Chapter Seven – A Late Night Letter to Oprah

    I left Scott sleeping in our bed and pulled the door of our bedroom shut. I silently made my way downstairs. My laptop was still on the kitchen table where I had left it, and the light of the screen was now a beacon for me in the darkness. It was as if it were saying to me, "Glad you're back. Have a seat. Let's do some more research."

    I accepted its invitation and pulled my chair up to the table, typed in 'cancer cures' onto my Google homepage and waited for the results. Scrolling through the pages and pages of today's new offerings I found a few seemingly new ones that offered me a couple of moments of hope only to find out that they were just reactions to a blog or someone trying to sell 'an amazing new ultra miracle product from deep in the Amazonian rain forest that had been harvested by an ancient civilization 5,000 years ago that will cure everything under the sun including poor self esteem with just 4 small drops under your tongue once a day at the amazingly affordable cost of $200 a bottle.' It was another scam that will 'shockingly' get people who are desperate to try anything typing in their credit card numbers and waiting at home for that miracle cure.

Do these companies that tout this stuff realize what they are doing to these people? Maybe they did believe in their product. Maybe they did believe that they were giving hope to people out there. But what if it didn't work? Then what?

    I had had enough researching for the day. I was tired but I knew I couldn't sleep. I would just lie awake thinking about my cancer challenge. I decided that I would watch a movie instead.

    I made myself a cup of tea and went to the DVD player, slid the DVD in and fumbled a bit for the play button.

    I recognized it immediately. It was my video copy of "The Secret". I had not watched it in quite some time but had loved the movie the first time I had seen it online. For the next 90 minutes I sat watching the movie again and forgetting about my diagnosis. For 90 minutes I was just a regular human being trying to get motivated about life and living. The movie worked. It made me realize what I had known all my life. Thoughts became things and the human mind is more powerful than we give it credit. I was filled with hope once again! I was ready to tackle this disease.

    So ready in fact, I turned off the television and went back to my computer to do more research. I was certain that I would find my 'cure'. I was so sure that this was going to happen.

    I went back to my search. It was then that I decided to do something that was out of character for me. I went to the Oprah Winfrey Show website. On the website it had a question to Oprah's viewers asking them to write and tell the show how the movie "The Secret" had changed their lives. Well, it hadn't changed my life yet but I knew that it would very shortly so I gave it a shot. I began to type …

I watched the Secret for the first time back 2006 (way before most of the world knew what it was). I stumbled upon the website while I was researching information for one of my magazines. It was 2am and the first time I saw it online I was like Oprah when she said "I've always lived my life this way and didn't know that it was a Secret'. Well, shortly after The Secret aired on Oprah I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I was shocked but most of all I became mad. Not because I had cancer but because most of the doctors that I have spoken to (three so far) have all said surgery was absolutely necessary within the next month. I would have to undergo a partial radical mastectomy of the right breast followed by treatment. Where was the hope in something less invasive, less permanent?

After much thought, I have decided to heal myself. Most would say that's putting your money where your mouth is. Well, if you can talk the talk, you should be able to walk the walk. It's easy to think positive about things that don't threaten anything other than your comfort or your reputation.

It's a different story when the worldview of the outcome could be losing your life. I have a great life. I am doing what I love and I am making a positive difference in this world. I plan on being here a long time and when I do leave (another 70 years from now) I plan on doing it with all my body parts! I do believe that we have barely tapped into that amazing source that rules all things in the Universe. If we can tap into it we can do great things. The greatest of which is inspiring others who will follow to believe that they deserve an abundant life full of promise and potential. I'll keep you posted!

I reread the letter once to make sure that I had everything in it that I could think of and then I hit the send button. In a blink of an eye it was gone. I figured it would go into a mass of emails that would be read by someone who would hit delete and it would be gone forever. It didn't matter. I wanted to tell someone and Oprah was the person I wanted to tell that night. So from my laptop on my kitchen table in the outskirts of a small rural north Texas town I shouted my proclamation to the world: I was going to heal myself of this disease and live to tell about it.

I closed my laptop and went to bed.