To Your Health

I’m on a diet. Several weeks ago I met with an incredibly helpful nutritionist to discuss what I thought would be balanced nutrition in the midst of chemotherapy. Instead, she suggested a fairly radical departure from what I assumed was ‘good’ for me. Top of her list of priorities was countering, balancing and cleansing the poisonous toxins that have been coursing through my body for over a year now. When the body is deprived of the essential minerals it needs to stabilize a toxin present in your system and get rid of it, it stores it instead. The build-up of toxins in a normal body can lead to erosion and damage to your organs, bones, etc. Imagine how all of this is affected by the presence of chemo drugs! Over the years, as the build-up continues without essential minerals (few of us have as many as we need) to stabilize, the erosion makes your body much less capable of fending off other diseases, other cancers even. I’ve lived for a while with the dreaded feeling that while I may have survived leukemia, the damage caused to my body by both it and chemotherapy could haunt me for the rest of my life, constantly impeding on my well-being. Imagine how it feels, then, to have someone explain in detail how to give myself a chance to have energy and vitality for the rest of my life. I didn’t need to think about it twice. I told her I’d give it a shot.

Every day I swallow whole cloves of garlic. I drink shots of wheatgrass (one of the most potent sources of minerals). I eat sprouts. I juice vegetables. I make a mixture of coconut oil, raw honey and this green powder called spirulena that, when mixed together, looks something akin to diarrhea. I close my eyes and slurp it up all day. I snack on raw nuts and avocados. I take a knife and hammer out to our balcony each afternoon, crack open a coconut and dream of Africa and the Caribbean while I drink the sweet, warm milk.

It requires an enormous amount of discipline to reconfigure a mind that has been wired one way for years. I joke that I’m asking myself at age 25 to do what most people wait to start doing until they’re perhaps into their fifties. 25 is the age of indestructibility. You can stay out till 4am every night, live on redbull and twizzlers and not give it a second thought. I don’t drink, I go to bed around ten pm each night. I avoid refined sugar and fast food like I avoid people with mullets. Forgive me if I have difficulty relating to most people my age. My circumstance has demanded that either I sit back and accept my situation and the damage it implies, or I be proactive and take on my healing myself. I remember what my favorite nurse, Gigi, told me right before my first chemo treatment the night I was diagnosed. “We’ll be working to get rid of this cancer in your body,” she whispered. “But there is so much we can’t do in here, so much that is up to you.” I understand so much more clearly what she was trying to tell me a year later. I want a life twenty years from now that is rich and full of energy and vibrancy and liveliness. Last year, I wanted to survive. This year, I want to flourish. So bottoms up. Here’s to my health.