Last year, my mother planned a trip to Greece. She had the tickets, the tour, the hotels. Everything booked. She was scheduled to fly in September. In May, she found a rough bump the size of a split pea near her anus and scheduled a biopsy.
The biopsy was easy, no more than ten minutes.
The split pea was cancer.
My mother does not like this cancer. But here are some things that she does like: Pâté and French champagne and rice cakes. Three-inch heels and bright lipstick and every single long sleeved t-shirt ever made by Vera Wang for Kohl’s. My mother likes Jell-O, Marie Callendar’s custard pie, BBC America and Agatha Christie mystery movies. She likes driving fast in her Prius and powdering her nose in restaurants. She likes being taken for fifty when she is sixty-two and counting. My mother likes shopping at vintage stores and buying beautiful, barely wearable things: chemises and dressing gowns worn feather-thin, wrapped in eyelet lace, things she can hang up and then take down and stroke and hold up to my wide-shouldered frame and say, “Oh, this would look so good on you.” My mother likes hats and Bakelite and cubic zirconia. She likes Absolutely Fabulous and Bible study and a really good burger, and more than any of this she likes to travel.
My mother likes England, Italy, France and Belgium. She still wants to see Turkey, Nepal, Iceland and India. The last big trip my mother and father took together, they went to Prague. They drank beer until midnight, rambled along cobblestone streets, got tipsy, laughed. They took lots of pictures that we don’t look at anymore, not since Dad moved out three years ago.
My mother traveled alone after the divorce. Occasionally, she would take her cousin along for company. The two of them went to the Holy Land and came back with hand-woven rugs and Dead Sea Salt scrubs and pictures of each other on camels. My mother likes camels, cab drivers and adventures. She likes talking to strangers at pubs and crashing other people’s wedding receptions being held in hotel bars. She likes eating savory things for breakfast like they do in Jerusalem: tabouli salad and hummus and olives and cucumber sprinkled with spices. She likes curry and naan and jacket potatoes and scotch and seven, Mister Whippy soft-serve and the Cadbury Flake chocolates they stick in the cone’s creamy top like a straw.
*
After her diagnosis, my mother was scared. Of the cancer. Of its insidiousness, its silence. The doctors succeeded in removing the carcinoma from her skin, lifting away not only the split pea but several dermal layers beneath it. “Just in case,” they said, “you should consider a small dose of radiation and chemotherapy.” Six to eight weeks. It will wipe out any cancerous cells that might be lingering, they said. It will guarantee you 20-30 years of carefree living, they said.
“You have plans,” the doctor told her as she sat on the examination table. “You have places to go, things to see.” My mother told him about the trip to Greece. He said it sounded wonderful. He said it was worth postponing. He said she was the youngest sixty-two-year-old he had ever met. My mother liked this. She called me after the appointment and told me so, several times over. My mother likes flattery, hair dye, Botox and Forever 21. She told the doctor she would consider the treatments and then went out for sushi. She sat at the bar drinking sake and looking at travel magazines, trying not to think about the time bomb beneath her skin.
*
The doctor gave my mother several days to make a choice. We spent a lot of time on the phone that week: me on my bed in San Diego sitting in a pool of spring sunshine; her, I imagined, sprawled on the powder blue couch in her living room, shades drawn, A/C blasting. I suggested a holistic approach—a gentler alternative to the chemo, the radiation, all those chemicals. “Clean diet, detox, cutting out sugar,” I explained. I could feel her nodding on the other end of the line. Nodding, and frowning. Because my mother likes sugar, mostly in the form of cheap wine and popsicles. She dislikes self-deprivation. Her idea of a detox is limiting alcohol to organic red wine—“one bottle a day, tops.” She likes doctors who are liberal with prescriptions, who don’t give her hell about her drinking, who say things with an air of authority. I knew all this. I tried to make the alternative sound appealing. “I mean, how cool would it be if you could just, like, neutralize the cancer?” My mother listened as I talked about the transformative effects of food and positive thinking; as I rambled on about my own release from anxiety after a year of clean eating and bodywork, the phone growing hotter and hotter against my ear.
“It all sounds so wonderful. I wish I had your discipline,” she said. I told her I wanted to help; that we could do it together. But in the end, she grew quiet. “I’m sorry. I’m just too afraid.”
*
My mother did not like the idea of radiation and chemotherapy. But more than that, she didn’t like “what if’s.” What might happen inside her body if she did not do the treatment. What might happen if she relied on willpower and antioxidants and the dozens of supplements flooding her kitchen drawers. She hadn’t always been this way.
