Episode 035: Empowerment During Cancer
Sep 20, 2018•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
Let’s be honest, it’s hard to be positive when cancer has turned your entire world inside out, but we can still look for ways to focus on things that make life a little bit easier, things that give you joy and sharing good times with people that you care about. That’s what we’re talking about today with Ros - she is a cancer survivor who is incredibly passionate about healing and wellness and wrote a book called: "Laughing at Cancer: How to Heal with Love, Laughter, and Mindfulness". Here are some things we cover today:
Reframing the way we perceive cancer
Staying connected in these trying times
The healing power of laughter and mindfulness
and much, much more!
Links
Laughing at cancer
LaughLife Wellbeing Programs
CancerAid: Australia’s No.1 Cancer Management and Support App
Episode 021: Laugh Your Way To A Better Life Despite Cancer
Full Transcript
Joe: Ros, what I want to start with first is, I want to ask you how did you find out that you had cancer?
Ros: I had some mucus and blood in my stools. As much as I was concerned, I wasn’t really alarmed because a couple of years before that, I’d had a Yardi Parasite, which we think we got from a family holiday in Thailand. I just thought, “All right, I picked up another parasite.” I went to the doctor and I’d actually done a stool test and nothing came back. Anyway, the symptoms just kept getting more and more, and the doctor, she didn’t know what to do with me. She said, “Right, let’s just get you checked out. I really don’t expect them to be able to find anything, but we’ll just do it. Peace of mind.” I had a colonoscopy and woke up from the anaesthetic, and the gastroenterologist said, “You’re one lucky lady, we just removed a polyp, but all looks well. See you later.”
Joe: That’s a good start.
Ros: Yes, well, there was no story then. Then four days later, or five days, I can’t really remember, but basically, the gastroenterologist knocking on the door saying, “Really sorry, got that wrong, it’s actually really nasty and there are some cells outside that polyp. Really need to refer you onto a colorectal specialist to see what your options are.” That’s what I did. I went along to the colorectal specialist. I had my 43rd birthday spent in his consulting suite. I was essentially given three options. One was, to do nothing more and to just keep my fingers crossed that the cancer hadn’t spread.
The second option was to do a partial bowel resection, which would have most likely dealt with the situation but again, no certainty because even with all the advances in medical technology, the only way to assess the length in the bowel, is to do a full bowel resection. You can’t access the length any other way. The only way that I could with 100 percent certainty know what we’re dealing with, was to opt for a bowel resection. That entailed, because the polyp was in my rectum and very low down, it’s quite difficult for healing. I was told I’d be getting a temporary ileostomy, so that bag that sits on the outside of your stomach for three or so months during the healing.
Joe: Crap.
Ros: Yes, crap on the outside. Sorry, Joe, I joke. I asked the question that nobody really wants to ask and once you’ve asked, you think, “Why did I ask that?” I said, “Do you have any idea as to how the likelihood or the percentage of the cancer having spread?” He said he didn’t, he said it could be two to three and then I saw another specialist a week or so later or within that week and he thought maybe three to five. Nobody knew. At the time, I thought, I was lecturing in health promotion. Done a Master of Public Health. I’ve done quite a bit of work with statistics and I hate statistics.
When we talk about statistics, when it’s someone else and when it’s a population, one/two/three percent, it doesn’t sound that much.
