Why again?

I’d lived with terminal cancer for most of my formative years, been saved by surgery and radiation treatment, but while I can’t remember a thing about that time, I just knew I wasn’t going through that again. It must have been so traumatic, because to this day I can’t remember my formative years at all.

So when I found out about the growth in 2024, I packed myself off to the bush to prepare myself for the surgery later that year. I lived on a farm surrounded by nothing. Isolating myself so that I could do what I knew I was going to do.  And that is treat myself.

After the surgery in December of 2024 the biopsy confirmed Ovarian cancer stage one, some doctors classify it stage 2.  They wanted me to do mop up chemo, I said no.  With the help of a knowledgeable friend, I started a parasite dump with Ivermectin and Fenbendazole, and used CDS (Chlorine Dioxide Solution) to work with the cancer cells.  I intentionally kept it simple.

Dare I even suggest you get yourself a libation! But at the very least get settled in comfortably, because this is a long story!

Of course, I cut out sugar (and sadly my wine had to take a backseat for the most part!). I hooked myself into a great eating pattern with all nature’s secrets doing their thing.  And I learnt to deal with the crippling experience of living with a stoma.  I knew I would have to make friends with it for at least a year, until a reversal would be safe and largely successful. Trust me it wasn’t easy.  I was so angry. So frustrated.  And actually, quite scared.  Those first post-surgery 3 months, with a prolonged, painful recovery, combined with a stoma is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I had moments of self-pity, depression and anxiety.  That information I shared with a small circle of people I trusted with my insaneness.

I’m such a social creature, but I knew that my path to healing meant being isolated from the impacts of other people’s lives on mine. I needed all my energy for myself. So, I put the cancer out of my head and got on with knowing that what I was doing would help my body heal. And it didn’t need me focusing on anything but feeling confident in my process.

As an aside, I didn’t and don’t see the journey as fighting cancer. I saw my experience as healing my body. Honestly, in my humble opinion in most cases, that wonderful placebo effect on our bodies does most of the work.  You tell your body its sick, sick it will be.  So to me, if you think you are fighting cancer, a fight you will get. And that very valuable belief in the brain-body placebo effect, is why I put myself into an isolated healing journey.  When it comes to cancer most people fall straight into fear, panic and chaos.  I’d seen it with friends and family, cancer started to define their lives, well intentioned friends and family fed the fear with their own fears. I didn’t want that experience for myself. Or the people I love. The farm was a good solution to that. 

And so it was until June 2025, when life took a different turn.

I run an advocacy for honey bees and through that supported a conference on Apitherapy, which LifeShine were hosting in the Western Cape.  That is where I met Dr Helen Stutz.

And it was on that exact day in June 2025 that I received the blood results and found out I was cancer free. My protocol had worked.

Everyone celebrated my success.  I’m not going to lie to you, it felt strange suddenly sharing a journey that I had largely experienced alone. There was so much interest and compassion, and dare I say it, love. I was overwhelmed by it, in a good way, but really overwhelmed, as it highlighted for me just how lonely my journey had been. Helen suggested we have a conversation some time as she wanted to hear my story. Knowing Helen as I do now, she knew my journey was far from over, I just didn’t realise it yet.

Not least of which I had the stoma reversal surgery coming up in 6 months. We chatted some and decided to do some serious pre-op preparation.

The day I arrived for my first treatments I will never forget.  I sat down in reception and felt like I was enveloped in this incredible sense of safety.  I cried right there sitting in reception.  I knew I had landed somewhere I could let down my survival guard.  Open my heart and trust in others to help my body heal itself.  Until you’ve been at LifeShine, it’s an inexplicable sensation.  And when you are unwell, stressed and anxious that feeling is an elixir for life in and of itself.

So, we started prepping for my surgery which involved continued high dose parasite detoxing along with RIFE and Molecular Hydrogen. And then we built up my immune system pre-surgery with Intravenous support, I like to call it Jungle Juice.  I’ve never experienced anything like my first IV before.  You know in the Sci-Fi movies when you see cellular transformation happening, like an energy field surging through the body.  I felt like that looks, like every cell in my body was coming alive, just lapping up the nutrition and energy.  Like there was just this force field of healing. Oh my word but do I love IV’s, my body appreciates them so much.

Like everything at LifeShine the pace is set by your body.  And what my body has achieved in healing since the stoma reversal surgery in January this year, is nothing short of miraculous.

