Life changed significantly for us when my wife was diagnosed with cancer.
It was a quiet evening in April, 2025 and my wife came to me with alarm in her eyes and her hand pressed to her left armpit where she had discovered an egg sized lump which led us immediately to book an appointment at our local health clinic. We were referred for an x-ray which we did the following Saturday and the results came back as showing "suspicious activity". Next came an ultrasound that further verified this, followed by a mammogram and biopsy of the lump which would give us the first piece of our diagnosis puzzle: Follicular Lymphoma.
Further tests included a CT Scan and a bone marrow biopsy, the results of those confirmed that (1) there were more than one site of suspicious activity and (2) there was evidence of FL cells in the bone marrow, meaning that we went from noticing an egg sized lump in April to receiving a Stage 4 Cancer Diagnosis about six weeks later in May.
The usual emotional and mental responses followed: shock, disbelief, fear, worry, denial, anger.
Once diagnosed we were fairly quickly moved through the system and paired with an oncologist at BC Cancer.
We knew nothing about the world of cancer treatment at this point in our journey so we just focused on gathering the facts and trying really hard not to react too much.
As we learned more about the conventional methods that were being offered we couldn't help but ask ourselves if there was another way, and we tapped into our community of keen healthy living friends to get our foot in the door of alternative treatments.
This approach seemed to make more sense to us and we started to read and learn more about making radical changes to diet and lifestyle, and learning about something called the 10 Key Factors of Radical Healing, documented in great detail by Kelly A. Turner in her book, Radical Remission, in which she devoted years to study hundreds of "spontaneous remission" cases documented in medical journals around the world (in reality there is nothing "spontaneous" about these healing methods, but rather they require weeks, months, or even years of commitment to a radical overhaul of diet, lifestyle, and other factors).
It was in Dr. Turner's book that I learned about a centre right her in BC that offers a 10-day detox retreat that employs traditional chinese medicine (TCM) to perform energy healing and detoxification.
At this point in our journey we are fully committed to the idea that our body created the cancer, and our body can heal it, rather than the conventional belief that cancer is a foreign invader that must be blasted to oblivion in order to heal (ie, poison the body back to health), and this approach just doesn't make sense to us!
When I learned about the treatment centre, I was already scheduled to be passing through the area as I had to pick up our kids from their camping getaway with their Grandparents, and so I followed my intuition to contact the head nurse practitioner, who agreed to see me.
As of this writing my wife will start her 10-day detox retreat in six days' time and we are incredibly excited and intrigued by everything we will learn.
