Tag: cancer disease treatment

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Have you thought about emotional healing?

I spent this week listening to a “Global Cancer Symposium” online organised by Nathan Crane.

Still not sure how I came across him and or the Symposium but it has been amazing. There were 4 or 5 speakers daily for about 7 days and I think now you can buy the access if you like – www.globalcancersymposium.com –

There were some amazing speakers talking about all the good things that are happening in the cancer world.

I was amazed by how much they spent talking about emotional healing as well as spirituality and spiritual healing.

Most of speakers have been in contact with cancer patients and cancer survivors stories from all around the world and mental healing kept coming up over and over again.

I then started thinking about my own cancer journey, specifically the emotional healing piece.

When I heard the words “You have cancer”, I knew it was about that. I felt deep down in my gut actually where exactly my cancer was that I needed to heal my inner world.

I hadn’t spoken to my family in years. I held so much anger and resentment inside me, that made me sick.

This is not a “poor me” statement or “why did I get cancer” statement at all.

Cancer has shown me that everybody goes through shit times in life and I wasn’t the only one.

Cancer showed me that I needed to change the way I look at things.

I needed to change me, not others, not what it had happened, not what it is happening neither what it will happen.

It is challenging though especially when it comes to family… but again I was committed because I knew this was the only path for healing. I was still desperately looking for ways to heal my body, mind and soul.

I am not going to say go and forget everybody in the world that upset you as I have healed all my wounds and forgave everyone. I am not going to say I live a perfect life now because that would be a lie.

What I would say though is be open to work on yourself, on your inner self.

I have certainly move forward, I opened my wounds up, I faced them even though it was painful and I was scared… I did it (my psychologist held my hand through it and still does it) and I am determined to keep working on it.

What about you? Have you thought about emotional healing or even what it is happening with your emotions, your inner world?

In a world that is moving far too fast, we are forgetting that our emotional state needs self care too.

I invite you to ask yourself if you are giving your emotional being enough attention or the attention it needs?

And if not why?

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Are you cured?

I went to my GP last week to get my little girl checked. After everything we went through last year, I am not sure she has got over mummy loosing her hair (she still askes me when my hair is going to grow long) and mummy not being well.

Valentina was 4 when I got diagnosed with Stage 3 Bowel Cancer, she is now 5. We read her books and explained that mummy was going to get strong medicine to make mummy better.

We were open about my treatment and kept everything at her level of maturity so she could understand everything that was going on. We would always ask her if she had any questions.

She is a very inquisitive girl and recently she has been asking my husband lots of questions about death (when are you and mummy going to die? Where are you going to go when you die? I don’t like that I don’t know when you and mummy are going to die) so I thought maybe we should take her to see a psychologist.

When I spoke to my GP – who is amazing by the way – about it, she asked me “Have you told Valentina you are cured?”

That statement took me by surprise. My GP told me “Right now your prognostic is really good and as far as I am concerned, you are cured unless somebody else told you otherwise”.

And no, nobody had told me that I wasn’t cured.

I then realised that we hadn’t told the kids these words :”Mummy is cured”, “The treatment worked and mummy is fine now.”

I left my GP office and realised that even I didn’t believe I was cured. Cancer is such a frightening word that it is hard to let go of that little voice inside you “what if?”, “What if the cancer comes back?”, “When could the cancer come back?”, “Will I have a cancer recurrence?”…

Living life after cancer is a daily challenge and I am constantly reminding myself that it is not all about cancer anymore…you can live a life after cancer…you are looking after yourself not because you had cancer but because you love yourself… you eat healthily not because you are scared the cancer can come back but because you want to eat a healing diet and the list goes on….

If you have gone through cancer treatment and you are ok now, have you told yourself you are cured? Have you told your love ones, you are cancer free now?

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Have you thought about how you would like your health to be in 10,20,30 years time?

After my bowel cancer diagnosis, I started reevaluating my whole life and the way I treated my body became definitely my focus.

I am ashamed to say I hadn’t been looking after my body, mind and myself as a whole for years. I didn’t even know what selflove was, I truly didn’t…but when the certainty of living a long life was taken away from me, I couldn’t help but become obsessed about finding ways I could help my physical body to heal, ways to sort what was going on in my head/mind, how I could get everything back into balance.

I knew I had to make some drastic changes on how I was living my life if I wanted to survive chemotherapy and stay cancer free. All of a sudden, nothing else really matter to me, literally nothing, our financial situation, work, our house, any material things around us except what I ate, how much I exercised each day and whatever else I was doing for my body and mind daily.

I connected to my inner will to live, to survive and to thrive. For me this was the wake up call I needed but shall we need a wake up call to value our health a bit more? Don’t we all need to think how we want our health to look like in the next 10,20,30 years time?

Part of me thinks it was easy for me to make all the changes I did as I was told I had Stage 3 Bowel cancer but part of me thinks was it really?

When I hear people talking about their small ailments, I wish I could shake them and say: this is your body trying to tell you something? Why don’t you listen? Why don’t you stop what you are doing and focus on yourself, on your inner voice?

For me it is quite evident now that we have our values reversed nowadays. We would rather spend money on a new dress rather than buying good quality of food, we spend more time thinking about what to wear to a party than what we are going to have for lunch. As I get back to normal life, I am still constantly reminding myself what really matters when I get caught up with mundane stuff and I loose the connection of being grateful.

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let the time make me forget where I have been, how grateful I must be and the importance of cultivating self love.

I hope this message encourage you to rethink about how you are treating your body, what self love really means to you and how you want your health to look like in 10,20,30 years time. Our health is live anything, if we don’t put effort in it, it won’t flourish, it won’t bget better, it won’t even stay the same…with the time and the battering of each day’s life, it will decline.

Remind yourself what it is really important to you as after all if we don’t have our health, we don’t have anything.