to go do what I do best: Heal. She is a surgeon, a masterful cutter-outer of damaged parts. I am a healer, a masterful uplifter of every cell of the body until the whole person glows with life. 

I may have a genetic issue, but now that I know I have it, I can manage it and make sure this never happens agaim. And I am confident in my ability to flush out any remaining toxicity or acidity left behind by that bad body part. To hydrate and alkalize and boost my immune system and rest and eat the healthiest most organic food, and work with herbs and foods and balance my hormones so my estrogen doesn’t run high anymore and casue things to grow out of control again. 

The results came back a week later. Yes, there was cancer inside the ovary and also beginning to be detected outside as well, in my abdominal fluid. It had indeed been allowed to remain for so long it was beginning to spread. But my appendix was confirmed to be disease free. I was officially diagnosed by them as having had “stage three ovarian cancer”. I don’t really consider this worth much though; to me it was already in the past as soon as I left that operating table. 

I went home to heal. 

In my follow-up appointment I showed off my new haircut where I had lopped off my waist-length dreadlocks into a shoulder-length bob. I said, it’s a new beginning, it was time for a new me! My arms thrust up over my head with joy and victory. To which she respnded, you know… there is something about you… She smiled a little bit, looked truly flummoxed, admiring. “People are still talking about you at the hospital, asking me about you. That doesn’t happen very often. You’re very… special.” 

I smiled, a little perplexed. I wasn’t sure what this had to do with having a haircut. It wasn’t until later that I saw it. She had tried to give me a diagnosis: stage three ovarian cancer. Her other patients believed this was a death sentence, crumpled in fear and dread, believed that they were now entering a new identity: cancer patient. That they now had to undergo chemotherapy and ‘fight it’. Feared for their lives. 

But I had done something none of her other patients did, a unicorn on her operating table. I had chuckled and said, “oh, no thank you.” Then I walked out of the hospital and gave myself a haircut, excited to go on living. I knew I had made it through something terrible. Not that something terrible was just starting to happen to me and needed to be attacked, but that I was done with the terrible. A “diagnosis” of cancer was laughable to me. It just didn’t have merit. She had already cut it out. 

She shook her head, appeared slightly awed by this unusual person before her that was unafraid of a cancer diagnosis and wouldn’t take it seriously. Who came out stronger and healthier, glowing and filled with life. While maybe her other patients were somewhere in that hospital right then, puking and bald and grey. 

And it was all becasue of perspective. A perspective that made a slipperly surface where fear just couldn’t get a foothold. 

I went home and kept healing. 

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