My mother grew up in the sixties. She ate Oreos and Miracle Whip and thought mayonnaise was a health food. In high school, she suffered from acne and anxiety, vitamin deficiencies and depression. After that, she read a lot. She tried to eat better. My mother raised me in a household of tofu and vitamins and soymilk and buckwheat pancakes. She read Dr. Spock and The Vitamin Book, took me to yoga when I was ten, told the orthodontist my teeth were perfect with the gap in the front, let me dress myself: green tights, orange shirtdress, pink pith helmet, black and white oxfords. When I was in middle school, she got a bad case of cystitis and skipped the antibiotics in favor of corn silk tea, cabbage, brown rice and ghee for a month until it cleared. Now I am grown up, and I remember these things—the things I pushed away as a child for tasting bad or smelling funny, the things I draw close now because they make me feel safe and whole. Because they remind me of her. I drink hot water with lemon and turmeric root and wheatgrass, go to yoga twice a week, bring her baskets of squash and kale from the farmer’s market near my house each time I visit. I tell everyone, “That’s how my mother raised me.” I imagine she would like this.
My mother decided to do the chemo. When I couldn’t get her to change her mind, I switched gears. I suggested seaweed for the radiation and root vegetable broth for the nausea, just like my holistic nutritionist had taught me. My mother would nod and say yes, yes, that is a good idea. But then she would forget, or not have the energy, or simply want something else. Something easier. She wanted meat and potatoes and lots of butter. When I’d show up for a visit, I’d find the kale from my last trip sitting rotten and untouched in the crisper, buried under bottles of apple juice for mixing with Jameson and tubs of reduced-fat cream cheese. Under vacuum-sealed packages of smoked salmon and prosciutto, jars of dill pickles and bottles of milk. The things she eats when she has been drinking too much, or when no one has been over to visit lately and so there is no reason to cook. The things she eats at 2 a.m. when she wakes up feeling hungry and alone.
*
Last summer, my mother canceled the trip to Greece and exchanged her Rick Steves brochures for informational pamphlets on chemotherapy and radiation, on preventing nausea and hair loss and low immunity, pamphlets with titles like “Chemotherapy and You.” In June, she had a mediport installed above her right breast, a kind of sub-dermal IV that could be accessed with the prick of a needle, sending the cancer-killing drugs straight into her bloodstream. The unit caused a bulge beneath the skin that I could see every time she put on a tank top and shorts to get in the pool. My mother used to hate pools, hate bathing suits. But with a pool of her own at the new house, the one she bought on a whim after Dad left, she can swim in clothes or naked or with a big glass of wine sitting on the edge. She can float or do the dog paddle or blow bubbles. There is no one to see. My mother always wears the same blue halter-top and brown cargo shorts when she swims. She’ll say, “It’s too fucking hot here,” then wade in without flinching.
Last summer, she swam every day until the nausea started. I went to see her and she had a map of the world spread out on her dining room table. The plan was to put it up with lots of colored pins, marking the places she had been, the places she still wanted to go. The plan was to help her stay positive. My mother loves maps, has always been better at finding her way around than following directions. But in July her hair fell out and she began to get weaker and she stopped swimming, stopped looking at the map, started spending half the day trapped in the bathroom and the other half lying exhausted on the couch.
My mother is proud. She didn’t want to be seen this way. She didn’t like the way she looked: her bald head, her gaunt cheeks, her grey flesh hanging off thighs and hips where all that meat and butter had once been. She didn’t like the pile of clothes on the lawn out back, discards from all the times she’d failed to make it to the bathroom in time. She didn’t like the way the doctors said, “Hang in there” when she showed up at Radiology twenty pounds underweight.
*
My mother put away the map in July. She cleared the dining table and covered it with pill bottles. In August, she was admitted to the hospital: feverish, weak, unable to eat, unable to control her bowels. She was seven weeks into the treatment, finished with chemo, only one week away from completing radiation. Nurses kept asking about her cancer. “The cancer is gone,” she repeated. “This is all from the drugs.”
I went to see her. She was colorless, her hair a translucent fuzz around the crown of her head. I sat with her and held her hand, brought different flavors of popsicles upon request, took them away again when she couldn’t keep them down. She kept the TV off and the curtains drawn. This felt unnatural. My mother likes TV. She likes the news and No Reservations and Downton Abbey on PBS. But in the hospital, she didn’t want anything: not books, not her glasses, not the cards or the flowers that came in the mail. When she wasn’t getting blood drawn or talking to the nurses or crying weakly on the bed, she slept. Sometimes I would sit in the corner for an hour and simply watch: her placid face, her still fingers, her body motionless as the morphine slithered slowly through her blood.
