I Lost My Dad to Cancer: Here’s What it Taught Me
Next week will make a year since I lost my dad to cancer.
He had a rare, aggressive form of melanoma – uveal or ocular melanoma is one that it is in the eye and not related to sun damage. He had the worst of the worst of the worst form, one that after 5 years, only 5% of people were still alive. It was a very small tumor in his eyeball, but as expected, it metastasized to his liver at which point chemotherapy and other treatments were ineffective.
I desperately wanted him to be among the 5% who avoided this outcome. We prayed and fasted, seeking God’s help to know what could be done to overcome it. Although the outcome wasn’t what I hoped, we have learned and continue to learn from the experience. I hope that by sharing I can help others in similar situations.
“But If Not”
Ultimately I found comfort in the Old Testament story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego.
When they were faced with being thrown into the fiery furnace, they said “If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. (Daniel 3:17-18)”
These faithful friends had full trust that God had the ability to save them from the fiery furnace, yet in their statement of “But if not” they pronounced their belief that they would trust in God even if he didn’t save them. I know God was able to deliver my dad from his cancer, but did not for reasons that remain to be seen. Even though I had every anticipation of my dad being a part of my kids’ lives into adulthood, just has his dad had been for me, I came to feel that God’s wisdom extended beyond my limited perspective and that He had greater plans for all of us.
My mom and I know it was his time to go.
Fueling our Grand Potential
But the rest of us don’t know how long we’ll live. What I hope we do know, is that each of us has unique talents and tremendous potential to do amazing things with one of the greatest gifts we have been given: the gift of life. I am so passionate about health because having the best possible health increases our capacity to serve others and accomplish all we were put on this earth to do.
Not everyone with a cancer diagnosis is at the end of their life. In fact, for many, a cancer diagnosis can bring about positive change in health habits, relationships and more. It is in this light that I feel to share some of our experiences, in hopes that it can help all of us–whether we or a loved one have been diagnosed with cancer of if we hope to prevent it.
The Medical Approach
Many studies have found turmeric to be very powerful in killing not just cancer cells, but selectively killing cancer stem cells and leaving healthy cells in tact. 1, 2, 3. But when my dad was in a clinical study, receiving a drug that was hoped to delay the spread of his cancer, he was prohibited from turmeric for fear that it could skew the results. It appeared to me that they knew turmeric was effective in fighting cancer, but if he took it they wouldn’t know if it was the drug or the turmeric. Sure this makes sense from scientific standpoint, but is it right to deny people something that has great potential to heal? Something that has more evidence to support its efficacy than what they are giving him? Did it have anything to do with the $10,000 price tag of the drug over the minimal cost of turmeric?
LDH is a blood test that can indicate advanced cancers and is also used to help identify if treatment is working. My dad’s LDH had consistently been at a normal level around 200-300 prior to the spread of his cancer. He had quarterly MRI’s and blood tests to check to see if the cancer had spread to his liver. In December he had a clear scan, but in March it was discovered that not only had the cancer spread to his liver, but he now had a grapefruit sized tumor. Consistent with the spread of his cancer, his LDH was now over 900. Even with the extremely rapid cancer growth, he could not get in to see his oncologist for two weeks.
Although it added to my frustration that my dad’s survival did not appear a top priority for the doctors, the delay left him with no treatment options aside from the healing power of food. We began juicing all kinds of vegetables and serving him a plant-based diet rich in foods that are known to fight cancer. After a little over a week of flooding his body with nutrients, his LDH was tested again. This time his LDH was down in the 400s. Again, LDH is a blood test used to help identify if cancer treatment is working. Clearly he had experienced a significant decrease, but when he finally got in to see his oncologist they brushed over the change and focused their attention on discussing other possible studies he could participate in now that the cancer had spread. Why weren’t they interested in finding out what he was doing to experience such a drop?
Significant research has shown the power of a plant-based diet to fight cancer (excellent research video). The American Institute of Cancer Research recommends a vegetarian or vegan diet.4 I was constantly sharing this information with him and he repeatedly asked his doctors about what impact diet might have. Generally they said you want to stay healthy but it doesn’t really matter what you eat and it shouldn’t keep you from having a steak. It wasn’t until just a few weeks before he died that he asked the nurse practitioner and nutritionist and finally heard that a plant-based diet is the best diet for cancer.
Until this point my advice was at odds with his doctor’s, and I appeared to be clinging to questionable information. He was generally agreeable to an anti-cancer diet, but also didn’t fully believe it could make that much of a difference. I don’t blame him. When his doctor, with years of medical training is telling him that it doesn’t really matter what he eats, why should he believe his daughter who has zero formal medical training that actually it does?
I’ll be the first to admit that giving up your favorite convenience and comfort foods can be extremely difficult, especially if you are trying to do it overnight. We have such strong emotional and social ties to food that even knowing it has been shown to reverse terrible disease is not always enough for us to be able to make healthier choices.
