The Cancer Whisperer

Description

The self-published sensation and UK bestseller that has helped thousands touched by cancer.

“I have cancer. Cancer does not have me.”

Sophie Sabbage was forty-eight years old, happily married, and mother to a four-year-old daughter when she was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Since that shocking diagnosis, she has been on a remarkable journey of healing and renewal that has reshaped her life—for the better.

The Cancer Whisperer chronicles Sophie’s extraordinary relationship with cancer and the very effective methods she has used for dealing with her fear, anger, denial, and grief. The Brené Brown of cancer, Sophie empowers readers to reject the traditional adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it; how to be healed by it as well as how to seek to cure it; and how to be emotionally free even when we are physically curtailed.
 
Beautifully and poignantly written, The Cancer Whisperer encourages cancer patients to:
 
• Direct their own treatment while preserving their personhood in a system that tends to see them as patients more than people.
• Engage with fear, anger, and grief in healthy and healing ways instead of toughing it out, trying to be falsely positive, or collapsing into despair.
• Radically shift from being a cancer victim to a cancer listener—fostering an understanding of cancer as a symptom of other underlying causes and engaging with whatever changes it calls on them to make.
 
As authentic as it is revolutionary, The Cancer Whisperer calls for an end to “the war on cancer” and the start of a more transformative dialogue with the disease.”A brilliant new book that offers a radically different way of dealing with the disease.”
—Daily Express
 
“Sabbage charts the physical aspects of her illness with unsparing precision.”
—Irish Times

“This is medicine for the soul from a soulful cancer thriver.”
—Kelly Turner, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All OddsSOPHIE SABBAGE is an inspirational writer, speaker, and facilitator who has worked in the field of human development, emotional intelligence, mind-set change, and corporate culture change for more than twenty years.1

The Compass

Being diagnosed with cancer is a multifaceted challenge for your mind, body, heart and spirit. It is by no means only a physical journey, though all too often it’s treated as such.

My doctors ask how my body feels, but not how my heart feels. They ask how I’m coping with the side effects from drugs, but not how I’m coping with the fear that stalks so many of my days or the waves of grief that first crashed onto and continue to lap at my shore. Conventional medicine advises me to eat a “balanced diet” of protein, carbs and vegetables, while assuring me it is fine to eat sugar. My complementary practitioners are convinced that cancer feeds off sugar (among other things) and implore me to cut it completely from my diet.

At first I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know which way to turn or what plans to make. I wanted to live, so I needed a survival plan, but I had incurable cancer, so I needed a death plan too. I was the primary earner in my family, but was incapable of working, so I put the consulting business I had led for twenty years aside while I scrambled for dry land in the wake of my diagnostic tsunami. It seemed so symbolic that my eyesight had gone wonky. I could see only a few feet in front of me. Everything got blurry, precarious, vague. My ability to envision the future, which I had always found easy, evaporated quickly while time fell in on itself and then spread out like sand.

Terrifying as all this was, I was blessed in many ways. I had friends around me who did ask what my heart was feeling, and who were willing to dive down to the depths of my fear with me. Also, I had been prepared for this experience, in a sense. I am in the business of awakening the mind and freeing the spirit by enabling people to alleviate unnecessary suffering, unleash their creativity in response to challenging unwanted events, expand in the face of seemingly insurmountable limitations and be transformed by everything that happens-up to and including their last breath. So my journey after the cancer diagnosis began with the skills I had honed over twenty years, a deep faith in whatever hand life deals me, and a determination to let cancer awaken my spirit even if it destroys my body.

I drew on internal and external resources to navigate my way through a dense, dark forest of (often contradictory) elements:

Shock and denial

Fear and grief

The UK medical system

A multitude of alternative treatments

Conflicting advice from orthodox and complementary practitioners

The shock, fear and grief experienced by people who love me

The multiple possible contributory factors of my disease

The need for practical, emotional and financial support

Choosing relationships that truly support me while letting go of the ones that don’t

Making memories with my five-year-old daughter while envisioning giving her away at her wedding

Putting my affairs in order while doing everything in my power to get well

Today I am writing with normal eyesight and clear vision. I am well enough to write this book and share a program I have created to help others navigate their cancer journeys with power, purpose and autonomy.

