Testimonials for "Confronting Cancer 2 DVD Program: Facing, Embracing and Thriving" at DrMiller.com

Before embarking on any course of treatment, it's always worthwhile to get some feedback from people who have experienced it. The patients on this segment have graciously agreed to share their experiences with the program at the Cancer Support and Education Center to inspire you and to help you evaluate how you want to confront your cancer.

My name is Karen, Karen Haas, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 29. My son was a year old. And the worst part about it for me was the thoughts about leaving him behind and not being able to raise him and what would happen to him. And I had been given a book when I was in the hospital that I think saved my life, and it was the old Carl Simonton, Getting Well Again, which spoke to to the concept that we— that there was the medical treatment that was valuable to me, but also that there was so much more that we could bring to the whole healing process. And that really spoke to me. And I didn't know what that meant. And I didn't know what exactly to do. And of course, the book gave some directions, and I was very grateful for the exercises, and I started charging through the exercises. I'm happy to report that almost 30 years later, I'm alive. I had no recurrences. I got to watch my son, who is now 29 and a half, turn into an amazing young man. So that's the happy side of it. But back to that time when I was diagnosed, Carl was in his book Actually, James Creighton and Maggie and Karl all worked on this book together. And they were talking about stress in our lives and how stress can impact our biology. And I kept thinking, I don't have stress. I'm not in a corporate job. I mean, I live in a resort hot springs, and I take hot baths, and I meditate, and I'm not stressed. But when I really started to think about it, I was very stressed and I was very unhappy and I was in a relationship that was very painful for both of us. So I'm not a victim to my ex-husband. We were in it together and we were both very unhappy, but I was clearly focusing on myself and was not happy. And I felt trapped. Trapped. And I remember a moment looking out my screen door as I'm reading the Carl Simonton book, and he's looking at 6 to 18 months prior to the illness. Was there something going on in your life? And it took me a while to uncover that, but there was a moment I remember where I was so unhappy, and I looked out the door of my, of my front door, and I went, I can't do this. This is not me. I can't go on doing this. And the answer in my head wasn't, well, then maybe you have to look at changing the relationship or ending the relationship. It was really about, I can't live. And so something in me really collapsed, and I felt like I had no options. How could I? The guilt was, how could I? You know, how could I? I would have been a failure if I'd chosen to end the marriage and take my son away from him, you know, break up the family kind of thing. So I felt like I didn't have the options that I really know now that I needed at the time so that I had the quality of life that I now seek to have every day in my life. So I think that was the major stressor for me, um, the major life issue. I, um, it was just very serendipitous that, uh, certainly the Simonton work I was working on myself, but it was very serendipitous when I discovered a program that had a very structured coursework, um, that was even more in-depth. She'd taken the Simonton work and it was much more in-depth than what the Simontons did. And in the course of that, I think there were two things that were really valuable for me. And one was to continued to hear the message that I could play a role in this. It wasn't just up to what the medical community brought to this, that I could really play a role. And the more that I began to learn and use the tools that were taught, which was another part of that, which was I could do something and then here are an array of tools. Which was great because I had so many people sending me, calling me, here, do this, go here, do that, take this, you know, stand on your head, you know, soak in cold water. And I started to think, oh, I had a million and zillion things I had to do, and it was like trying to figure out what, what really made sense to me. So here was this structured outline of very specific tools that I could learn to help myself. Myself, and I took the ones that really resonated with me. So that was number one, hearing the message. I realized that I could play a role in my own healing process. It wasn't just up to the chemotherapy and the surgery and the radiation, all of which I did. And it was so valuable for me to have very specific tools that as I began learning different tools and deciding which ones that really resonated for me, and then beginning to really practice those on a daily basis. And those tools actually have become part of my life. It was— those things weren't just something I did for the cancer. They were what I would do— was I— that they were what I was doing for my life, for my quality of life. The tools that I— that really resonated with me, that I found valuable, that I continue working with in my life is meditation. I think meditation has been valuable for almost everything. Visualization— I've used visualization to manifest many things in my life. Being more comfortable expressing my feelings, learning how to learn— having learned how to get in touch with and articulate that that I'm having, this is what it is. And then the communication tools that I was given or taught to be able to express those things to the people that it was important to share those with, and mostly to myself. Getting to a place where I could admit to myself who I was and what was going on at any moment, so that moment by moment I could check in, I could go into my body, I could feel feel my feelings, I could relax, I could just be right in the present. And so those are things that I continually use in my life. The communication skills have helped me in every aspect of my life. One of the first tools that I learned that was so valuable was meditation and then imagery, because it gave me something I could do. It was the anxiety that I would experience in the morning, waking up, remembering, "Oh my gosh, I have cancer," and the sense that cancer was way more powerful than I was, because look at how many people died and how many people got wretchedly sick. Discovering that I was powerful and I had some way of being able to communicate to my body that that part of my life, that cancer was not welcome, it was not invited, and I was clear I wanted it gone. And so the imagery process of being able to activate those parts of my body that are designed to go after and eliminate parts, you know, things that aren't supposed to be there, things that create more ill health, That was the number one first very powerful thing. And I turned to it at moments when my anxiety reached the highest and oftentimes would wind up feeling very empowered and could then, you know, it really began to believe that the cancer was just these immature, misguided, missed their genetic coding, and I had parts of my body that were way more powerful than that. and I was going to play a part in activating those to take care of me. Communication is not quite so directly— you know, I think of the imagery as going after the cancer, like a treatment goes after, kills cancer cells. But the communication skills were also incredibly empowering, and I think I think that's the piece that I took away from this kind of work was empowering myself to deal with my illness, empowering myself to have a greater quality of life. So the communication skills, well, particularly in dealing with the illness, it gave me permission to speak up to my doctors, to question things that might come along that I either didn't understand or that I didn't believe in or wasn't interested in doing, and being able to chart my own treatment course. So being able to be in touch with what I wanted and speak up about it, and once again sort of set that line. No, this isn't going to work for me. Yes, this is going to work for me. Can we work together on that? I spent the next, I guess, I don't know, 2 decades. It was an incredible honor to take those, you know, take what I had learned and be able to share it with other people and watch it, the lights go off. I used to think that, I mean, I used to, I could see the people's color changing, literally changing at the end of, you know, a session or several sessions. The fear and the anxiety that comes along with a life-threatening diagnosis is so de-energizing, and being able to work with people and watch that energy just arise in their body and their being and their spirit was— that was the next part of my healing process. Being in that sphere was so powerful, and I loved, I loved being able to share it with other people and still do when the opportunities arise.

