Dot-to-Dot

My four year old currently loves doing dot-to-dots and mazes. I used to love them too. It has a sense of achievement and satisfaction once you're through them, and you go on to the next one.

My journey for cancer is kind of like that too. Every day it's getting clearer and there are small achievements, that I hurray for in my heart. But not only that, a year ago, I had no clue about gut health and microbiome, nor the energy of each cells, and what all these different therapies are good for. I knew of course, they were good for something, but mostly in my mind, it was the trendy woohoo hippy dippy thing to do when you don't have better things to do. Homeopathy, Chinese Medicine, meditation, gong therapy, qigong, and everything else.

At first, the thought of having cancer was terrifying, shameful, and uncontrollable, that it just felt like this vicious monster will soon take my life away from everything. Then it started feeling awkward as my doctor seemed to be controlling this, and not the monster nor me. That's when my instinct started popping question marks, and uneasiness in my head. When the cancer relapsed third time around, I felt deceived by Western medicine because even the doctors were not controlling this, couldn't explain why it keeps on coming back, even after going through surgeries and the aggressive treatments. 

Since then, I've looked into so many paths. I am not ruling out Western Medicine but I just knew that just relying on doctors, Western medicine, is not the right answer. It's my F*ing body, duh. Why let other people even try to take control of it?

Now the dots are starting to connect. I've gradually changed my diet, it's not perfect nor is it ideal, but at least I didn't cut out so many things that I have burning desires to eat certain things, which will then turn into stress. I love cooking, so I've signed up for macrobiotic cooking classes, vegan cooking classes, and started fermenting many things on my own. I've started to regularly meditate. I increased my exercises, started pilates (all about alignment!) but I let myself give excuses when I don't want to. I go see my Chinese medicine doctor, get my acupuncture and mushroom tablets, go see a masseuse to get lymph drainage massages, and go see a lady who can detox my mental side of things and pray. List is still long, and I'd like to try many more.

The whole point is, the Western medicine doctors will do their best to fix your problem, but mostly will not look at the whole picture, the whole body, and balance. So you need to be on top of it all.

It did help, that my daughter was getting older and was getting more social. Playgroups, nurseries, many classes, birthday parties, and playdates. I needed to be present too. I couldn't hide the fact I was going through tough treatments, my physical appearances had changed too, so I started to talk about it (this wasn't easy though!!).

WOW, after that, love, help and support just came rushing through. Mummy friends and friends of friends had diverse, vast network that I didn't know about. All the "you should look into this", "you should talk to this person"s!! They took my daughter in for extensive play dates, and fed her while I rested or make my time to myself. I am ever so grateful of all of them, because it definitely accelerated my research into the outer world, but also learned that I need to deal with my inner self too.

Now, I want to think, I'm taking control of my body, not completely but far way better than a year ago. I monitor what goes in and out, I observe my inner feelings and sensations, and I accept my situation but learnt not to punish myself for it. Biggest thing is, I've also learnt to accept any support I can get.

It'll be ongoing, but I hope I can share what I've learned or experienced, but at the same time, hope to widen my horizons even more through this community too.

*This was written in December 2019, before the pandemic and things turned around. I was finally able to re-open this blog and post it in December 2020.