When Life Breaks Open — The Last Nine Months and What Comes Next

Welcome to Oncology Alive—a place where I share my lived experience with cancer, along with the tools, treatments, and inner work that continue to support my healing. My hope is simple: that my story and the lessons I've learned can offer clarity, strength, and hope to anyone facing cancer, recovering from it, or caring for someone who is.

Over the past nine months, my life has unfolded in ways I never expected. Cancer rearranges everything—your body, your beliefs, your daily rhythms, your understanding of what matters. And yet, in this breaking-open, there have been moments of profound clarity and transformation.

Where This All Began

February 21st, 2025 was the scariest day of my life.
The day everything in front of me disappeared into a blur of white noise.
"Stage IV cervical cancer."

The words felt impossible, like they were being spoken to someone else in the room. Cancer already feels like a death sentence. Stage IV feels like an expiration date carved into your future.

My first thoughts were not about treatment or prognosis—they were about people.
How do I tell my son? My family? My patients?
How do I speak a reality I could barely comprehend myself?

Looking back, the signs had quietly begun a few months earlier. Around the beginning of the year, I caught a cold. Every time I coughed, a little fluid leaked out. At first, I brushed it off as incontinence—one of those lovely side effects of being a woman over 50.

But the leaking persisted long after the cough was gone.
And eventually, I realized it didn't smell like urine.
It was something else—something wrong.

I felt otherwise fine, but I decided to get checked. My nurse practitioner raised concerns immediately, but I couldn't absorb them. It just didn't fit my identity.

I was the healthy one.
The clean eater.
The detoxer.
The emotional-release-work doer.
The toxin eliminator.
The one who lived the lifestyle I taught and believed in.

Cancer wasn't supposed to be part of my story.
And yet—here it was.

A diagnosis that landed like a tidal wave: cervical cancer already invading my bladder, lymph nodes, and rectum.

Medical oncology wanted to start chemo and immunotherapy that day.
Immediately.
Aggressively.
Decisively.

But I couldn't do it—not in the way they were offering. My intuition, my training, and my lived experience all whispered the same thing:
There had to be another way.

So I stepped into a holistic, integrative approach—one I'll share more about in a later post.

For a while, it seemed to be working. I found a rhythm. I focused on my terrain. I believed.

And then the symptoms shifted.
First pain and bleeding in the rectal area.
Then in the vaginal area.
And when it moved to the bladder… I felt fear in a way I never had before.

Within weeks, everything changed.
I struggled to urinate.
My bowels tightened.
Pain became my daily companion.

My physiology—this body I've honored and studied for decades—became foreign, frightening, unpredictable.

Fear is its own kind of illness.

Whenever the fear crept in—and it did, often—I would meditate.
I would turn on a Joe Dispenza meditation, connect with my heart, then connect with God, with source, with the field of all possibilities, with something bigger than the body that was confusing me.

I would disconnect from the pain and enter a different place—
a place where I wasn't a diagnosis,
wasn't a statistic,
wasn't a frightened mother—
but pure consciousness.

I could feel that if I let the fear take over, it would consume me quickly.
I'm not exaggerating.
There were moments I sensed that if I allowed the fear to remain in my consciousness, I would be gone in two weeks.

Dr. Joe Dispenza is one of the lifelines I have held on to throughout.
He has thousands of people who've used his practices to overcome cancer and other so-called incurable illnesses. His teachings helped me shift from panic to possibility, from contraction to creation, from the body to the field. He made me believe.

I recommend him wholeheartedly.

Meditation didn't erase the cancer.
But it kept me alive long enough to choose my next steps from a place of clarity and guidance, not terror.
It helped me stay in my power when everything else was slipping away.

As an Olympian and a functional medicine doctor, I have always believed the body is wise and adaptable. But what I learned in this chapter was different:
the mind and spirit can hold you when your body cannot.

This experience forced me into a level of surrender, faith, and inner work I aspired to but had never given myself time for.

