The story continues. For those who might be reading for the first time, you can go back to Number 1 and start at the beginning. I’m just getting started with telling the story of our cancer journey that started in 2017 and ended when she died, January 15th 2023. Everything in quote form below is taken from a Word document that I began writing in Jan of 2022 and appears essentially as I wrote it, with some grammatical and light stylistic edits.
The entire compostion of “A cancer Story” is more than 33,000 words and I will be publishing a chapter every week or so on the weekends. Also there is a companion poetry piece, “What Do You Mean, Never” that I needed during this time to express through the loss in a different way. There are about 40 poems in that collection and I will post on the weekends as well.
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Written 3/17/23
about time period of first diagnosis after mid January, 2017.I thought I could handle anything. I never thought cancer would happen to me and when I say “me” I mean Sally…because after all we’d been through, she was me and I was her. And of course, we “handled” it. There’s no choice, it happens, and you “handle” it.
After the first diagnosis they wanted her in right away, literally chemo within the week. She said no. Thinking back to that time, it feels like beautiful innocence. Hopeful. Like there’s a choice in the matter. I’m still trying to figure out if that’s true, or not. Regardless, she said no to chemo right away. She wanted to explore other options, it was who she was, who I was, this was something we both believed in wholeheartedly. The power of the human body, the human spirit, untapped avenues of redemption, health, healing, things outside the medical establishment.
Sally’s sisters started a Go Fund Me and money poured in. As you know, if you knew Sally, people would do anything to support her, because she had made those relationships, she’d created that type of support throughout her life. The money is an illusion however, Steve Jobs died of cancer.
Perhaps the money allowed us to explore in certain ways, perhaps it limited us in other ways – the point was she wanted to find another way to treat the cancer in her body. She wanted to try other avenues before jumping into the cancer pool and so we began our deep dive into “alternatives”, and wow, is it deep.
Apricot seeds, electromagnetic machines, deep tissue massage, vitamin C drips, hydrogen peroxide injected directly into the tumor, sugar treatment, infrared sauna, EM’s, THC, CBD, mushrooms, love and light…the alternatives were endless. Go to Mexico, go to South American, Ayhusca…so much and so many…but you know what…through it all, we never found those two people who injected peroxide or THC or had gone to Mexico or used Electromagnetic fields, we never found those two. Sure, there was a guy here who injected 1,000 mg of TCH into his anus and lived to tell about it, just like there was the woman who went on mushrooms and the cancer disappeared. Single events abound but there wasn’t two people, talking about the same solution, doing the same thing, with the same results. There wasn’t two people. Course that doesn’t mean there actually wasn’t two or more people that have had reproducible success against her type of cancer, there probably are, somewhere, we just couldn’t find them.
That didn’t stop us. It doesn’t stop anyone who believes the way we believe. And so, we took the journeys. She spent time in the mountains getting deep tissue, supposedly trauma releasing pressure points and electromagnetic therapy after which she was so convinced (and, I think, terribly desperate) that she bought a $4,000 machine to bring home…and there we sat, in Albany, with her feet on plate glass, holding an electric wand to her chest as the machine crackled and popped, filled with lightning and apparently injecting electrical waves into her tumor filled breast.
We ordered the apricot seeds that contain low dose amygdalin (Laetrile) that was supposed to be an anti-cancer agent. When the order arrived, we eagerly shoved handfuls into our mouths, again, desperate for some relief from our sentence, thinking kernels of apricot, if we just ate enough, would cure her and prevent me from getting cancer. We got dizzy, sick and had to cancel our dinner plans.
Edited 1/19/24
Edited 1/27/2024