Marge knows everything. Maybe it’s because she was once a carpenter. Or, maybe it’s because she is a breast cancer survivor who used both Western and complementary medicine for her own health. Or, maybe it’s because she is now a body worker and her clients come to her for advice about their own healing. More likely, it’s because she is a consummate consumer, constantly shopping, networking and comparing. When it comes to buying tires, sexual lubricant, or which doctor to go to, Marge has the answer.
I’ve come to learn not only does Marge know all things material; she excels at everything earthy as well. Largely, our relationship had been defined in the context of growing food. For several years, we’ve started seeds together in the spring and then Marge grows them into healthy seedlings under a grow light set-up in her basement. When our hands are not covered in humus, we both love to sculpt and mold Earth’s other treasure, clay. We discuss building techniques, glazing, and our self-consciousness as emerging artists. The creative process beckons us both. Whether we are comparing our heirloom tomatoes or one another’s sculptures, we are always eyeballing each other’s developing skills.
On a professional level, Marge is a massage therapist – I, an acupuncturist. Our discussions about health are served up like volleys in a tennis match, each of us taking great pleasure in discussing the ins and outs of all probable and possible disease processes. We land questions into each other’s courts, which force us to mobilize our minds for answers. The speed of these volleys is energizing but it’s the accuracy of our intuitions that keep each of us in the game. There are other qualities about Marge that make me feel like she and I are well matched: she has high standards and is thorough and structured. I am organized, resourceful and experimental. Not only could this woman be my guide and collaborator, I finally had someone to compete with.
After one too many unwelcomed awakenings by sunrise light glaring through the metal-slatted shades hanging in my bedroom, I decided a good night’s sleep was more important than the money I would spend on new blinds. I knew I needed good sleep, the deep restorative kind, but the problem was I had no idea where to get shades so I asked Marge.
“Go to JC Penny’s,” she said without missing a beat as if anticipating my question for a week, “they always have sales and you can probably get them even cheaper online.”
“J.C. Penney’s?” I thought J.C. Penny’s was a destination for suburban moms taking their kids for discount school shopping.
“Nobody thinks about going to J.C. Penny’s anymore but they have the largest selection of curtains and shades around,” she said more adamantly.
“Wow – Marge, you know everything!”
“Hey, if you need an answer, just call Marge,” she said in a mock radio commercial voice.
I followed her advice. Not only were the very expensive shades 70% off the regular sale price at Penny’s; my husband, Craig, and I had lively repartee with the sales woman who helped us narrow down our choices in the complex and specification-spinning world of window shade procurement. They are perfect; the darkness of the room now coddles our old dog, Golda, and us in the early morning hours. I had a cave.
Recently I discovered an enlarged lymph node in my left groin signaling me that the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma I’ve had for fifteen years has re-surfaced. Craig tangles his body up with mine every night now, using his limbs and intent to rope me into my own body. He was frightened by this third re-occurrence. One night as he tugged the rope tight he whispered into my ear, “Don’t die.”
Golda, our sixteen-year-old dog, and I, are use to dealing with lumps and bumps. Golda, a spectacularly beautiful mix of serenity and killer instinct is slowing down in spite of her perpetual puppy affect. Now deaf, she lays in the middle of our path to the bathroom at night so she can still track us. She is filled with tumors in her body cavity and recovering from a surgery on her foot where a fast growing one was removed. It is conceivable to me that she, my guardian, is using her own body to absorb and protect me from the cancer. We, two older gals, have our daily routines and are keeping pace with each other. She sleeps in every morning and through most of the day now, retreating into the darkness of our cave.
When my mortality is threatened I have a routine. First, I retreat into an interior space. It is like a cave but there are no walls; no one else has access to this space – not my husband, not my best friend, not Marge, and barely myself. My interior cave is a dark space below the surface of my ordinary awareness where I am very still, and where a deep, wordless assessment goes on. I have no fear in that space. When my hand brushed over the protruding lump in my groin I knew it was time to mobilize. The time had come once again for changes. Shit, this is going to be a lot of work I thought to myself as I lay in the still darkness.