Consider this book a compass to use when you are lost, a means to chart your way forwards in any given moment, depending on what is happening for you at the time. Like a compass, it is designed to adjust to your surroundings and circumstances, to help you find your way starting from wherever you are right now. Sometimes you will be hemmed in on dark winter nights by trees so tall you can’t even see the stars. Other times you may stand in a clearing on a carpet of bluebells, your face stroked by shafts of sunlight on a soft blue spring day. And sometimes you may even stumble upon the source of the stream from whence the whole ocean formed.

I have put the practices of this program in a particular order for the purposes of this book and because they make some chronological sense based on my own experience. For example, I was so ill right after my diagnosis I needed to stabilize my body before I could fully focus on clearing my mind.

Although presented in a linear way, this is a circular process. You are likely to move back and forth between different practices. While stabilizing my body was my priority at the beginning, it was also a key time for me to come to terms with the shock of my diagnosis, which is a critical step in clearing the mind. Similarly, I spent many hours a day in those early weeks understanding my disease by researching, reading, watching films, googling and talking to experts in the field of cancer, as well as talking with other cancer patients.

Most days, you will know where you need to place your attention, but you can use this compass to keep reminding yourself of what else you may need to focus on. This is a holistic process in which you stand at the center, holding your compass and finding your way to the outer edges of each of the practices, as and when you need their help.

Here’s a short summary of the whole system, its purposes and key steps, all of which are explained in more detail in subsequent chapters.

Coming to Terms (Chapter Two)

This is an important phase to engage in fully from the beginning. It is about getting through the shock of your diagnosis, however early or late your cancer is detected, while laying some firm foundations for the journey ahead. This phase is both practical and psychological. It involves:

Feeling Your Feelings: expressing and releasing your feelings rather than numbing out and avoiding them, which so often happens when we’re faced with shocking news.

Facing the Full Facts: facing into the full reality of your situation, however hard that is to do, because the more you know about your condition, the more power you have to respond.

Asking for Help: reaching out to whomever is willing to support you and creating a sustainable support system to facilitate your journey.

Establishing Your Boundaries: setting necessary limits around your work and relationships so you can preserve your energy for the tough choices and challenging treatments of your cancer journey.

Understanding Your Disease (Chapter Three)

Educating yourself about your particular form of cancer is one of the most important and empowering things you can do after you’ve received your diagnosis. Either you can leave this to your doctors and do what they say, or you can find out exactly what you’re dealing with and what treatments are available (or not). Then you can partner with your doctor and any other practitioners you find with more confidence, intelligence and freedom to choose your own path. This phase involves:

Asking Questions About Everything: engaging in an ongoing, purposeful, brave inquiry into the nature of your condition and what it means for your life.

Doing Your Homework: researching different treatment protocols at home and abroad so you know your options.

Avoiding Statistics: staying away from soul-sapping, fear-inducing information that discusses indicators but not inevitabilities.

Tracing the Roots of Your Illness: uncovering the possible factors that may have contributed to your cancer and being willing to address them piece by piece.

Knowing Your Purpose (Chapter Four)

I often say my faith is the wind in my sails and my purpose is the rudder on my boat. Purpose is a powerful force when consciously chosen and deeply committed to. It will guide all your choices and decisions on this journey, so it’s important to get hold of it as early as you can. To survive or to thrive? To hold on or let go? To take charge or be taken care of? To get through this or grow through this? To live or to die? There are no right answers. Just choices. Yours. Boldly and bravely made. This phase involves:

Assessing Your Reality: reviewing the facts of your illness alongside the circumstances of your life so you can determine the limitations and possibilities with accuracy and wisdom.

Knowing What You Really Want: engaging honestly, deeply and courageously with what you truly want, given your situation-from how hard you want to fight to how gracefully you want to let go.

Knowing Why You Want It: discovering your deepest, most heartfelt intentions and envisioning the results you want to create.

Choosing What to Do: making clear choices and forming a viable, specific and practical plan to underpin your purpose or purposes.

Stabilizing Your Body (Chapter Five)

This phase will depend on the nature of your diagnosis. If you catch your cancer early, your body may be stable enough to make more progress with the other phases. If you are diagnosed with later-stage cancer you will need to prioritize this phase accordingly by:

Taking Urgent Action: identifying immediate things you can do to steady your ship in the waters and catch enough breath to choose your next moves wisely.

Changing Your Diet: because whatever the arguments for and against “cancer diets,” there are too many valid, common-sense reasons to ignore and too many risks to contemplate if you don’t change your diet.

