Rewind a few months. My dad was diagnosed with cancer in October 2009. Not knowing there might be any options, he went along with the standard treatment of chemo, radiation and surgery. Now, I'm the research queen. I'm fortunate enough to live in a state where most of the libraries are part of one system. So I can just go online and request every book on a certain subject and they will (eventually) come to my library for me to pick up. When something interests me, I will research it to death until I'm satisfied that there is nothing else for me to learn about the subject. Or until I get bored. Which usually doesn't happen until I've read 20 or 30 books about it. Cancer didn't happen to be one of those subjects that I had ever researched. So I didn't know any better, either. Daddy made it through the chemo and radiation without getting horribly sick and didn't miss much work, but there were complications with the surgery and he had to take off much longer than the six weeks originally planned.
Being 500 miles away while all this was going on didn't help my mood much. My aunts and grandma did a great job keeping me up to date on everything, but there's nothing like being there. I started getting frustrated then with how the doctors were handling things, but there wasn't much I could do. Or that anyone could do, really. So he eventually went back to work and started a second round of chemo and radiation. Which made him progressively sicker each week. At this point, it's Memorial Day weekend and I made a running trip home for a family reunion and to see my parents. I was so upset with the way the doctors were handling things that I cried most of the way home. And I was worried about my dad. Really, though, I was mad and feeling helpless because there was no where to direct that anger.
I stopped along the way and sent an email from my phone to a couple of my homeschool Yahoo groups. These are not only loving supportive women, who I knew would listen to me rant, but they're well-informed and I knew that they could help me with my questions. In recent news, the Susan G. Komen Foundation had partnered with KFC to sell pink buckets of nasty (not nasty-tasting; I happen to love the way it tastes) fried chicken to an already obese and unhealthy nation in order to "raise awareness and money" for breast cancer research. Really? Is there still someone somewhere who isn't aware of breast cancer. And how many women don't know they're supposed to do a self-exam once a month? What they don't know is that the mamograms that are being encouraged not only give false positives, but can also cause cancer. There was also the campaign from the American Cancer Society to get people, specifically women, active to help decrease their cancer risks. That's awesome! What's not awesome: the women have to pay $5 to be part of the program and it's sponsored by the Coca-Cola company. They're touting Sprite Zero (filled with cancer-causing artifical sweeteners) as "a healthy beverage". Really? I would think water would be a better "healty beverage".
So, with both of the Big Names in cancer advocacy selling out to corporate America, what do we do? I asked my friends if there was an organization out there that is talking about prevention rather than collecting billions of dollars for a cure that will never happen. They're not developing cures. They're developing more drugs for treatment. And in many cases, the treatment is worse than the disease. No one had heard of anything, but I did get several book recommendations. So I got home and headed to the library. And what I read made me mad.
There are doctors who are curing cancer with different methods. And all the methods revolve around nutrition. Nutrition can help fight cancer along with so many other diseases. Even if you're not comfortable bucking the system, good nutrition can make your chances of surviving the chemo much better.
So I made a facebook fan page to share the information I've found. But I kept finding information that wasn't directly related to cancer. And most of that information says that eating real, natural food and surrounding yourself with as few chemicals as you can manage will go a long way toward keeping you healthy. So I started this blog to share all that information. If I can help just one person, I'm happy, but I would love to do much more than that.