It’s when I have re-occurrences that I bring Bones off the shelf. Bones is a foot long flexible rubber skeleton that I bought at a thrift store when I was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1996. He was probably some person’s cheap Halloween decoration but he is now an old friend and advisor to me. The way his skull is permanently cocked at an angle and the accompanying wry smile always makes me laugh. Although Bones needs props to hold up his constitutionally droopy body, I place him in all kinds of nonchalant gestures that communicate his knowingness. This is how I look death in the eye or rather, eye socket: Bones relaxing in the kitchen as sits, leaning his back on a coffee cup; Bones tucked under the covers of our bed with his vacant eye sockets looking into the distance; Bones propped on top of napkins in a basket, his head leaning against the handle, laughing at an inside joke. When Craig chances upon Bones in a new location, he even talks to him, “How’s it going today, Bones? Hey – let me fix you up here so you are more comfortable.”
When I found the first tumor fifteen years ago, Yi Ren Qigong was my treatment of choice. Within eight weeks I was in remission and I still had two weeks to go in a ten-week class on this ancient healing practice. For forty minutes a day, I devoted myself to Qigong: I felt sensations of both profound calm and catalyzing heat; exhilaration flowed through out my entire body until one day I felt no lump at all in my groin. Developing the skills to become receptive to my own energy field increased my confidence in the self-healing ability of my body. I chose surgery for the second re-occurrence. At the time, I viewed surgery as a clean and efficient way to remove a mass, and it was much less work than doing Qigong everyday. With the current lump I was again faced with a choice. Which treatment modality should I use for this enlarged lymph node? It showed up on the same side that I had surgery previously, which suggests that Qigong was more effective than surgery.
The rub with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is that it never goes completely away because it is a systemic disease so it is like living with a chronic condition that likely will spread through the lymphatic system at some point. My oncologist recommended I remain in a “watch and wait” mode until more symptoms arise although I could opt for a monoclonal antibody treatment, which has few side effects and would likely suppress the tumor for two years or so. I am the kind of patient that given the choice will always choose to work with the self-healing capacity of the body. I agree with Hippocrates, “Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.” Time to talk to Marge.
It was a week later in late August when Marge and I were walking around Seward Park that I mentioned I wasn’t feeling any clear direction for how to treat this cancer. However, I did have the notion that I needed to change my body’s chemistry as a first goal for addressing the enlarged lymph node. Cancer thrives in acid environments.
I announced, “I need to cut sugar out of my diet so my body can become more alkaline. I need to create the conditions that inhibit cancer growth.”
Marge agreed, “Definitely, you need to cleanse.” Then she stopped in her tracks, arched her body like a bow and let loose these arrows in rapid succession, “You know – wheat grass is so powerful. For that matter, doing a raw food cleanse and colonics is really the only way to really change yourself on a cellular level.”
“Yeah, but raw foods just seems so extreme. I mean, I’ve noticed that the people who go on raw food diets feel great but they seem so spacey and ungrounded; then they go off the diet, do something else extreme and keep ricocheting from one unbalanced diet to the next.”
Marge looked at me again, “Well, cancer is an extreme!”
“True,” I had to admit.
That’s when Marge ran for the ball, “I know I can go to extremes but just eating raw food is a trip. And, wheatgrass contains all these amino acids, 17, I think, and is rich in protein and besides it has vitamin A, B, C, K and K. I like it. I like how it makes me feel. Yeah, I really should do another cleanse…hmmm…I need it too.”
Marge went on to describe the two visits she made previously to Optimum Institute for Health in Austin, and twice she did a home retreat where she used their program for a few weeks. The program consisted of wheatgrass in the morning and afternoon; drinking Rejuvelac all day, exercise to move the lymphatic system, quiet reflective time, and platters of food vibrating with vitality and whole nutrition for each meal. The platters consisted mainly of raw vegetables, nuts and seeds with an emphasis on sprouts because of their high enzyme content.
“Rejuvewhat?” I asked
“Rejuvelac is a probiotic drink made from sprouted wheat or rye, even quinoa – it’s not bad – you get used to it. If you’re interested I can show you how to make it. You need to drink a gallon every two days. It replenishes the intestinal flora which you need to do because you are getting colonics.”
“Tell me about the colonics. I’ve never done that.”
“Colonics are the best way to get accumulated wastes and toxins out of the bowel. You have to do a lot of them to get at the sludge built up in the large intestine. But, it’s amazing how you feel once you start dumping that mucoid plaque and guck that’s just been sitting there in your colon for years. All the puffy areas of your body like under your arms and your belly just go away. I felt so good after all my cleanses.”
