Preface
There is nothing special about me. I am an ordinary woman whose life was turned upside down by cancer. I went through the medical treatment like everyone else – steroids, chemotherapy, radiation. Together with my family I went to hell and back. But I recovered, and now feel healthier than I have ever done. Why? Because I took control and made a few simple changes to the way I live my life.
My story starts with a benign breast lump at the age of seventeen. Fifteen years later, with two young children, I was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph system. After I recovered I slipped back into life happy in the belief that I was leading a healthy enough life. I wasn’t. And I was told I should never have the third child I so desperately wanted. Years later, after the second, terrible confrontation with cancer I realized I had to do something to help myself and to help my family get through this difficult time. I needed to get back some control, I wanted my husband and children to feel as if they could do something to help too, and I wanted to make each day less painful and help my body all I could. So I read everything I could get my hands on, went to all the talks and lectures I could find, and set about making some real changes.
What happened next amazed me. My arthritis disappeared, I no longer needed my reading glasses, and I was suddenly full of energy. These are small things in comparison with the bigger fight I was having with cancer – but it was a clear indication that the changes I had made were working on my body in a positive way. I realized that if you give your body what it needs it will reward you. I have now been clear of cancer for five years: ‘cured’ according to the medical profession. I feel healthy, I look well, my eyes are bright, my figure has lost its middle-aged spread, I have more energy than ever before and I am full of vitality.
I was so excited to be feeling this well that wherever I went I told people what I was doing, and how I had helped myself. Gradually people started coming to my house for classes, and I started giving talks. The trickle became a flood, and after I had lectured to capacity audiences at Ireland’s largest health show, I appeared on television many times. This stuff was working, people were getting better, and I was receiving hundreds of letters and e-mails testifying to the success of my Change Simply plan each week. I was constantly being asked for a book, a video, an information pack – anything. And eventually I was persuaded to write my story.
So here it is. I think it is an ordinary story, but like all ordinary stories it has its share of heartache and joy, of passion, tenderness and sorrow. I believe every mother will recognize the agonies I went through, and anyone who has confronted illness in themselves or others – particularly cancer – will understand my urgent need to find answers. I have met so many people during the course of teaching the health principles you will read about here that I cannot claim to have had a more tragic life than anyone. I am humbled time and again by the pain of others and by their selflessness in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. I do not feel I deserve the accolades that have been heaped upon me: I am no angel, no guiding light, no healer, although I have been called all of these and more. It just makes me happy to pass on the amazing knowledge I have acquired. I am – and I stress it again – just an ordinary woman who discovered that by making simple choices she could make a difference to herself, and others. I am conscious, though, that the suffering and pain that I went through was, in a sense, a kind of gift.
However, I sometimes think that if I have been given a gift at all, it is the gift of the gab, and indeed I am happiest when I am waxing about these few simple changes that anyone can make. My life is now devoted to telling as many people as I can about the four key steps to a healthier life. Read my story to find out why I had to make the choices I did, and read the health plan to find out how easy it is to change your own life.
The choice is yours.
Chapter One
The First Cut
When I was seventeen I discovered a lump in my breast.
This was 1971, and I can’t say we were very clued-up on health matters then. Nowadays, of course, just about every woman’s magazine has advice and information on breast care, how and when to check for lumps, what to do if you think you have found one, and so on. I shouldn’t be surprised if they taught it at school now as well. But back then, this was not the case. Not only were health issues not discussed, they were almost taboo. As a family, we were very self-reliant when it came to sickness. If one of us fell ill or was hurt in some way, my mother would ‘doctor’ us; there was never any question of going to the doctor.
