Shannon's Journal Discussion

[Shannon]

Hey Shannon one more question,

How did you overcome cancer? Was it through treatment or through the belief work or something else? Don't wish to get too personal, but you are definitely an example of mind over matter.

Thanks

Well I discovered I had testicluar cancer in 1996, December, and it scared the hell out of me. I tried to hide from it, using up what little serious painkillers I had around the house from my prior dental visits.

Eventually, the pain was greater than even the painkillers, and I had to go in for treatment. And let me tell you, you think getting kicked in the juts square on hurts? Think again. There is no pain like cancer pain except maybe childbirth. Or major abdominal wounds.

The doctor confirmed what I already knew, it was testicular cancer, and she sent me to a doctor who could do the required surgery. He had me get an ultrasound, and based on the results, scheduled me for emergency orchiectomy the next day (which was his day off). The next thing I now I'm waking up wondering where I am, and what the hell this amazing pain in my abdomen is.

They tell me they got the initial cancer site, but that it's in Stage 2, and that means it has spread to my kidney, and it's the size of a grapefruit. They have to send me to chemotherapy, and so off I go to Shand's cancer center. I book a hotel room, and then meet with an oncologist and a surgeon, who decide I'm going to get chemotherapy but not radiation. They tell me that I can expect my hair to fall out in three or four days, and that I'll be exhausted all the time.

I decided at this point that I was not going to take all this lying down. So I created for myself Version 1.0 of the cancer healing aid. It's designed to keep my spirits up, help with energy, and generally get my body to get rid of the cancer cells. I listen to it on loop every night in my hotel room.

They can't figure out how it is that I breeze through two full weeks of chemo with all my hair and all my energy before I hit a wall. They have never seen that before. I tell them about my cancer healing aid, but they of course only chuckle condescendingly and pat me on the head, as if I am crazy. Even though they themselves just told me they have never seen results like this before.

I'm on chemo until June of 1997. There is no exhaustion like this in the world. At it's worst I was literally sleeping 23 hours a day, and still exhausted. They tell me that if I get an infection, I need to go to the emergency room immediately, because the chemo will destroy my immune system (leave it to modern medicine to find a way to heal you by destroying your immune system). One night I wake up with a fever, and I am unquestionably aware that if I don't get up and go to the hospital, I will most assuredly die. Yet my exhaustion is such that after a moment of thought, I conclude that I am more than happy to die, as long as I can just go back to sleep. I am that tired. So I close my eyes.

But it is not my time yet, as has been proven so many times in my life. My mother, who happens to be visiting me, shows up within seconds of me closing my eyes, and discovers that I have this fever. She literally carries and drags me to the ER. They admit me immediately, ignoring an entire room full of people waiting. I don't remember what happens next, but obviously, I lived.

In June, they check and conclude that it has shrunk to the size of a golf ball, but they need to cut it out to be sure it's all dead. I use my knowledge of prediction to see if it's dead, and the answer comes back yes, but of course no doctor or surgeon is going to risk malpractice because of that, so they perform on me one of the most painful surgeries you can have, which is that they open me up from pubic bone to sternum through my stomach. They aren't sure if the cancer is in the kidney or next to the kidney, so they decided this will be the safest way. It turns out to be growing next to the kidney, and they remove it. Biopsy reveals it to be entirely dead.

My recovery raises more than a few eyebrows. That first week or two is sheer hell. I can't breathe without excruciating pain, and that's even with morphine, the most powerful pain relief drug they have. In fact they overdosed me at one point, and I began hallucinating. I asked my nurse, "Do you see that purple snake on the ceiling? And look, there's union troops marching, and President Lincoln!" They lowered my dose, which made my pain more obvious to say the least.

But after that first two weeks of hell, where they forced me to get up and stretch the severed and stitched-together-only muscles in my abdomen (and it just so happened that Tom Greene was there doing the same thing at the same time - Hi, Tom! Hi, Drew!), the pain almost magically dropped and I was able to function with virtually no pain. They had never seen this before either. They gave me a bottle full of major pain pills for the pain, but I never took one of them. I threw them away a week later. After that, the only pain I had was when I was getting too vigorous and pulled a stitch in my stomach. The doctors could not explain how quickly I healed from that major surgery, or how quickly I felt no pain. I don't know if it had anything to do with my subliminal, but it was truly amazing.

They took the staples out when they discharged me, and told me that the stitches in the abdominal muscle - I think there's like 29 or 39 of them - would dissolve. They didn't. I have them to this day, and it makes doing sit ups most painful. But I'm alive.

That's the story in a nutshell, minus a bunch of drama that happened at the same time.

Did my subs have an impact? I'm sure. That's why I thought it was worth improving the program for others.

Would I have made it without the chemo and surgery? Probably not.

The cost to me for my life was the pain I went through, and the chemo destruction of my lungs. Bleomycin was one of the cancer drugs they used. It causes thickening of the alveoli, and so I have a much lower oxygen transfer/absorbtion rate from breathing, meaning I am easily winded. My lungs are now so sensitive that I cough frequently because of allergy to something or other. It's also what forced me to make a living on subliminals, instead of doing what I was planning to do: join the Marines.

So you can thank my cancer for your subliminals. And you can thank my constant allergic reactions for the coming allergy relief aid. Things turned out the way they did for a reason, I am sure.