“Hmmm, sounds good, strong immunity does come from the gut.” I replied.
I was chewing on her words, all the puffy areas of your body like under your arms and your belly just go away, when Marge offered to do a cleanse with me for a week and teach me how to make all the special raw food concoctions like seed cheese, dehydrated nut crackers and sprout burgers that keep a raw foodist grounded and satisfied.
Marge is so hip and so generous too. The fire element is strong in her; she has short red hair with sharp, jagged edges that flames forward. Her upward slanting blue eyes are mischievous, sometimes mocking. She has one of those enviable tight bodies and little muscular, expressive hands that animate the air she moves in. This is going to be fun. We set a start date right then and there.
It was early September but we were fortunate to be in the midst of an Indian summer so eating raw food was going to be easy and accessible since both of us have productive gardens abundant with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, and greens. Amazingly, garden envy and competition never got in the way of us sharing tips on planting, growing, harvesting and preserving food throughout the season.
When Marge and I started the cleanse, we were equipped but not very well prepared. I had quit my morning coffee and was starting to eat semi raw for a week before the cleanse but Marge didn’t give up her coffee or ice cream until the day before. I had to hustle and spend some big bucks to buy the essentials. I bought whatever Marge told me to buy but I had no idea what to do with it all. Long trays of wheatgrass choked off all the space in our respective refrigerators, sprouting containers consumed the kitchen counters and varying sized plastic bags of seeds, nuts and grains were scattered everywhere. Our Champion juicers, Vita-mixers, wheat grass juicers, and dehydrators usually relegated to taking a backseat to other appliances were now front and central to our daily culinary operations.
I called on Marge constantly, “I was reading about the Rejuvelac and it seems like the Hippocrates Institute isn’t using it anymore because they did testing on it and found it had bad bacteria in it. Do you think we should still drink it?”
Marge had the supposition that it could be a money thing with the Hippocrates Institute. Then she responded dryly, “Just do the program Joyce! And just stop researching so much - you are going to end up knowing more than me.” Her logic, as always, was sound, “Rejuvelac is a fermented drink so why is it different from all live cultures which has diverse microorganisms in it?”
“True, I replied, “What makes it any different from eating sauerkraut which has bacteria from the air? It has a tangy flavor – with these hot days, I don’t have any resistance to drinking it.”
“Yeah – I think it’s fine,” Marge concluded.
Although we were using the basic program from the Optimum Health Institute, we made many adjustments because we did not have the luxury of being on retreat and dedicating all our time to ourselves. Marge and I both saw clients and ran errands during the week. Marge decided she was going to drink more green juices throughout the day to keep her energy up. I anchored my meals with avocados even though I knew sprouts should take up more of my plate. And, I decided to eat fruit in the mornings because our grapes and blackberries were ripe and delicious. Some natural medicine practitioners suggest that a cancer patient should eliminate all fructose, even those found in fruit, but others view fruits as having a cleansing effect on the body. Marge thought it was fine to eat a little bit.
I told my husband that he was going to be on his own for meals during the next week or two so he needed to do his own shopping and preparations. Craig was familiar with this scene: He had cured abscessed acne on his face and back when he was eighteen years old with a strictly raw food’s diet. After that experience, he ate raw food for nearly two years.
Two days into the cleanse, he came home and started making his dinner when he realized he only had about six square inches of counter space available to him.
“I think I’ll just grill meat outside and, tell you what, I’ll eat out there too,” he said generously.
I gratefully agreed since I was on a steep learning curve, which took all my attention. There was a constant need to rinse sprouts, soak seeds, conduct daily food experiments and of course, check-in with Marge by phone. Being consumed with this new food alchemy brought fullness to my otherwise very low caloric days. For the next two weeks, Craig found satisfaction as he sat hunched over his dinners, with jackknife in hand, eating his “caveman” diet of grilled meat and raw veggies outside by himself while inside the kitchen, I managed my metabolism with a mixture of desperation and creativity. He was losing weight and energized by his diet, and feeling more secure about my survival as he watched my daily productivity increase and artistry with our garden food amplify. He was grooving on what was trending in our home. We have always had the knack of staying in parallel, moving towards change, side by side.