I remember one summer playing barefoot in the yard outside our house when I felt a sharp stab in one foot. I cried out in pain and limped into the kitchen to tell mum. As I sat down I could see that I was bleeding quite badly. ‘You’ve stepped on a nail!’ cried my mother. ‘Come here, I’ll see to it.’ She washed it under the cold tap and reached up in a cupboard for what we kids called her ‘Doctor Box’. A few minutes later I was expertly bandaged, and with a kiss from mum I was ready to hobble off to resume my game of hopscotch. I knew I would be all right because she was looking after me: she made me feel totally secure and completely loved. The following day, before I left for school, Mum knelt down beside me. She looked at the wound and changed the dressing. ‘Mind you tell them that you went to the doctor,’ she cautioned. I nodded. Doctors were expensive, not for the likes of us. Another time I was messing with her sewing machine and managed to plunge the needle right through my finger. Again, Mum sorted it.
When I think about this now I’m astonished that none of us fell prey to tetanus, septicaemia, pneumonia or worse. We led a very rough-and-tumble existence and the boys in particular were often getting hurt. In winter if we caught a chill it was mustard baths and bed, then up again as soon as the colour came back into our cheeks. Perhaps we were lucky, or perhaps today we are all too ready to dash to the GP at the first twinge or sniff.
Whatever, I think it gave us children a strong sense that we were responsible for our own healing, and that getting better happened at home. We were a tight-knit family, and I have very happy memories of those years – my mother doing her best to give us the loving stable childhood she herself had been denied.
I was in the bath when I discovered the lump, quite by chance, in my right breast. I didn’t know much, but I had done a bit of reading – in fact I quite enjoyed finding out about anything to do with health – and I knew enough to be concerned. ‘Mum, will you have a feel of this?’ I yelled out. She came into the bathroom and felt what I was feeling. For once she did not suggest doctoring me herself. ‘It’s probably nothing, but go get it checked as soon as possible,’ she said, frowning. Go to the doctor? Me? This had to be serious.
Thinking back now to my innocent seventeen-year-old self later on that week, lying on the bed in the doctor’s surgery trying to take my mind off the examination, I wonder how I would have felt if I had been told then that I would spend hours of my life lying on beds like these. It was so foreign to me to be there in the first place – the smell in the surgery, the doctor cold and matter-of-fact. I was glad that Mum had saved me from this so far. The lurching feeling I felt that day in the pit of my stomach was to come back again and again over the course of my life, and not even Mum could save me from that.
‘It’s definitely a lump. I recommend we remove it next week.’ The doctor’s words brought me back to earth. ‘It is a fairly simple procedure. You won’t feel a thing, and we’ll examine the tissue to see what we’ve got. We need to find out what kind of a lump this is and if we need to do anything about it. Let’s see if we can get you booked in for that.’
I walked home that day, my head spinning. It was summer and the golden evening light spread in shafts across the road. I could hear the distant clack of lawn mowers and sm
ell the fresh, herby scent of newly cut grass. A bee buzzed at my head but I walked on, in a daze. This was the first time I had ever faced anything like this, and I knew I was going to have to face it alone. I wasn’t a child any more, and this felt like my first test of adulthood. What was happening to me? How would the operation work? I was so naïve, and I had never had an anaesthetic before. I couldn’t imagine how they could take the lump out and not hurt me. Whom could I ask? I thought of my friends, mainly local girls from school. None of them had ever gone through anything like this, and problems like this were not the kind of thing you talked about then. I badly wanted to talk to my big sisters – they would know what was what, but they were married and living a fair step away.
I reached my house and saw my mother leaning over the garden fence talking in hushed tones to a neighbour. She turned and hurried towards me, gathering me up in her arms as I sobbed the news. I was terrified at the prospect of pain, and the idea of having a scar right across my breast for the rest of my life. ‘It will be all right, you’ll see,’ she whispered into my hair. ‘I’ll never let my baby get hurt. Come on now girl, dry your tears.’ I breathed more slowly. How comforting a mother’s arms are when things go wrong. Although I thought I was all grown-up, I realized that so much of me was still a child. She would make it better. Nothing bad was going to happen.