I'm Larry Steiner and I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1978. I was 41 years old and Looking back at my life at that time, I realized some things that weren't obvious to me at the time. That is, my professional life was going fine. I'm an architect, but my personal life had always been a disaster ever since I was— can remember. And at 41, I was divorced 3 times. I was in another unhappy relationship, which I took that that's the way relationships were. They were unhappy. And in spite of that, I was playing tennis a lot and living essentially the bachelor life and thinking I was having a good time and everything. And yet I remember at times thinking to myself when I was alone and quiet, you know, is this it? Is this it? I mean, I seemed to run out of options. And then the next thing you knew, I had cancer. Now, my upbringing was the doctors knew everything. You went to them, they told you how it was going to be, what to do, and essentially they told me there was nothing they could do. They'd give me some chemo for a short time, perhaps alleviate the pain, but I probably had 9 months to a year, somewhere in there, to live. I immediately went into a huge depression. I'm not normally a person who experiences depression as a primary emotion, but I got so heavy I could hardly get out of a chair. I could hardly get out of bed in the morning. And every time I moved during the day, I'd sit in a chair, I just became fixed to wherever I was. I just felt like I weighed a ton. And at that time, one of my friends who heard that I had cancer sent me the book Getting Well Again. And when I opened it up, my initial reading of it was that this was something spiritual perhaps, and that not being my mode of operation with the world, I just got into anger, which was my primary response to the world anyway. And that book sat on the dining room table staring at me as I was in my depression, and one day out of desperation, after about 4 or 5 days sitting there, I picked it up and I started reading it and it wasn't what I expected. It made sense. And it had that magic phrase in there, "You can have a part in the outcome of whatever it's going to be." That you can make a difference. And that's what I needed because I'm a person who is active. I go after goals. I'm diligent. I persevere. Bear and I'm patient, as I mentioned, and to tell me there was nothing I could do was absolutely, totally devastating. But this book said I could do something, and I did. I started immediately using the book as the meditation even before I started in the center. I started meditating and I started immediately changing my diet. I had Lyme calling on the phone where he was in Palo Alto at the time, and I started taking my 10 grams of vitamin C, and I started eliminating sugar, and I looked— everywhere I looked I found something more I could do. And my life for a while became almost about nothing but taking care of myself and getting better. And I lived a a very almost monastic life, a lot of meditating, a lot of, you know, I did a lot of oddball things too. I went to chiropractors with the hair analysis and the coffee enemas and, you know, I left no stone unturned. I sat in the Reiki and had a telephone box and so in retrospect, I don't really know what worked. I mean, I just did everything. And they started me on chemo and from the first treatment I just started getting better. I could feel it by 10 days when I went in for the second treatment, the tumors which my pancreatic cancer had metastasized to tumors on my neck and armpit and those started shrinking the last like 3 days before I went in. I went into this, I saw the oncologist first time I met her because my GP had started me into the program with the chemo. And I, I was really upbeat. I was so high. And she walked in and I, you know, how am I doing? She didn't, you know, she just asked me a bunch of questions. I said, you know, how am I doing? I expect her to say, you know, you're doing great. And she just said, well, she She said, "We'll see." And I said, "Well, you know, these tumors are going away and everything." She said, "Oh, they'll be back." She said, "We often get that initial response, you know, but that just— you're going to feel better for a little while, but it's all going to be back." And I went into another depression for a few days. I went back to my GP and I told him, and he said, "You're not going to see her anymore. I'm going to handle you." And I had a good rapport with him. He used her as a consultant and he and I were as thick as thieves for 3 years while I was on chemo. And, uh, in fact, I had to fight to get off chemo because they had changed it a couple of times, got a little more aggressive because things seemed to work, so they figured they'd try more. And, uh, then they didn't want to stop me, you know, and so I insisted. I started putting weeks in between treatments and everything until finally at the end of 3 years I said to him, you know, what do you think? He said, well, he said, would you like to have surgery? We can go in there and see what's going on. I said, no. I said, I just think I want to stop. And he said, well, you know, it's so infrequent now with me as well, so let's see what happens. And I walked away from it and never looked back. That was the end of it. Yeah, that was in about 1982. Yeah, so that's a lot of years. In the meantime, I met a woman who eventually worked at the Cancer Center as well as I did for a while. She was doing some of the Radix work and things had to developed with us. We got married in 1985. We had our 25-year anniversary last year, and— or the year before, actually. And somehow things happened for me. It became a complete turnaround in my life as far as relationships and so on. It's just, I guess, all— All the bad things that I endured in relationships, I got all reversed with my wife. As I look back, I think that I realize about myself, as I was saying before, that I'm very patient. There's a part of me that from when I was a kid, I know how to jump up and down and scream and yell and throw a tantrum, but that usually didn't get very good results. And I've learned that when I just quiet down, let things happen, don't exert too much pressure, that I've often said to myself, you know, everything will come my way in time. I kind of live by that. That in fact, I think if I were able to live forever, whatever, everything would happen to me because it just seems to all come my way eventually. And that's always been very sustaining to me, you know, in that I don't get despondent if I don't get something right away.