Back at her house, I found the map draped across the bed in the guestroom, gathering dust. I thought about the doctors who had talked her into the treatment, the ones who had promised twenty years of health and travel. I brushed off the dust and rolled the map up gingerly, feeling its newness still crisp between my fingers. I filled the pool with water and threw away rotten food in the fridge and folded my mother’s headscarves. At night, I lay awake waiting for the phone to ring. For my mother to call. For her to say she’d like something: People Magazine; French fries; her Bible. I’d lay awake and listen to the whirr of the air conditioner and wonder. My mother likes air conditioning. She likes cool temperatures and cozy blankets, and she always draws the blinds in the afternoon. She leaves the A/C on at night, sometimes as low as 62 degrees. She says it makes her feel like she is someplace else.
Tags: illness, lauren westerfield, moms, the butter
Wow. Beautifully written.
Please point me to the peer-reviewed empirical studies showing that removing sugar from one’s diet is an effective treatment for carcinoma.
I am sorry that you and your mom are going through this, but after watching a diet-obsessed grandmother die from multiple myeloma, I have no patience with the assumption that cancer treatment is that easy. Junk science does far more harm than good.
Thank you! I thought this was beautifully written and very moving, but when I got to the part where kale would somehow take the place of chemo and radiation, I had the reading equivalent of a record scratch.
I understand feeling powerless and terrified, but the resentment toward the mother’s medical team for suggesting a course of action that they know to be effective and the suggestion that she would have been better off following the advice of a “holistic nutritionist” just left a bad taste in my mouth. The fact that she ate tofu and soymilk and buckwheat and brown rice and ghee didn’t prevent her from getting cancer in the first place, did it?
I understand that it’s common to try to feel useful at a time of supreme powerlessness, but as a cancer survivor I will say that this kind of non-peer-reviewed stuff is not helpful (and it comes from every direction except the doctors). There are parallels with people who advise women to take self-defense courses to prevent rape: the implied blame (“oh, if only you’d [learned krav maga/eaten more kale]”), the self-reassurance that it won’t happen to the person giving advice because they [take BJJ/eat clean/don’t have a negative affect], the willful disregard of evidence showing limited utility. Yes, a healthy diet is desirable; yes, being aware of your surroundings is a good thing; but no, neither of those things is a magic bullet, and if someone chooses not to do them after they’ve already been hurt, that is their right.
I hope that your mother comes through it okay–and that we continue to improve our conventional therapies so that future patients don’t have such a hard time.
So much this. My mother-in-law still blames her triple negative inflammatory breast cancer on eating too much sugar and refined flour.
She nearly died, and is the one out of four women diagnosed with the disease that will make it five years post diagnosis. She is extremely lucky but has swallowed the clean eating nonsense to a point where she is obsessive, cannot get over her feelings of shame for “bringing the cancer” on herself, and is in a constant state of paranoia that she is not eating cleanly enough, that it will return.
Record scratch.
Nothing hurt my mom more when she was undergoing chemo and radiation than people suggesting things with the underlying theme “I do this and I don’t have cancer–do this like me.” Don’t eat sugar or meat or fat or smoke or drink alcohol or use plastic or whatever. With the unheard comment “I don’t do that and I’m cancer free. You shouldn’t have done that. “
I felt my growing resentment for the pseudoscience and judgementalism going on here slowly overtake my sympathy for a vibrant woman unexpectedly taken ill. Now I just feel angry about the misinformation, the junk science, and the fact that I spent my time reading this.
Yeah, I stopped reading and just skimmed the rest of the post to see if she did manage to stop her mother from getting treatment. It’s highly irresponsible to peddle this bullshit when it’s someone else’s life at stake. I also had cancer and went through chemo and radiation after surgery had taken all the cancer out of my body and it was the toughest ten months of my life. But I am alive because of it. I understand the impulse to want to blame someone for your mother’s suffering, but the doctors trying to save her life aren’t the villains here.
The misuse of the term “holistic” bothers me also – the term simply means taking into account factors beyond just physical when looking at health, including mental and environmental. It does not mean completely ignoring arbitrary parts of medical science. And have you ever met a (good) doctor that completely disregarded diet as a part of health?