Marge thought we should schedule three colonics in one week with Gloria. It is typical when doing a cleanse to have colonics spaced closely together. We drove together and caucused about our physical and emotional reactions to the cleanse, and shared intimate information on all intestinal matters, specifically - color, shape, volume and frequency.
I assessed myself, “I definitely feel altered but stable. I had a bowel movement the day after the colonic. I love not having any attraction to sugar. I can just walk by a chocolate chip cookie. It’s the first time in my life that I don’t have any cravings. None! Zip! It’s as if I’m feeling what real hunger feels like and I can satisfy it with whole foods. I feel so free.”
Marge confessed, “I feel like crap; I’m feeling so spacey, and bloated – eck, I haven’t had a bowel movement since the last colonic. I feel awful. I don’t know what’s going on….this never happened with my other cleanses.”
“Maybe your you don’t have enough digestive fire in your middle burner to handle cold food? Chinese medicine speak for maybe your intestinal flora isn’t transforming and assimilating the raw food? Maybe you should be taking probiotics? Maybe I’m stressing you out with all my questions,” I teased.
Marge shared that it made a big difference for her in the past to be in a totally supportive environment like the Optimum Health Institute when she did her cleanses. We both found it hard to see clients and be on a cleanse at the same time because we were struggling to keep up with our own metabolism, never mind anyone else’s issues. Being able to concentrate, listen and attend to the needs of one’s own body can be life changing for individuals who use their energy to be in service to others. Healers are often excellent at diagnosing and treating others yet struggle to read their own body signals. We spent much of our car rides reflecting and questioning each other, puzzling out our different health issues and reactions to the cleanse and then alternately discussing how we would preserve our tomatoes and what we might plant for cover crops. Marge convinced me to try wheatgrass as a cover crop on one of our drives to the clinic.
On our first visit, we went back and forth like goofy young girls about who was going to get the colonic first. I suggested Marge go first since she was having a headache. Marge countered with a twisted sympathetic tone, “You go first – you have cancer.”
“Oh, you are sooo good!” I laughed as I moved towards the door of the clinic.
Gloria, a stately black woman with quiet dignity in her early sixties, was a colon hydrotherapist with many years of experience. With just the right proportions of instruction and sensitivity, Gloria handed me the sterilized disposable plastic fitting for me to insert approximately two inches into my anus. There were five different metal knobs to my left, which she periodically turned as warm water filled my colon creating peristalsis and then emptied out while I maintained my own internal self-talk about relaxing and letting go. I rode the waves of mild discomfort turning into ease as she did reflexology on my feet and pressed her hands down on my belly. There was no smell but there were visuals. Through a mirror, I could see the contents that were being eliminated – small brown chunks and earth tone particles rushed in water through a clear tube on their way to the septic system.
Gloria started informing me about how this whole colon business works, “If we maintain a healthy diet of eating live foods, lots of fruits and vegetables, drink enough water, exercise, limit stress and keep the intestinal flora at a good balance, ideally, we should have a bowel movement after each meal or your output in bowel movements should be equal to your input – meaning, food intake. But everyone should have at least one bowel movement a day.”
“So, the hardened buildup of fecal matter that adheres to the walls of the colon is why we don’t eliminate as frequently?” I ask.
“Yes. “Anything with white flour and dairy, the mucous forming foods, causes the fecal matter to stick to the colon. Every time you have a bowel movement, it leaves a residue and gets hard over time.
“Yuck….so with colon hydrotherapy, we’re kinda washing the insides of the colon?”
“Yes, because once your colon is super hydrated, it loosens and moves the old stools out of crevices and pockets. It’s like when you soak a lasagna pan overnight and it loosens up the hardened stuff on the sides of the pan – it’s the same with how water helps remove the buildup from the walls of the colon. Water in, waste out.”
“So – what will keep my colon clean after these initial sessions?
“It' a good idea to get your colon washed out at a minimum seasonally and eat naturally fermented foods or take a good probiotic supplement. Especially, if you have been taking antibiotics, antidepressants, steroids, birth control pills, and pain medications. These medications either affect the natural peristalsis of the intestines or the good intestinal flora in the gut.
