All posts tagged: breast cancer

Cancer saved me… really.

Published by

One of my fellow health coaches posted a TED video today called “What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living” and it got me thinking about the road between perfectly healthy and gravely ill. If you think about it, ALL of us are on that continuum, and some days are much closer to the ill end than others. For me it wasn’t days, it was decades. In 2005 I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. (I’m not sure why I capitalized that, but for me it was a pivotal event in my life). It was a game changer. It stopped me and my family in our tracks. We rallied, but my view of life as I knew it was over. You look at everything differently from that moment forward, and sometimes that is a good thing. And you are never that same Pre-Diagnosis person again. You simply cannot be. Your view on mortality shifts. I was lucky, it had not spread to my lymph nodes, but I still opted to go through both chemo and radiation treatments. …

10 Years Ago Today

Published by

Ten years ago today I heard the words from my husband “It’s cancer”.  He stood in Recovery Room with tears in his eyes and had to tell me my biopsy was positive. I was in shock and scared out of my mind.  For about a day.  And then we went into fighting mode.  Not that I wasn’t still scared.  I was.  Every single day.  As a former nurse, this wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  This was the thing that happened to someone else. The Hardest moment came a week later when I sat in the “Cancer Center” waiting room at our local hospital.  Here I was with my husband, who is a cancer surgeon, and I really wanted to run out of the room.  I wasn’t scared of seeing the oncologist, or the treatments, but sitting in that room with others who were struggling, some who were clearly fighting a much larger fight than I was — that was the thing that I didn’t want to see.  Was that my future? It felt too …

Vitamin D is NOT a vitamin. But it’s critical to staying well.

Published by

I originally wrote this article in 2013, and I’ve updated it annually with more research and to stress it’s importance in immunity. The COVID pandemic made it crystal clear we all need to maintain healthy levels, as our ancestors were outside, without sunscreen routinely. Do you know you can make your own D? All you need is skin, sun and no sunscreen (read on…) Everyone should take a Vitamin D supplement.  Yes I said EVERYONE. Why?  There are multiple reasons.  Optimizing your vitamin D levels should be at the top of the list for virtually everyone, regardless of your age, sex, color, or health status, as vitamin D deficiency has been linked to an astonishingly diverse array of common chronic diseases.  Let’s explore what happens in our bodies, and why I think it is CRUCIAL to check your levels with your physician and make sure your body has enough available Vitamin D3. Vitamin D is actually a group of fat-soluble secosteroids responsible for intestinal absorption of calcium and phosphate.  Basically it is a neuroregulatory steroidal …

Can fish oil save your life?

Published by

I’ve already talked before about the supplements I’m on, and why I think they are CRUCIAL to my staying healthy.  Here’s some new research from the Fox Chase Cancer Center, just published this week: … omega-3 fatty acids and their metabolite products slow or stop the proliferation, or growth in the number of cells, of triple-negative breast cancer cells more effectively than cells from luminal types of the disease. The omega-3s worked against all types of cancerous cells, but the effect was observed to be stronger in triple-negative cell lines, reducing proliferation by as much as 90 percent. The findings were be presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 on Tuesday, April 9. Lead author Thomas Pogash stated:  “Diet can play a critical role in breast cancer prevention,” says Pogash. “When you compare a western diet to a mediterranean diet, which has more omega-3s, you see less cancer in the mediterranean diet. They eat much more fish.” My doc, Dr. Mark Hyman stated:  ” Simply put these extraordinary fats affect every part of your biochemistry. …