This really is well written and moving, and a great portrait of your mother, but whether or not you meant it to be, it’s also a harsh critique of a medical establishment and procedures that have saved so many lives, and may well yet save your mother’s (forgive me if this was written earlier in her treatment and there is more to the story we don’t have).
Yeah. I mean, I get the interest in alt/holistic/etc medicine. I appreciate non-western ways of medicine, but I don’t accept them as substitutes for western medicine.
I know everyone has their own story of various things working/not working but my mom is the healthiest person I know, she’s been a vegetarian for at least the last 10 years (didn’t eat a lot of meat before anyway), no dairy, very little gluten, never really drank, has been doing acupuncture/eastern medicine for years and years and still she found out she has cancer, treatable, but still cancer.
That said I did like reading this. It’s hard to watch loved ones go through things, and help them while respecting their wishes.
I think I want to cry now. Thank you for writing this.
This is beautiful. This weekend is the 5 year anniversary of my mom’s death from cancer and it is a privilege to read this today. Thank you
This was wonderful. I wish I could meet your mom. You have written a lovely portrait of her.
My grandfather insisted on lovingly feeding my grandmother only green smoothies and organic chicken broth when she was diagnosed. She died anyway. Some part of him will always feel like he got the tumor to shrink for a while at least. And cancer meds truly ravage you. Thanks for writing about it.
I’m really sorry this happened. I’m even more sorry that, by your telling of it, you met your mom’s diagnosis primarily with a stream of harmful junk science masquerading as medical advice. Throughout the piece, you sound astonished that she had the audacity to undergo the course of treatment her doctors recommended and to continue to consume foods and drinks she enjoyed while doing so.
I hope sincerely that your mom recovers and that you’re spared from going through this with anyone else in your life. In the sad event that someone else you love confronts the disease, I hope you’ll have developed the perspective to understand how horrific it is to suggest to someone that if they just try hard enough, their body can “neutralize” cancer. This was a huge unkindness to your mom at a time when she needed you most and frankly, it sounds like she was much more civil in her response than you deserved.
It’s incredibly hard to look past the tone of judgment and lack of empathy to consider any other aspect of this piece.
All the parts of this piece about your mother and (I have to read between the lines a little to get this) how incredibly brave she is are wonderful and moving.
I just have to ignore the overall tone of condemnation, as if her decision to undergo a short-term therapy to vastly improve her long-term prognosis is somehow… what? What are you trying to say? That she’s selfish for doing chemo and radiation? That she’s lazy for using medicine as opposed to just eating her kale?
Please tell me if you were trying to say something else, because I love your mother from this piece, but I can’t stand how you wrote about her.
Things that are true:
-too much sugar is bad for you, and most Americans consume too much sugar
-kale is delicious
-chemo and radiation are miserable experiences and rational people can rationally disagree on whether the slog is worth it for their prognosis
-doctors may be more treatment-biased and/or focused on their speciality’s treatment rather than a holistic view
Things that are not true:
-you can cure or prevent cancer with your behavior
-western medicine is an evil sham
I’m sorry to be jumping on the criticism train, but the tone of what you wrote here is harmful to people dealing with cancer. If it were just you processing your pain, I’d leave it be. This is evocative and beautifully written and brought tears to my eyes. But there’s also a current of fearmongering anti-science that is just so damaging.
Do I think cancer treatment should be structured more holistically? Yes (in the actual sense of well-rounded and complete, not mumbo jumbo). Realistic prognoses, nutrition, strategies for managing pain and stress… these should all be a part of the treatment package and the different parts should be in touch with each other. More and more hospitals are moving towards this model (e.g., the new Duke cancer center has everything under one roof, is designed to be calming and beautiful rather than flourescently sterile). But that doesn’t mean that radiation and chemo aren’t central to curing cancer.
A study recently came out suggesting that more than half of cancers are bad luck, meaning statiscally during cell division there’s whatever percent chance something goes awry. Genetics and environmental factors matter too, obviously, in some cancers more than others. You can manage your behaviors and environment to lower your risk, but you can’t definitively cause it, you can’t prevent it, and you certainly can’t cure it once it’s there.
I wish you and your mother all the best and hope that last week of chemo does its job and she’s back on her feet soon. To everyone else dealing with cancer in themselves or loved ones, I send you love as well, and fortitude against well-meaning suggestions of juice cleanses.
