She lives

After spending 2 1/2 months in LA fighting to save my mom's life with nutrition and love alone, I am back in San Francisco. My mother lives. Below is an email to a dear friend of mine detailing the latest situation in her stage 4 cancer journey. I will continue to update this blog with the information and research I found surrounding fighting cancer with nutrition however life is crazy and I can't post daily. Please do check in from time to time though because I will make a concerted effort to get the information out as quickly as possible.


Dear Erika,

So I have been back almost two weeks now and I tell you, life just simply does not stop. In fact I think it's gotten faster. I can hardly keep up. In the two and a half month while I was in my underworld, I wondered what life back on top would be like again. Now here I am and i'm still so lost in the moment, I hardly have time to reflect. Too much I think. I have gone absent from writing for almost two weeks. 

Everything has changed with my mom's situation. The moment I left, my father changed her health plan (which was a monumental task I tell you) and got her out of the LA County system and into a non-public hospital. I went to visit last weekend and in the new hospital, the walls are purple and there are paintings and there is a very, very looooong cushioned stretch of platform near a desk for which the family member can stay. In LA County, as you know, I slept in chairs, small nooks, her bed and would sometimes get kicked out for being there with her. If only I had been privy to such a palace! No wonder it's not a thing for my father to spend the night with her. I did all the brunt of the work! She now has doctors that come in the form of one in lieu of dozens upon dozens of revolving students with an attending not so much looking at her as someone to treat but someone to learn from. I didn't realize the drastic difference until I sat in that hospital room and met, for the first time, her very own oncologist...and he was Chinese and he spoke Chinese. All translation duties for me were instantly eliminated. 

Her CT Scan has come back and her tumors are all gone again. We don't doubt that she still has cancer...but this is a mind bending shift from the last CT results which showed tumors in her liver, kidney, colon and stomach. At LAC USC they told her that the two tubes would never come out of her stomach. At White Memorial, the liver specialist asked us why she had those? Now they are in the process of removing them. Today she called me and told me she has gained six pounds. As we come upon 1 1/2 years of living with stage 4 cancer, although I am open and hold no expectations, it would be nice to make it past 5 years and enter the top 4% who have figured out how to live with cancer. My mother's cancer went away again with no chemo treatment. I accepted the inevitable and simply fell back on nutrition to sustain the body. That says something about nutrition which I was nazi-like in executing.

For two months I lived in hospitals and went through the thousand shades of how to die alongside her. I now know that the act of death itself is not so torturous as the anticipation of it. At our most poignant moment, I had driven her to the ocean. She was, by the time we arrived there, so listless that I parked the car along the road by the ocean and took out a spoon and slowly fed her soup while her head barely moved. I told her that we had to at least get out and smell the ocean air. I walked over to the other side to open the door and helped lift her out so she could stand. We walked three steps so that we could at least see the ocean. That walk to the other side was one of the most reflective and heart touching moment of my life. I thought to myself, "this is the end". I held her fragile, 79 lb body as she leaned all of herself on me and we closed our eyes and breathed three breaths. 

Love,