My worst fear confirmed. What to do now? Take the bull by the horns! What is within my control:
a) choosing a team we are comfortable with
b) starting treatment as soon as possible
c) looking at other aspects of our lives that may improve treatment and increase our odds of winning this fight
I’ll never forget sitting and receiving my husband’s biopsy results…I knew too much. I’ve seen some tough outcomes from this disease in my line of work. My husband looked at the neurooncologist and in a upbeat voice said, “So, what do we do to beat this thing?” Her reply was, “Well, that’s what I’ve been working my entire career to do.” We had done A and B. My job was to research C and try to get my husband on board. The getting him on board part was harder than I anticipated, mainly because he didn’t want to give up so much of his “normal lifestyle”. Especially since our normal was just turned on its head. I learned some great tricks of sneaking things into his food and making minor, healthier changes.
The big “win” was when he agreed to see the nutritionist at the cancer center. I never thought he would go for that! But he came without kicking and screaming and, most importantly, was open minded. She offered a lot of insight during our hour together. She shared with to us a lot about what foods to incorporate and taught us tricks about how to preserve nutrients in the foods we were eating. I was soaking it up! She is the one who turned me onto the 3rd book I started reading after his diagnosis, Anti Cancer A New Way of Life ( Servan-Schreiber, 2009). This book gave me a great foundation to start our journey of taking back some control. From there I built a framework of how to change our habits and worked to find more and more resources.
If I knew then what I know now, there are 4 things I would start after a new diagnosis. I have implemented these into my routine to increase my overall health and potentially reduce my risk of cancer in the future. I’ll explain why I think these are powerful practices to start with in future posts.
- Drink Green Tea every day, up to 3 cups if you can
- Growing broccoli sprouts to sneak into tacos, salads, smoothies or just throwing a handful in your mouth
- Throw out all oils in your pantry other than olive oil and avocado oil
- Juicing!
Thanks for recommending this book. Very helpful!
Thank you Kelly!! This information is phenomenal. So grateful to have you ? Based on your recommendation, I bought my mom and good friend a copy of Anti Cancer…to try and help them understand my “crazy” decision to eat sprouts…lol…among other things. Now, I just need to purge my pantry!