“I eat fermented food so I’m getting my probiotics that way. I don’t take any medications.” I say proudly. “I was wondering what is the role of the liver in the elimination process?”
“If the colon is congested, the liver doesn’t work as efficiently at removing the toxins from the blood. Clean your colon and it indirectly impacts the health of the entire body. Also, lifestyle and environmental factors play a huge part in our digestive health. So always be conscious of what you eat, breath and think.”
Always be conscious of what I eat, breath and think. I was ruminating on her words and fascinated by our conversation but my eyes were glued to the tube and what was being expelled from my body.
On the third appointment, I returned to the car where Marge was waiting for her turn and said, “Oh man, I got allot of sludge out today. It was really dark brown and it just kept coming.”
Marge was enthusiastic, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff you want to get to.” She got out of the car with a determined look on her face. She returned an hour later and conveyed the humorous conversation she had with Gloria after she moved her own mountain of sludge.
“O.K., Gloria – Joyce and I are always competing – in a good way – so I just want to know, who had the most sludge? Am I winning?” Marge asked boldly.
Gloria responded, “Oh, definitely, hands down, you are winning.”
After more and more sludge kept coming out, both Gloria and Marge realized that this might not be quite the victory Marge had imagined. Marge asked nervously “Is this good or bad?”
Gloria answered honestly, “I didn’t realized you had been eating so poorly this past year. I bet Joyce eats better than you.” Marge expressed her regret that she didn’t transition better for this cleanse.
“So, are you saying that Joyce won?”
Marge and Gloria laughed and acknowledged me as the inadvertent victor.
At the end of the first week, we both agreed to continue on our cleanse for another week but with some modifications. I was feeling energized; I had a strong momentum for this method. Marge continued to feel spacey, bloated and uncomfortable in spite of periodic relief from the colonics so she eliminated the Rejuvelac as well as nuts and seeds but she continued on wheatgrass, raw food, green drinks and included a fiber supplement. I took Gloria’s recommendation and did a modified Super Detox Cleanse program for the second week. There are many different kinds of cleanses but they all have overlapping principles of using simplified nutrition like fruits and vegetables and sometimes supplements as a means to detoxify the body. I took a fiber supplement with bentonite clay three times a day and did a juice fast for two days and then returned to the wheatgrass and raw foods diet for the rest of the week. Even though we started on the same program, we both customized it for our individual needs. As anyone who has been on the self-healing path knows, it is essential to listen to the feedback from one’s own body. Marge started eating warm miso soup, not a raw food but a live food, in the evenings; her symptoms eventually abated. Both of us had another colonic coming at the end of the week and were motivated to make this last dump matter.
I found myself looking at all aspects of my life through an intestinal lens. This clarity emerged: all input needs to be processed, utilized and the remainder, eliminated. From this premise, I started looking around my immediate environment and reignited the sorting process of things, some inherited but mostly acquired throughout my adult life: objects, projects, clothes, shoes, jackets, papers that had somehow gotten stuck in the intestinal colon of my home. Previously, I felt immobilized by sentimental attachments about making these decisions but now I felt catalyzed and definite about what things still felt nourishing or useful and what felt like waste. The objects designated as waste suddenly appeared as stagnant and lifeless as manufactured food without nutritional value.
It was inevitable that I would offer this advice to Marge who led a very active life, “You know, you are so busy going to this meeting or that one that you aren’t able to process the input you bring into your life. It’s like growing food but not getting the benefit of its nourishment. You need to stay home more and digest.” She listened.
I witnessed perfect yin/yang choreography: as more crap came out of my colon, the cleaner my house became. I started paying attention to small messes and wiping down surfaces, counters, and walls. I finally got around to making and using simple, low-cost, non-toxic cleansers for my home so the cleanliness of my insides would match the outside. Skin brushing became part of my routine. Before I took a shower, I used a dry bristle brush with a long handle, moving from digits on my hands and feet to my heart, increasing surface circulation and opening the pores for metabolic wastes to be eliminated. At night when Craig lies next to me, I slide his hand down the silky topography of my skin, “Feel this.”
