Wellness Plan

My wellness plan was also my cancer protocol. After being diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer I decided to devote myself, my body, my mind to heal itself. This meant meditation, tai-chi, healing by drumming, Qichong, exercising, and eating mostly plant food. I felt that I accomplished this very well and today am doing quite well in my cancer program. I contacted a naturopathic oncologist to help with all of this and to provide support with supplementation to boost my immune system and antioxidants. I also availed myself with naturopathic treatments such as vitamin c infusions. I also believe that cancer is a mental disease as well as physical one so incorporated programs to promote mental healing as well. Changing one lifestyle's is not an easy program but I feel, today, that it helped save my life. I did not avail myself to the traditional chemotherapy but concentrated of doing things that would help my immune system work more efficiently. In my experience, wellness planning must be based on a person's individual needs and meet the survivor wherever she is in her journey to recovery. It must also be flexible, and change as the survivor changes. Thus, while there are many dimensions to a comprehensive wellness plan, including physical, medical, emotional, social, and spiritual ones, a survivor's journey to wellness may not initially include all of these dimensions, and may start with any that seem most important.

For me, I started with the emotional and spiritual dimensions. I realized that my mind and body were very much out of balance, and that I needed to examine the patterns I had established throughout my life that were enabling bad habits in my body to lead to physical manifestations of deep emotional and spiritual blockages. I wrote about this recently in my blog: thrive-after-cancer.com. The brain is a pattern-making machine, and I initially embarked on "rewiring" the channels in my brain. This is work that continues everyday for me.