A week later I packed a few things carefully into a bag, desperate not to betray my nervousness to my mother who was fussing around me, trying not to show her own fears. ‘Have you got everything? What time did they say to be there for? What did they tell you to bring in?’ I knew how worried she was but I needed her to be strong for me.
Fortunately the lump was benign. ‘It was just a cyst,’ explained my doctor. ‘These things come up from time to time. Nothing to worry about, but keep checking yourself regularly just in case.’
I suddenly realized that I had been so fixated on the pain and the scar it simply hadn’t occurred to me that it might be malignant. I reeled. ‘What happens if I get one again?’ I managed to ask.
‘The only place for a lump in a woman’s breast is under the microscope,’ he said confidently, as if it was something he had said many times before and would say many times in the future. It was one of those black-and-white statements that I have grown used to hearing from the medical profession.
I think now that perhaps I would disagree with what he said.
After this I checked myself diligently for a year or two, and gradually I found myself doing it only now and then. As I grew older I began to understand how lucky I had been, especially when I heard of others who were not so lucky. The scar faded, and with it my memories of that fearful time.
It was around this time that I met Gerard, the boy who was later to become my husband. I was young, I wanted to have fun, and I wanted to put the whole experience behind me.
Chapter Two
‘It’s Just a Big Bruise’
Fifteen years later, and my four-year-old daughter Sarah was in a frenzy of excitement. ‘Mammy, are we really going on an aeroplane?’ she cried. ‘Yes, really,’ I said, laughing. ‘Tomorrow night we’ll be up above the clouds.’ ‘What, up in the sky and all? Will we have beds to go to sleep on? Can I bring all my Barbies?’ She rushed up to her room to gather her favourite things. Richard, two years older, was a little more restrained, but I knew from the way he rushed home from his last day at school that he was just as thrilled as she was to be going on their first foreign holiday. Months earlier, back in the dreary Dublin winter, we had pored over brochures searching for somewhere to take the kids to for a fortnight’s sun. Usually we went away to friends, or spent holidays travelling around Ireland – but we felt it was time the children had the chance to play on a beach without wearing several layers of clothing or being driven into a coffee shop by drizzle or high winds. So Tenerife it was, and now at last it was July and the school holidays were here.
I had been knocking spots out of the sewing machine for weeks, making up clothes for Sarah. Always full of energy, I had felt particularly well that summer and worked late into the night making sure everything was going to be ready on time. The children’s things were laid out carefully on the bed in the spare room: rows of shorts, swimming things, T-shirts and sun hats. Sarah kept peeping in to check that her new sundress with the bright red flowers was still there. ‘Will you stop your fiddling and leave those things be?’ I kept scolding her. ‘Aw, Mammy, I just wanted to see it. Can I try it on again? Pleease?’ Her eager face and bright smile always melted my heart. ‘Go on then. I’ve got to go and wash the kitchen floor so you come right down after. Don’t mess with my nice neat piles will you now?’ I headed downstairs and got on with washing the floor.
I was in the middle of a pre-holiday clean up: I always liked to come back to a pristine house. While I was mopping the floor I pulled the kitchen table towards me rather too quickly and banged the edge of it into my groin, just at the top of my right leg. ‘Ouch!’ I yelled out, tears stinging my eyes, just as Sarah came running in. ‘What is it Mammy, are you hurt?’ ‘No, it’s nothing – just a bash from the table. Now, what are we going to have for dinner?’ I rubbed the spot and turned my attention to the potatoes. I thought no more about it until a few days later.
Tenerife could not have been more idyllic. We spent the days relaxing under a huge parasol on the beach next to our hotel, watching the children building great fortresses and dugouts in the sand, or hurtling in and out of the waves. What minor cares we had seemed to melt away in the sun. One morning I looked over to where Ger was lying, marvelling at the way his frown lines had disappeared. He was a good man, a great father. How lucky I was. I breathed a long contented sigh.
