Cancer.

It’s an ugly word.

The word in itself tends to bring an onslaught of emotions ranging from anger, pain, and most of all, fear.  Our society has learned to think of cancer as a death sentence rather than a diagnosis.

I can’t say I blame them. The most common methods of treatment are chemotherapy and radiation and even those have a success rate of only 2-10%.

When the treatments alone significantly decrease your quality of life, who wants to even take those chances? The reality is that many people do.  We’ve been conditioned to believe that those methods are our only chance to survival.

Allow me to first say that I have the utmost respect for doctors and their medical care.  Many doctors go into the profession because of their desire to help people and see them live to their fullest potential.

However, modern medicine does not always allow them to do just that.

On August 1, 2012 I was at the Phoenix airport waiting to board a flight to California. It was then that I received a phone call at 8:30am that many of us pray we never receive.

My doctor of over 20 years called to tell me that I had cervical cancer.  My vision blurred and my mind raced as the words he spoke began to become jumbled in my disbelief.  The airport that was just a few minutes ago busy and loud seemed to have gone completely.

Silent and motionless, I kept trying to think of ways to rewind time and take the words back that he said, but I couldn’t.

I couldn’t have cancer. I had already had to overcome so much in my life.  To give you perspective, I was molested by a family member as a child, gang raped as a teenager, abandoned by my father in my late teens, gained and lost 100 pounds, battled an eating disorder, worked in the sex industry as a stripper, and survived a horrific divorce all by the age of 35.

As you could see, my life had been anything but easy.  Couldn’t life give me this free pass considering I had children to raise and had only been married to my now husband for three years.  I had so much life ahead of me!

Cancer is no respecter of persons. 

It doesn’t only happen to “other” people.  It could happen to anyone.  Even for myself, someone who prided myself on being healthy and a Taekwondo instructor at the time could get it.

I sat in my doctor’s office while he went into detail about my diagnosis and that’s when he broke the news to me.

“Andrea,” he said with sadness in his eyes.  “If you don’t follow tradition protocol including chemotherapy and radiation, at best you have a year to live.”

The Bible makes it clear that we do not know the time or the hour when any of us shall pass, but hearing the words “a year to live” shook me to my core.

I drove home with thoughts running through my mind.  How was my husband going to respond to the fact that his wife had cancer? What would my children do without their mother?  How would I be able to fulfill everything that my heart desired to accomplish? How was this fair?

The fact that I even had cancer hadn’t had time to settle with me yet.

I knew that I had a decision to make.

I could either listen to my doctor’s orders and undergo the harsh treatment of chemotherapy and radiation, or I could fight it naturally and according to the plan God revealed to me.

In fact, I have learned that cancer in and of itself is not the true problem.  Cancer isn’t what made me sick.  I had been sick for years leading up to it!  Cancer was my body’s way of sending smoke signals to signify that something was truly wrong in my body.

Cancer is a result of the environment that has been created inside of our bodies.

My encouragement to you is that you consider that there is possibly a way to overcome the deadly disease and allow yourself to steward your body the way God designed.

Taken from my ebook, From Cancer to Victory