Story and experience from SIXTEEN-YEAR BREAST-CANCER SURVIVOR, part 2

Story and experience from SIXTEEN-YEAR BREAST-CANCER SURVIVOR, part 2

--- MARILYN HOLASEK LLOYD ---

About two years into my journey, I found The Amazon Alternative Therapies for
Breast Cancer LISTSERV (amazon-alternatives.org), an online group of women with
an approach to preventing recurrence similar to the one I was taking. So these women
from around the world became my long-term friends, and we supported each other
through our diet and lifestyle changes. I learned early on to rely on the friends who
supported the many changes I continued to make as my journey progressed.

What allowed me to sustain my original momentum, which had started with fear?
A combination of knowledge, intuition, and faith in myself and my higher power that
I was on the right path. From the moment of diagnosis, I read and studied everything
I could get my hands on. Understanding the physiology of the body and why I was
doing what I was doing made the changes enduring. When I understood how cancer
feeds on sugar, it became easy to replace sugar with fruit for my sweet tooth. The
funny thing about knowledge is that we can choose to ignore it, but we can’t take it
away. No way was I going back to eating sugar and food additives and drinking
impure water.

Also, when I realized that cancer didn’t like oxygen, I could sense how every step
I took oxygenated my body, which made walking a pleasure. I repeated a little mantra
whenever I went walking. It changed daily but went something like this: “I want to
live, I want to be. I want to live, I want to see.” Learning to manage stress through
meditation got me through some very rough times.