I keep at it but realize it takes a lot of patience.

When I was going through cancer treatment and I meditated 3 times a day and There were many things, and that was one of them. I said to myself, you know, if I get out of this alive, I'm going to meditate 3 times a day the rest of my life. You know, well, you know, I don't. And although in all these years there have been times when I'll be under stress of some kind, situations happen, now it's a It's still a tool. I can go back and meditate at any time, and it's always helpful. I did enough so I can usually get into it right away. For me, there came a point where— a couple of things. One, I began to rely more on some internal knowing. Which is hard to put in words, but it's illustrated by what I said before when I finally decided to stop taking chemotherapy. You know, and all the doctors were against it, but as time went by, those 3 years that I was on chemo, I began to have a sense of how well I was or ill, and it just became time that I knew. What was right for me. And I've tried, in fact I do rely on that quite a bit, you know, in terms of when I have to make decisions. That's some of the times when I meditate, I'll sit with myself and just see what really comes up from down deep. No, in fact they said it wouldn't even eliminate it at all. It was just palliative, is what they told me, just to eliminate the pain for a while. I think just the fact that their expectations were 180 degrees from what reality produced showed me that I made a whole lot of difference because they admitted right from the beginning that they couldn't make a difference. So, you know, In a sense, almost every day of well-being that I had was further proof to myself that something that I was doing was working.

My name is Hope Scherf, and, uh, At about, in about 1980, maybe '79, something, my regular gynecologist said that he felt something strange going on and he wanted to operate. So he operated and he said, "You have cancer, ovarian cancer, which had spread to the bone and into the lymph glands." Then he sent me off to the oncologist, and the oncologist said— well, he gave me maybe a 3 to 5% chance of living. I'm a rather determined, stubborn person, and I said, "No way, I'm living." The nurse standing behind him was saying, "Yes, yes!" And so a few years before, I had seen this book, Getting Well Again, and so a friend had cancer, and so I took the book over to her and I suggested that she might like to read it. No, no, no, that was nonsense. She wasn't interested. So I took it back home and when I woke up from the operation, I told my husband to go home and get the book and I started reading it right there in the bed and I was extremely determined. I wasn't going to stand for this. I was going to get healed. Then later I found through a friend, a neighbor, that Maggie had a program that was just like the book. And so, wonderful, I called her and within 5 minutes I was signed up for the program. And it was something that I could really believe in. I had no trouble with it at all. It was something that I could do. And as I say, I'm a very determined person. And that's exactly what I did, is I did everything that was suggested. I used the tools. I used everything. And within the year, I was healed. It was done. It was finished. I feel that visualization did a great deal of help for me, and because that's something I could believe in, and I still do. I can, I can still use that in many instances. All I know is is that I had ovarian cancer which had spread, and they used radiation to get rid of the bone cancer, and then they said I could use chemo for the rest. That's what I did, although still I didn't feel that that was going to be the thing that healed me. I had to go deeper, and so I visualized, meditated 3 times a day, and I didn't just stop there because I used a wolf as my helper. And I could— I can remember stopping at a stoplight and just leaning on my arms and seeing a wolf One wolf, two wolves, and then pretty soon the whole image was just surrounded by wolves. I could see nothing else but wolves, and they were all attacking the cancer and killing it without harming me. That was a big thing for me. I could see the chemo coming in, but I would also see that it would not hurt me. Me. It would only kill the cancer.