Movement. It’s all about flow. The blood circulation has the heart, which pumps blood through the whole system. However, the lymphatic system has no pump so it is dependent on deep breathing and exercise to circulate materials through the lymph; the diaphragm and skeletal muscles push the flow. To increase my own lymphatic flow, I jumped on my mini-trampoline to music after a shot of wheatgrass each morning. Wheatgrass helps to rebuild the blood stream so it can handle the toxins going out of the body. Based on a Qigong technique of stimulating channel flow, I used my hands to slap my intestines in a clockwise direction and then slapped the yin meridians that bypassed the enlarged lymph node as I jumped up and down on the trampoline. Every morning I sprung into the air, bouncing, slapping and moving with improvisational explosions of spontaneous movement. Move. Move. Slap. Slap.
By the end of the second week of my raw food regime, I realized that this world of raw foods was BIG and it was both stretching and shrinking all of my previous concepts about food. In Chinese medicine, I learned that it is better to eat cooked food because it comes into the body already broken down which makes it more digestible. But there is no doubt that some nutrition is lost through the cooking process. Raw food is totally intact nutritionally but it wasn’t this fact alone that was starting to sway me; it was the aesthetics. The composition of color and texture on my dinner plate amplified the taste sensations into a vibrant experience for not just the palette, but also all the senses, which brought delight and satisfaction. On my plate, sliced heirloom tomatoes sat next to mounds of adzuki and lentil sprouts which sat next to thin slices of Japanese cucumbers which sat next to freshly fermented sauerkraut which sat next to slices of avocado which sat next to another mound of mung sprouts. Radish sprouts, fresh basil, and thinly sliced red radish roots and red onion were sprinkled over this plate of glistening abundance and fresh flavors. My own brand of Marge’s dehydrated seed crackers acted as fins for this whale of a meal. Although later, I made more complex raw food recipes, I always found satisfaction with the sincerity and directness of simple foods on a plate.
Without eating any starches or gluten or grain carbohydrates, I feel energized, clear and focused. In a word: efficient. Gone are the gucked up sensations and constant distraction of cravings for stimulants, mostly in the form of sugars. When I go shopping for food, I just buy actual food, the actual building blocks of nutrition like seeds and beans, legumes and grains for sprouting, nuts, fruits and vegetables, no filler or processed food, nothing packaged except coconut and olive oil. I didn’t mind paying more for these items because the volume of my shopping cart was reduced to a quarter of its previous size. Now I am able to process all the food I need in my own kitchen: How basic, how simple! In the evenings I watch fewer independent films and documentaries and more You Tube videos on raw food preparations. Reading recipes in the evening allows me to try out something new the next day.
By the end of the third week of this odyssey, I had various sized crocks and jars filled with fermenting cabbage, tomatoes and peppers. I was sold on the advantages: the fermentation process pre-digests the raw food so the nutrients and minerals are more bio-available once it is in the gut and nutrients like B-Vitamins are generated during the fermentation process. It’s also a preservation method that earns its own keep; no additional energy source like electricity is needed to maintain it. My creativity had its own ferment, and kept bubbling up to the surface of daily domestic life. Craig was enthusiastic too. When he tasted my golden colored seed cracker made of pumpkin, sunflower, sesame and flax seeds with onion, garlic and tumeric, he said, “Wow, this is real food - I never need to eat any junk food again.” As a health practitioner, I knew this information on an intellectual level but now as I began to master the methods of raw food preparation, I was experiencing the power of raw foods in action: I was having a physical revelation that was changing me.
I had been progressively losing weight over the first two weeks of the cleanse but when I had my very last colonic, and saw the volume of dark sludge washing away through the clear tube, I knew a shift had happened. I did indeed lose those puffy areas: my belly and butt flattened, my breasts shrunk a size, my thighs became leaner and those bags under my eyes collapsed. Also, my sense of smell, long disabled, returned and the menopausal hot flashes disappeared. Over the last twenty years, ten pounds had slowly drifted and then settled on to these areas so I felt an incredible sense of return to a younger body. A 52-year-old woman’s dream comes true. I started feeling the same sense of exhilaration I felt when I was doing Qigong during my first remission. While the tumor still resides in my groin, I have a recognizable kind of energy, creativity and trust in myself, which are all markers that I am on a self-healing path. Feeling healthy and confident while eating gorgeous food, and having a guide like Marge to accompany me on this journey, is the only way to live with cancer.
Marge was right once again.
Just Ask her: margaret.justaskmarge@gmail.com
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