A Turning Point: RGCC

There are moments in a healing journey when something inside you rises up and says, "Pay attention. This is the next step."
For me, that moment came in meditation.

In one of those quiet, surrendered spaces, I felt a clear message:
Do the RGCC test.

RGCC is a liquid biopsy that analyzes your circulating tumor cells and tests dozens of agents—from supplements, herbs, and repurposed medications to various chemotherapies—against your own cancer cells. It shows what weakens them, what kills them, and what simply does nothing.

It is individualized biology.
Your cancer, your terrain, your answers.

When the results came back, they surprised me. Alongside natural compounds and certain metabolic therapies, chemotherapy showed up as highly effective for my specific cancer profile.

Did this mean I suddenly wanted full-dose conventional chemo?
No. Not at all.
My intuition, training, and lived experience still said no to that path.

But this is where something shifted.

I learned about IPT—Insulin Potentiation Therapy, a method that uses only 10–15% of a standard chemotherapy dose and delivers it in a metabolically targeted way by temporarily lowering blood sugar. It aligns with how cancer cells behave… how they feed… and how vulnerable they become when glucose is scarce.

This made sense to me. And I could wrap my head around the lower dose with fewer side effects.

That's what led me to California, to the practice of Dr. Virginia von Schaefer, an integrative oncologist who uses RGCC results as a blueprint for treatment. It's personalized, precise, and rooted in the intelligence of the individual.

And my body responded beautifully.

Within two weeks, the pressure on my organs eased.
Within three weeks, I could urinate normally again.
The pain that consumed my days began to loosen its grip.

And then came the scans.

Just one month after starting treatment, tumors had shrunk by over 50%.
By the second month, the tumors in my rectum and bladder were barely discernible on CT scan.

The doctors were amazed. I was thrilled.
I wasn't just receiving treatment from Dr. V, I was doing extra work on my own—physical, emotional, spiritual—and I believe it created a terrain where the treatment could thrive.

Healing rarely comes from one thing.
It comes from the synergy of many things working in alignment.

What I Believe About Cancer

Over these months, something has become very clear to me:
Cancer is not just physical.

It's physical, emotional, and spiritual—three realms that constantly influence one another.

On the physical level, inflammation, toxins, mitochondrial dysfunction, immune imbalance, and metabolic factors play real and measurable roles. But these same physiological changes affect mood, thoughts, intuition, and energy.

The emotional world—fear, grief, trauma, stress—shifts hormones, immune function, and cellular behavior.

And the spiritual dimension—the story we hold, the consciousness we inhabit, our connection to something larger than ourselves—shapes how the body organizes itself.

These three components are not separate. They form one terrain. One living system. One person.
When one shifts, the others follow.
When one heals, the others begin to move.

This, along with the belief that the body can heal itself, has guided every decision I've made.

Where I Am Now

Today, I feel strong, grounded, and deeply hopeful. My symptoms are a fraction of what they were six months ago. My doctors expect a full recovery.

My next PET scan in a few weeks will give us more clarity, including whether I'll return to California for additional treatment.

But right now, I'm home. I'm healing. I'm rebuilding my strength and my life with intention and presence.

What's Coming Next

With all I've learned, combined with my 20 years of experience as a Functional Medicine Doctor, I feel called to create an Integrative Oncology Consulting business. My son Zac is my partner, as this has been a profound journey for him as well.

We will call the business Oncology Alive. Here on the blog, I'll be sharing:

• The details of my treatment journey
• The metabolic and functional medicine principles that guided my decisions
• The nutritional and therapeutic tools that supported me
• What I learned emotionally and spiritually
• How Dr. Joe Dispenza's work shaped my ability to cope, believe, and transcend
• Guidance for caregivers
• How to stay in remission after cancer
• The questions I wish I had asked
• And practical, educational insights for anyone navigating cancer
• Support and community

My goal is not to present a perfect story or a single "right" way.
My goal is to offer real stories, real tools, and real hope—from someone living this in real time.

Thank you for being here.
There is so much more to share.