Detoxing Your Environment: creating a context for your journey that is healing, conscious, nurturing, intentional and dedicated to your well-being.

Detoxing Your Body: minimizing the toxicity in your body so that your cancer has less to feed on.

Clearing Your Mind (Chapter Six)

This phase is all about coming to terms with your humanity, accepting your vulnerability and doing battle with the inevitable fear that grips you when you are diagnosed with cancer. It is also about looking at the fears, feelings and limiting beliefs you may have been carrying for many years but have not paid attention to. In my view, cancer has emotional and psychological roots as well as physical and environmental ones. That is the nature of dis-ease. At minimum, it is important to keep releasing the stress that fear generates. If you are willing to go deeper to unblock emotional pathways in your system, then all the better. This involves:

Re-experiencing Your Lifeshocks (significant events): learning to engage with specific moments in time when you reacted negatively and fearfully.

Killing Your Killer Beliefs: noticing and tearing down false beliefs (about yourself, cancer, living and dying), as well as assumptions and predictions about the future that generate unnecessary fear and limiting outcomes.

Making Clear Choices: choosing how to be and what to do in light of what’s really true-rather than what you fear, believe or assume to be true.

Getting Emotional Support: because there is no better time and no better reason to invest in your mental, emotional and spiritual wellness, in addition to your physical healing.

Directing Your Treatment (Chapter Seven)

This is all about taking charge of your treatment plan by feeling informed and clear-headed enough to do so. It is well documented that patients who direct their own treatment fare better than patients who don’t, so this is an attitude to adopt as much as a practical plan to put in motion. It involves:

Listening to the Experts: creating a partnership with your doctors in which you listen closely to their advice, experience and recommendations while asking astute questions and making your own choices.

Using Your Intuitive Compass: this is your life, and every decision is yours to make on this journey. It’s important to start listening to your intuition, that inner instinct that knows what to do when all around you people are advising you differently or pressuring you to go in a particular direction.

Creating Your Own Plan: designing your own plan based on the research you have done and what feels intuitively right to you.

Preserving Your Personhood: finding ways to remain a person first and a patient second so you stay yourself and maintain your self-esteem in a system that often relates to you as a disease rather than a human being.

Dancing with Grief (Chapter Eight)

This is an invitation to completely redefine your relationship with grief and embrace it as a profoundly healing force in your life. Grief is not meant to be held at bay until the end is inevitable or preserved by your loved ones for after you have gone. Nor is it exclusively reserved for those of us labeled “terminal.” When you are told you have cancer, grief is as likely to flood your life as much as terror is likely to stalk it. But unlike terror, which tears you apart and shreds your sanity, grief restores your right mind and makes you whole. As well as clarifying its true nature, this chapter gives you three gateways to grief:

Listing Your Losses: engaging with all the losses, regrets and disappointments you have accumulated in your life but not yet grieved for.

Laying Down Your Regrets: dispensing with the “shoulds” and “if onlys” that cause untold, often wholly unrecognized pain when we confront our mortality.

Honoring Your Hopes: allowing yourself to let go of the hopes and dreams that are now genuinely unviable while resurrecting the ones you still have a real shot at, perhaps especially because you are ill.

Breaking the Shell (Chapter Nine)

This is where your work with the previous chapters can take you to a new horizon in your relationship with cancer, by inviting you into a radically different dialogue with your disease, one in which you can find the pearl in the oyster shell, the concealed and unimagined treasures your cancer can offer up when you listen to it very closely and ask what it is inviting you to change in your mind, heart and being. This is an alchemical inquiry that promises a different kind of medicine, the kind that turns fear into gratitude, sorrow into wonder and bitterness into hope-the kind that can provide emotional and spiritual healing on a journey of physical healing that has no guarantees.

* * *

All of this may seem like a lot to take in when you are already reeling from shock-and may also be dealing with physical symptoms that limit your functioning. I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by all the information I was discovering, the advice I was receiving, the decisions I found myself making and the emotions that crashed through me for many weeks.

So, here’s the thing: You don’t need to get this all at once. You only need to get it one step and one breath at a time. I have designed this process to make your journey easier, not harder. I want it to be as comprehensive as possible to give you the best chance of meeting your needs, but you can prioritize the elements that feel right for you and enlist help if you don’t feel well enough to do them.US