My name is Rob Roy McLeod. It was in about 2000, I had been working in a in construction, and I was injured. So I went to a neurosurgeon, and it was about my cervical spine. He did all the tests as usual, and he told me that I was— had a degenerative problem. I had cracked some vertebrae and that I needed to have neck surgery right away. And I dreamt about that and thought about bolts and plates and things going in and I have a thing about body integrity. My body had never really let me down. And so I acquiesced, however. He said, well, in no time I'm going to lose continence. I'm going to have difficulty walking. And so I went to the hospital, and they, of course, had to do their own series of tests before I could have surgery there. And my neurosurgeon called me and said, "Sorry, we're going to have to cancel your surgery and you need to call your general physician, your general practitioner." And I thought, that's very strange. I said, "Well, what's the problem?" And he said, "Well, your blood count's off." So I said, well, Okay, so I called my doctor and— who'd been my doctor for almost 30 years and we're good friends as well, and he said, "Rob, you've got cancer." He said, "You've got leukemia." And I said, "No." I said, "That's some mistake. That couldn't be. I'm perfectly healthy. Nothing ever bothers me." And as a matter of fact, I asked him if I could have the test. Get a test done again. And so I— that— after the telephone call, I hung up and I went directly to a lab, and he asked for a very quick diagnosis, and it came back. The results, of course, were exactly the same, and I had chronic lymphocytic leukemia and a really high white blood cell count. So I can really identify with the depression thing that comes from that. I didn't get any information. I didn't really know anything about it. I'm a very healthy person. I didn't have any problems. And my body had always been so good to me, athletics and everything. I don't get injured. I don't get sick. And so it was that letdown, and I felt like a relationship had been lost between me and my body. It was really hard and I became very depressed about it and then I realized that what I needed to do was to try and heal that relationship with my body. I'd gone along not really knowing who I was, what I was up to, what counted and then it became began for me was a rebirth. In my case, my leukemia is truly a blessing. I realized that I had to take responsibility, and I had a very good oncologist that my GP referred me to, and he explained what the medications were and so forth and showed me the lab tests. and I looked at all that. I went home and sat and thought about everything and what the treatment regimen would be and so forth. And when I looked at it, it wasn't me. My name was on those papers, but it wasn't who I was. And I— that knowing was so important to me. And so in order to develop this relationship with with myself, really figure out who I was and get in my skin. I knew about meditation years ago, Ram Dass, you know, I followed him and all that. So I started meditating, I started visualizing, I started reading, and really getting in touch with what was going on with me, knowing. And I needed to just know inside that what I was doing was appropriate. The doctor was really good about it. I explained to my oncologist that I wasn't the least bit interested in the laboratory tests or the results. I said, "Those are just numbers. I realize that it's important to you to have the statistical information. It has nothing to do with me whatsoever." So I went more on a spiritual spiritual quest, I read, I talked to those people, and here I am. One of the physicians that I saw at that time said, "Well, you probably have around 24 to 30 months, so get your affairs in order," because of the way it was responding at the time. And I thought, "No, I don't accept that at all." I just don't accept that, and I never did. I realized that diagnosis and statistics are so important in medicine, it seems, that who I was kind of got lost in between. And I found myself. And it was through my taking charge of that that I had to— I was responsible. Responsible for getting myself well, not this cadre of people. I'd been in construction most of my life and it occurred to me that it's like, you know, you build a house and you get an electrician and you get a plumber and you get an architect and you get a— you get all these people, but it's still your house. And all these people can help and they all have expertise and can do things that I can't. I can't do, but it's my house. And very specifically, I meditated, I changed my diet, I paid a lot of attention to eating healthy foods, to exercise, double the amount of exercise that I've been doing. The interesting thing is that in doing this and in focusing on my health, the degenerative problem that I was having with my spine disappeared. And I went to a physical therapist who used Pilates and other stuff, but I would— same thing, I was doing the same imaging, the same focusing on that knowing inside. I don't need anything with my neck. I haven't had any problem with my neck since, and there are no bolts or plates in it.