I’ve suffered with terrible anxiety around my health my entire life.  A bad flu makes me anxious.  Lack of sleep triggers it.  It is my bodies way of telling me ‘enough’ or something is wrong.  You can imagine then, if that sets off anxiety, what having surgery does to my mind. And the surgery experience was another nightmare, for another story entirely.  But I will say this, I would never have got through it without the team at LifeShine.

All the doctors were present and available through my hospital stay of a full week.  Visits to check on me and bring me healthy support, phone calls to help me through my anxiety and my fears. LifeShine is for me a community and I made a friend on her own journey there, who stood by my crazy as I came down off morphine, who made a space for me to stay in town for the first part of my recovery. Allowing me time to heal before heading out to the farm.

And this is where the magic in my story starts. 

After 7 days in hospital, discharged, my day 1 of recovery started. Helen travelled all the way to Paarl with RIFE, Molecular Hydrogen, ointments and oils and incredible anti-inflammatory products to kick start my path to wellness once more. You won’t be surprised that my set back was my anxiety – it hit an all time high during this initial period and gave me horrible ulcers.  Which complicates an already complicated process of healing a stoma reversal.

The thing with a stoma reversal is you don’t get to just pick up your life again, you have to eat a liquid diet and soft foods for weeks to help the colon reset (which LifeShine’s Eden Eats made specially for me). I literally couldn’t eat much at all. And I didn’t feel like it. And that, combined with the sheer trauma of the hospital experience, was making me extremely anxious.

I was turning on my own body with my mind.

Dr Hilton Calder stepped in here and started psychotherapy to talk me through my trauma and fears. And we started the IV’s straight away and fed my body.  These IV’s geared to healing the damage that the drugs do with surgery and helping fix the ulcers – along with my lovely Jungle Juice mix.  So while I couldn’t really eat much, within days I was feeling amazing.

My stitches came out on day 7 after hospital discharge, on day 10, I was driving myself to LifeShine. Dr Carel Bredell treated my wounds daily.  A stoma wound is quite a story.  Mine was closed and healed within a week of having the initial stitches removed. My general surgeon was actually quite amazed, as he anticipated a prolonged healing with the nature of the stoma wound, and he was worried about infection.

With Dr Carel’s treatments we glided into health and healing with no infection.  He started biopuncture shortly thereafter and the scars look amazing. He tells me he hasn’t seen such quick and healthy scar healing in many adults, mostly children heal like this. I put it down to the full spectrum of treatments of my healing plan. And my mind was together again, because at every point in every therapy, each therapist, nurses, sisters, doctors, the admin staff, everyone at LifeShine was tapped into my anxiety, and unobtrusively managed it with me.  They would talk to me before I started any therapy.  They made time for me to sit quietly before a new therapy I hadn’t done before, just to become acclimatised to the space.  And feel safe. I know it sounds mundane, but when anxiety is triggered like mine is, that support and breathing space was a huge part of healing me, and making sure the therapies themselves could be as effective as my body needed.

I don’t know how else to express this, but I felt ‘held’.

By Day 14 post hospital discharge, I drove myself 2 hours back to the farm. And I felt great!

And then the real work started.  There is simply no point in thinking that physical healing is sustainable if you don’t do the emotional and trauma release work that effected the physical dis-ease in the first place.

So every week for the next 4 weeks I would drive myself 2 hours to LifeShine and 2 hours back to the farm; have IV’s, do the RIFE and Molecular Hydrogen, adding emotional release therapies. I handed myself into ‘doing the work’.  I have been so lucky.  I’m not new to emotional therapy release work, I’ve been using alternative therapies since my 20’s.  But I’ve never experienced the depth of transition that happens with the different modalities offered at LifeShine. Maybe at my age now, I’m in that emotional space and more open to addressing trauma.  I won’t lie to you, the first few weeks were emotionally challenging, I had to traverse a lifetime of drama as only I, being me, can expect to have accumulated. But I love every minute of it, that sense of ‘lightness of being’.  That is the healing for me now.

As I tell you my story,  it is 12 weeks since the day I had a full vertical abdominal cut and Hartmann’s stoma reversal surgery on 20 Jan ’26.  That is just 3 months. I’ve been eating whatever I want for 3 weeks. I can’t remember the last time I felt like I had even had surgery.  I’ve been doing normal yoga for nearly a month already.

Having had the same surgerical cut to remove the growth and execute what is called a ‘complete’ surgery, just over a year ago, the comparison is glaring. By month 3, I still couldn’t drive and was still in pain. I was an emotional wreck and alone. Yoga was nowhere to be seen.