So much this. I related to this piece a lot, because my mother died from cancer not too long ago. She was diabetic and struggled with being overweight for many years. In the aftermath of her death, it was hard to watch people judge her for her decisions in life. My sister, in particular, seemed to condemn her for not being healthier. But there is no family history of cancer. She was one of those “bad luck” cancer victims, and could have never predicted it, nor could she have done anything to prevent it. That said, I do wish she had gone for screenings more regularly (mammograms, colonoscopies, etc.) because had they caught it earlier, she may have stood a chance. I think so many of us need to let go of the illusion that our health is 100% in our control, and the guilt that goes along with being less-than-“perfect.”
Yes, me too fully agreed about the illusions of control over health. My mother also died from one of those one-in-a-million bad luck cancers. While she was undergoing chemo, I had a really hard time not pushing full-fat ice cream and soups chock full of protein powder on her (because she desperately needed calories and found it very hard to eat). But ultimately, just as important as her doing the dietary things that might help her body, was her just being as comfortable as possible in the time that remained to her. Some cancers aren’t curable. In many cases, making the dying person’s last weeks full of effort and judgment is futile as well as unkind.
Also, when you do chemo, you feel incredibly weak. My mother also stopped watching tv or movies because she didn’t have the energy to follow the plot. And you know what, that is totally okay. It’s not a sign of “giving up,” it’s just being genuinely sick and husbanding your resources. I felt like this piece also judges her mother for not keeping the map out or not watching tv or not being chipper — but she is feeling very very weak so why should she have to right now, instead of resting? She doesn’t have to put on a show of chipperness just to make her daughter feel better. If I were the sick person, I would feel so alone if my daughter reacted that way.
And the way chemo works, the mother is probably going to get better soon if her cancer was removed surgically — it’s always worst in the week or two after the chemo as your body catches up to all the damage done it.
The terrible, implacable fact of cancer is that for the most part, it just happens. We want to think we have control over it, but we don’t. It isn’t the doctor’s fault your mom is feeling sick, it’s cancer’s fault.
I hope your mother recovers fully and quickly. She seems like a lovely and remarkable person.
This is beautiful. Well done. Fucking cancer.
I can understand why it feels a little like a betrayal to have one’s mother suddenly seem to reject all these values and practices that she formerly believed in so much that she raised a child (the author) using them. I imagine that sense of betrayal is made up a lot of fear, not just the fear of losing one’s mother, but fear that practices from one’s childhood that one finds comfort in as an adult may not save a person from horrible things (like cancer, like death).
I think there was a way to express this fear without sounding naive and condescending, but this piece missed the mark.
I hope your mom makes a full recovery and I wish both of you the best.
What is an “anatomical memoir”?
Here’s what we do in our house. My husband has a treatable-but-not-curable cancer for which he is seen by a hematologist-oncologist every 3 months. When Dr. Li decides it’s time for treatment, he gets treatment. 3 years ago he went through his first round of chemo, his numbers have looked great ever since, and he is strong as an ox.(Knocking on wood). We have lots to be hopeful for regarding his particular disease thanks to several breakthrough treatments recently approved by the FDA. But it’s still a chronic cancer, so we’re always waiting for that other shoe to drop. During these lapses in between treatment? We juice every day, he takes his green tea capsules and turmeric capsules which have both been shown to be effective in clinical trials. How effective? Who knows. But there are little to no side effects and it can’t hurt. His friends from the islands print out info on curative herbs and teas and bring them to him at work. We try some, we forget the others. We still have our wine and our steaks and fries. We still stay up late dancing and listening to music and getting too drunk. We love each other a hell of a lot and we have the occasional screaming match. We try to find a balance every day between fear and hope, between acceptance and defiance.
No one knows how to deal with cancer when it knocks on your door. The best we can do is be compassionate with each other and with ourselves.
I thought this was beautifully written and, with all due respect to those who had a strong reaction in the key of “junk science vs. science-science” and may have found this triggering, it’s the story of one person’s experience, not advice. At the end if my dad’s life he was so often mentally adrift and physically uncoordinated, and all I wanted was for him to focus and start an argument, or burn a steak, or do any of the things I hated so much but that signaled him, and home, to me. I was supposed to be taking care of him, and I was 41 years old, but it reduced me to a demanding six-year-old: “Why won’t you play with me?” And of course he couldn’t. I felt that same disconnect and devastation here, though I hope things end well in this case.
Thank you, Heather, for truly understanding the piece.
“…it’s the story of one person’s experience, not advice.”
