[Wandatime]

In advance, sorry for the long post!

Advocate, advocate, advocate! Do your own research. Ask questions. If you have cancer or any other life threatening chronic illness, make lifestyle changes to your diet and exercise and take appropriate supplements. If something sounds wrong, ask for another opinion. And another.

Why? Doctors mess up sometimes. Sometimes more than one doctor messes up with the same patient. Like this:

1. So sorry, Sheldon you have stage IV lung cancer and only six weeks to six months
2. Oh, no our mistake, it is fast growing stage IV mantle cell lymphoma, we'll stick with the six months to maybe two years
3. Oops, never mind, it is B cell lymphoma, we may be able to fix that. Boy, we sure are glad the chemo treatment is the same as for the other two misdiagnoses
4. You are in complete remission! Yay!
5. Oh, sorry, you are not in remission, your cancer metastisized into brain tumors
6. We can fix that with gamma knife!
7. Oh, sorry, we can't fix that with gamma knife, you need whole brain radiation
8. You may never walk or talk again because the tumors were so large

The times he was in the hospital I moved in too. I stopped a nurse from mixing two chemo drugs in his IV line that would have killed him. I hunted down nurses, and sometimes doctors. I asked questions, and more questions. I said no a lot. I said he needs help a lot. I cried a lot. I got mad a lot. I was in the cafeteria and saw the doctor that said Sheldon had stage IV lung cancer and I managed not to choke him. I told some nurses to leave his room and never come back. I brought some nurses gifts, they were so angelic. It was a long roller coaster ride and I hated every second of it. But if I hadn't been on that ride with Sheldon I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt he would be dead.

It took Sheldon six months to go from using a wheelchair for taking more than fifteen steps clutching the wall to running up our long driveway with a twenty pound sledgehammer. He worked his ass off to get there.

He ate so clean he lost forty pounds. He quit drinking, quit eating sugar of any kind, quit eating any meat except organic chicken and fish, did yoga, meditated, drank tons of water and carrot juice, and took supplements, lots of supplements. He learned to juggle scarves to train his eyes to work right again. He did Lumosity games to train his brain. The sledgehammer was to help with his balance issues. So was the Bosu ball. The doctors recommended NONE of this, despite us asking numerous times if there was anything we could do to help fight the cancer and its effects. The closest they came was saying that sometimes a plant based diet seems to help.

If you don't advocate for yourself, learn for yourself, take care of yourself, you are putting yourself at the mercy of people. Fight for your health! It is your most precious asset.