‘Happy?’ he glanced up from his book. ‘You bet your life I am,’ I answered. ‘This is just perfect.’ The kids were in heaven – as I watched them capering around I felt so unbelievably content and at peace with the world. We had been married for nine years, and this was just how I dreamed life could be with Ger and the children. At that moment Sarah skipped over to show us a pretty conch shell she had discovered. I examined its pearly interior and held it to my ear, listening for the soft sshhh of the sea. ‘Listen, Sarah. Can you hear the sea whispering?’
‘I can hear it whispering but I don’t speak sea language,’ she said stoutly, after concentrating for a while with her eyes shut. ‘You listen, Daddy.’ Ger obliged: ‘It’s a huge long story,’ he said, playing for time. ‘Is it a happy story?’ she asked. ‘No, it’s a sad story, but it has a happy ending.’ Sarah looked at him expectantly, but any more questions were forgotten suddenly as Richard appeared bearing armfuls of seaweed. The children giggled as they draped the brackish fronds over themselves and waved it at me. ‘We’re sea monsters, come to drag you away,’ growled Richard in his best sea-monster voice. ‘Get that slimy stuff away from me!’ I cried in mock terror, jumping up. After a momentary scuffle which ended when Ger out-monstered the sea monsters, they wandered off.
Some time later, sitting on the edge of my sunbed, I was watching Richard covering Sarah’s legs with sand as she lay in a hollow they had dug. Slowly he sculpted the sandy mound into a mermaid’s tail. I did not notice that Ger was staring at my legs.
‘What’s that, Bernie?’ Ger was looking at my groin and frowning. ‘What’s what?’ I asked, shaken from my reverie. He stretched out his hand and touched what was an unmistakable lump on my inner thigh. ‘Oh, that. It must be where I got that bump the other day. I was moving the table and bashed myself. It’s just a big bruise.’ It wasn’t bruise-coloured though, and it was very tender to the touch.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep an eye on it.’ We did – in fact it was hard not to, dressed as I was in swimwear and shorts. Over the next few days it seemed to get bigger and bigger, and was sore if I pressed it. I thought then that it seemed like that only because he had said it. By the end of the holiday it was as big as a golf ball, and almost as hard. Shorts were uncomfortable to w
ear, and I could feel it chafe when I crossed my legs. I fretted in silence, not wanting Ger or the children to know I was worried. But he could read my mind then – as he still can now – so he knew he had to jolly me along with jokes. ‘How’s the golf ball this morning? Is it still there? Looks like I’ll be collecting on the life insurance money any day now!’ Sometimes he even jokingly called it my ‘malignant lump’. By making a joke about it he was making it unreal, distancing it from us.
No matter how much I tried to push it to the back of my mind and reclaim the sweet sense of contentment that had overwhelmed me at the beginning of our holiday, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what this lump could be, and a tangible sense of fear started to creep up on me.
On our last day we were having a final drink on the balcony of our hotel room, watching the sunset. We were chatting comfortably about the holiday, and I was enjoying the peace and quiet, knowing the children were both asleep. Ger looked at me. ‘I know we’ve joked about this, but seriously now Bernie, I want you to get that lump checked out as soon as we get home. Make the appointment – let’s not mess around here.’ He didn’t have to tell me – I was as anxious to know what this could be as he was.
Although we had moved house I had not got round to registering with a new doctor, which in hindsight turned out to be a blessing. I drove the few miles back to Ayrefield, where the receptionist gave me an appointment immediately. My doctor was a middle-aged man with kind grey eyes and an old-fashioned reassuring manner. I liked and trusted him: he had always been ready to listen to me and respond to my hunches – something that is hard to find in the medical profession. Years before, when Richard had suffered from eczema, this doctor hadn’t foisted kidney-damaging cortisone creams on him, but had allowed me to try to sort it myself through diet. I had read that cutting out dairy products could be beneficial to skin conditions such as eczema, and sure enough Richard’s dry red patches disappeared a short while later.
The Choice Page 1