THIS! I’m a little dismayed that this author’s really beautifully written portrait of her mother has been totally hijacked into….what, I don’t have the words. My Dad passed from stomach cancer nearly 15 years ago but a day doesn’t go by without him drifting into my thoughts; God, I miss him.
I wish I could have written something as eloquent about him as this author has about her mother.
This is the first time I’ve ever felt uncomfortable reading a comment thread on this site.
Ahhh, I clicked away without commenting because I don’t have an opinion on the pseudo-science aspect and I didn’t want to get into it, but I also don’t want to do the writer a disservice by leaving without commenting.
I loved this, I loved the brilliant portrayal of the writer’s mother, and the interaction of families when crises strike is never not fraught with our own personalities.
The image of fuzzy hair and gaunt cheeks, oof. These are some of the last memories I have of my grandmother. It is such a personal thing, this hurt, and yet here we all are, sharing it. Life, eh?
Lauren, this is lovely.
And so effective! Everyone feels possessive of your lovable mother and her treatment now. And of your feelings about her treatment. I want you to know that I noticed a few details: that chemo was offered ‘just in case’, as a ‘guarantee’. That you weren’t suggesting kale as a substitute for cancer treatment because she had already had the treatment; chemo was being offered as a preventative measure.
And re this thread: I also know that there’s no one peer-reviewed authority for anything. I know that we resent people who make choices different from our own, increasingly so as the stakes seem higher.
I know that it’s easy to categorize “junk science” vs. “real science”, but I suggest clicking all the way through on peer-reviewed articles: get to sample sizes, 5-year survival rates, control group outcomes, asterisks. If it’s your turn, it may be worth it. Investigate how treatment protocols differ in equally-developed nations. Ask why that might be.
Or: just do what your doctor suggests. But don’t characterize your choice as the brave, proper or correct one. It’s just your choice, your body, your cancer. There is not one righteous path.
So moved by this. I know there are real people here in this essay, but this essay is also beauty and it is also grief. The “My mother likes” refrain brings me to tears, as it should. Thank you for sharing your mother with us.
It’s always shocking to me when people think essays like this are about the one right choice, or in the comments suddenly everyone becomes a doctor, your mother their patient. Isn’t it nice to feel certain? I think. Isn’t it nice?
I wrote about losing a beloved friend to breast cancer–she made all those kale type choices–for Gawker, and the comments were full of so called certainty. But unlike other friends who are still losing “the battle” she had amazing quality of life. I second A Yaggy, “There is not one righteous path.” Love to you and your mother.
I second that. I am currently surrounded by cancer: family, friends and co-workers. Although some of the cancers are the same (my dad and my mother in law both have lymphoma), all the treatments differ whether it’s two different oncologists or two different naturopaths prescribing. But there is one commonality: Everyone involved is driven by love and passion to preserve life.
That’s what I heard in your essay, your love for your mother who, according to your description of her (and her habits), extremely worthy of being loved and your love and concern for her. Thank you for writing this.
Seems like so many people really misread something that seemed so obvious… that the author was just trying to remember the way her mother raised her with care, and to apply that type of love to a situation that felt surreal. There is no advocacy here for kale as a cure for cancer. No science trying to “prove a point.” It was the author’s first-response attempt to help her mother the best way she could think of in the moment. And then she quickly adjusts and respects her mother’s choice, and tries to help her the best she can. And that’s what love is… even when there is a wide divide in systems of belief, the affection and the assistance to the best of one’s ability remains.
“I mean, how cool would it be if you could just, like, neutralize the cancer?” My mother listened as I talked about the transformative effects of food and positive thinking; as I rambled on about my own release from anxiety after a year of clean eating and bodywork, the phone growing hotter and hotter against my ear.” My father died from cancer late last year. It would indeed have been very “cool” if it was possible to neutralize cancer through clean eating and positive thinking, but cancer is different to anxiety. My father, aside from his cancer, was one of the healthiest people you’d ever meet. He didn’t like sweets or sugar, he ran long distance and cycled and swam all through his life. He was also one of the most positive, forward looking people you could ever meet. Surgery, radio, chemo, all gave him years and years of good life, and we are so lucky to have had good medical care and advice. Positive attitude & healthy living were a way of life for him, but it didn’t stop him from getting sick, and it didn’t save him. There is a lot of pressure and nonsense put on cancer patients, and I’m kind of shocked to see The Toast supporting writing that does so.
Yes, well, the pseudo-science and judgment in the piece made me feel uncomfortable, so there you are.