I became a bit of a food nazi, trying to help him eat an anti-cancer, plant-based diet as much as possible. My poor family. My trying to enforce such a strict diet wasn’t always pleasant. I still struggle with what I should have done. When you have information that can dramatically improve the survival odds of someone you love, you want to do all you can to put it into place.
But it didn’t need to be this way. My dad was diligent about doing everything the doctor ordered. Had the doctor told him about the impact food has on cancer, even if it was just a general suggestion of something he could do to support his body, he would have been all in and motivated to do it. We would have all been more than happy to support to him in the change, rather than feeling at odds about it.
Clearly the medical staff had some understanding the food we eat has an impact on cancer outcomes. So why wasn’t it ever communicated before he asked? Why wasn’t it emphasized as a way to positively impact his treatment? Why did all of his visits focus on highly experimental drugs and nothing else?
I believe doctors are doing what they have been trained to do. Medical school consists of years on pharmaceuticals and only 19 hours on nutrition. Further, most doctors make their money off of sick people, not healthy ones. Doctors aren’t incentivized to learn about the root cause of disease and foods that may prevent it. As an oncologist describes in this article, oncologists earn the majority of their money from referring patients for treatment, not office visits or research on behalf of the patient. Medical practices have large overhead costs that need to be covered. Add to all this the risk of being sued for medical malpractice and the system make it extremely difficult for many doctors to focus on what is really best for the patient.
My purpose is not to say all doctors or treatments are bad, however, I hope to raise awareness that we are often putting our lives in the hands of a broken system. It’s up to us to educate ourselves, because our doctors are not necessarily in a position to do so.
Ideally we learn these things and begin doing them before we are faced with a serious disease. It is so much easier to have some time to make positive change, and it takes much more dramatic changes to reverse a disease than it does to prevent it.
It’s impossible to say if my dad’s very rare and aggressive cancer could have been healed with a plant-based, anti-cancer diet. Ultimately we feel it was his time to go, otherwise I am confident things would have played out differently. There are some people who do everything right and still get cancer. There are others who do everything wrong and don’t. God’s ways are not our ways. We don’t have guarantees or absolutes.
But, as Kristi Funk, a breast cancer expert recently said in the Food Revolution Summit, those few exceptions at either end of the spectrum will always exist, but for 80% of us, she knows how to prevent cancer.
Once I was in a car accident that totaled my car. The law dictated that the other driver was ticketed but neither one of us was really at fault (or seriously injured, thankfully). I remember thinking again and again how grateful I was that the accident wasn’t the result of carelessness or reckless driving on my part. I’ve often remembered that experience and how we know that some bad things will happen in life, but they are easier to deal with when we know we did our best. I guess that is at the core of my frustration. Coming to terms with my dad’s early departure was hard. But feeling that he was missing out on what may have been the most effective treatments made it much harder.
“Some Great Thing”
Finally, I have thought a lot about another Old Testament story, the story of Naaman. Naaman had been plagued with the dreaded leprosy. He sought the help of the prophet Elisha, who sent a servant to tell Naaman to wash in the river Jordan 7 times. Naaman was wroth–he was sure the prophet would come out and perform some grandiose healing himself. Naaman began to leave in a rage, wondering what made the river Jordan any better than the multiple other places he had washed.
Thankfully he had servants who were wise and told him, “if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?” (2 Kings 5:13)
Finally he did wash in the river Jordan 7 times and “his flesh became as a little child, and he was clean”
Are we looking for someone else to do some great thing for us? Are we overlooking the simple things we can do for ourselves?
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we already have prophetic health advice. It is my personal feeling that a whole-foods plant-based diet aligns well with the Word of Wisdom, or health code described by modern day prophetic revelation received in 1833. The Word of Wisdom warned against smoking and alcohol a century before the medical community began to discover the dangers. It also emphasized plant foods and counseled that meat should be eaten sparingly long before these practices emerged in recent decades as powerful agents against heart disease5, diabetes6, cancer7, multiple sclerosis 8 and more.
My dad’s cancer taught me to trust in God, even when things don’t work out the way we hoped. But it also taught me that we have a lot of tools to take control of health.
To learn more about the power of plants to fight disease, I cannot recommend more highly the free Food Revolution Summit happening the first part of May 2019.
Chris Wark was an outstanding speaker. Every time I hear him he hits the nail on the head! His 20 Questions for Your Oncologist is a great free resource and his Square One Coaching program was worth 10x the $197 we spent on it!
The summit includes interviews with a number of health experts who are involved in ground-breaking research on impact of diet on so many aspects of our health. This summit cut through so much of the confusion I felt about what we should be eating and is focused on real research and results.
What has cancer taught you?
- https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/turmeric/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18462866
- http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/are-cancer-stem-cells-key-discovering-cure
- https://www.aicr.org/patients-survivors/healthy-or-harmful/vegetarian-and-vegan.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DkZi6A6jSA&feature=youtu.be
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5466941/
- https://www.pcrm.org/news/blog/reduce-cancer-risk-plant-based-foods
- https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/05/21/plant-based-diets-for-multiple-sclerosis/