The Hidden Book

I am sitting here at Starbucks, sipping on my peppermint tea and typing away on my little Neo realizing how wonderful life is right now. I am placing the finishing touches on my book and I have a long list of people already interested in purchasing it the minute it comes out. I am healthy and happy and compared to this time last year I am rocking and rolling.

This time last year I was exhausted and near panic. I had given myself until October to find the answer to my question of ‘what is cancer’ and more importantly ‘how can I cure myself of it’. I had promised friends and family that if I did not have my answers by October that I would have the surgery that the doctors were still pleading with me to have. It was a surgery that I did not want. After all, who in their right mind wants a partial radical mastectomy followed by chemo or radiation? I was running out of time and I needed an answer fast. I had exhausted most of my leads and was now down to daily searching of the internet for new blogs, press releases, anything that had to do with cancer and its possible cure.

I was sitting in my office twirling around in my chair like a four year old visiting her mom at the office. I had my clown nose on. Yes, you read right. My clown nose. It's red and is made of foam with a little slit in it that opens up just enough for my nose. I keep it in my desk and I pull it out and put it on whenever I feel that I am getting too serious about the cancer.

I know, cancer is supposed to be serious, but I always felt that I didn’t need to take it too seriously. Taking it seriously gave it more power and I didn’t want to give it any more power than it already had over my life. So the red foam clown nose is my cloak of invisibility. Whenever I wear it I become invisible to the cancer and anything that had to do with it. It keeps me safe and hidden away from the negative emails and letters that I received every day from ‘well meaning’ people who said that they were praying for me and that God wanted me to have the surgery and God made Doctors so that they could help people like me. I always laughed at this notion that God created cancer just so that he could keep the doctors busy. This was crazy talk but I was the one wearing the clown nose!

I finished my playtime with my nose and my chair and leaned back on my desk. I was facing my bookshelf. Now, I have to tell you that I am quite proud of my personal library. I believe that you can tell a lot about the personality of someone by looking at their library or lack of one. My library literally spoke volumes about me. It said I was hopeful, always searching, open minded, thoughtful and funny. It also said that I've been a reader all my life; a propensity that I received from my parents. If you can read and comprehend, you can find the answers to all life’s questions and teach yourself how to do anything.

That’s when I saw it. A paperback that had been slid pretty tightly, maybe even forced into much too small of a space, and placed upside down. I had to tilt my head to the left in order to read its spine. The pH Miracle by Dr. Robert O. Young and Shelley Redford Young. I remembered this book. I bought it several years ago looking for the secret of weight loss and had read half way through the book and decided that the program in the book was much too hard for someone who really was only wanting to lose five pounds. Ultimately, never having been known to throw away a book, I shelved it and forgot all about it.

So here I was head tilted looking at the book. I pulled or rather pried the book from the shelf and read the front, The pH Miracle, Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Life … hmmm, wasn’t that what I had been seeking desperately to do? Reclaim my life? I started reading and it all came back to me. This made total sense to me. It wasn’t written by a medical doctor but by a microbiologist and a nutritionist. These were people who weren't looking to turn me towards more surgery or chemo or radiation. They were just explaining to me what cancer was and wasn’t and how I could change my body so that the ‘cancer’ would not be part of it any longer.

I dove into the book and when I finally surfaced for air I was a different person. I had the hope. I had the courage; but most of all I had the answers. Take a deep breath and smile. Things are only going to get better. :) Peace and Blessings.