This guide offers practical strategies for families facing childhood cancer, emphasizing hope, caregiver self-care, open communication, family resilience, trauma growth, and mind-body healing for holistic recovery.
Integrative therapies like mindfulness, yoga, acupuncture, nutrition, and sleep support resilience in cancer survivorship. Collaborate with oncology teams for safe, evidence-based healing.
Shutterstock, Andy Dean Photography Life events are the situations; the insight we gain is our story. What meaning do you make of the turning points in your life? Have you ever waited for something that seemed to take forever to happen or get resolved? And after all that waiting, the outcome wasn’t guaranteed or might not be what you expected? I’m still lying in bed 20 hours a day, waiting for the pain to lessen and my spine to heal on its own from two compression fractures. The neurosurgeon’s PA says to give it 12 weeks. It’s been almost 6 weeks since I fractured the second vertebra (bending over [...]
Did you make New Year's resolutions? Here’s one way to empower yourself to reach your goals. Resolutions and Intentions I wrote in my January newsletter that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I do set intentions. And then I wondered what the difference was and why resolutions didn’t work for me. Somewhere over the years, I stopped making resolutions to get more exercise and eat healthier and set self-imposed deadlines for work and writing projects. The goals felt more like something I should do or would do anyway, without a specific outcome, rather than what I wanted to work on. Instead, I started setting intentions for my emotional well-being and spiritual growth and that [...]
The fall equinox and a new moon in Libra invite us to find harmony and balance by letting go of thoughts that no longer bring peace and joy. Happy fall equinox for those of us in the northern hemisphere (happy glorious spring equinox for our southern companions). For one day (Sept 22), the earth was in perfect balance on its 23.5º axis with the sun pointed directly at the equator. Everyone around the globe had 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness. Balance. Global synchrony. Did you notice? What does balance even feel like? For me, it’s not an outcome to achieve (how would I know when I’ve found it?) but an ongoing [...]
Valentine’s Day reminds us to show our love to one another. International Childhood Cancer Day, the day after, reminds us of how much love our children bring into our lives, and how much fear and anxiety we feel when they get sick. Losing a child is a parent’s worst fear. Watching your child endure months or years of scary and invasive treatment and debilitating side-effects obliterates the childhood we expect and want them to have. We all want the best for our children. Criss Angel, Las Vegas illusionist and magician, faces fear every day when he performs with fire and gravity-defying stunts but says that nothing compares to the fear of losing his son to cancer. [...]
As the holiday season winds down and 2021 exhales its last breath, we look ahead to 2022. With the Omicron variant of COVID-19 exploding across the entire United States and many other countries, however, 2022 doesn’t feel like progress or offer a whole lot of happiness. It’s another year, but not a new year. The imprints of 2020 and 2021 cling like droplets on our masks—invisible when we ignore them, debilitating when they invade. How are you protecting your body and nourishing your spirit? As we reflect—yet again—on the upheaval in our daily lives, the relentless cycles of loss, and the uncertainty for tomorrow, can’t we also seek the flickering flame deep within our solar plexus? [...]
Good morning, sunshine. I didn’t know how desperately I needed you until I did. Your early morning caresses soothe me. Your midday beams energize me. And your steady presence, day after day—here in Hawaii—rejuvenates my spirit and confirms my impulsive decision to escape Minnesota during one of the grayest, dreariest, and iciest January’s on record. I typically love the deep freeze of the Bold North winters—the biting and invigorating crisp air, the resplendently clear blue skies, and the teasing sunshine that sparkles but promises nothing. I just walk faster to keep warm. I had no intention of leaving on a jet plane in search of hope. I’d only just begun to travel again after a low-back [...]
Winter arrived early this year. Seven inches of heavy, wet, white fell like a weighted blanket on my November birthday. I typically love the first snowfall of the season, with the transformation from drab brown to feathery white, illuminating the darkness at night. But I wasn’t ready this year. The last big Minnesota snowfall was mid-April, when crocuses and tulips should have been rising out of bed. And I had just started walking again after a fifth major surgery and a broken foot, and I really wanted to rebuild some strength by climbing the hill every day. And now the icy undercoat makes it too risky for my fragile spine, which is rather like the decomposing [...]
Well, not all stress makes us sick. Stress can motivate and energize us—it helps us perform better in front of an audience or get psyched for an adventure, like white-water rafting on the Colorado River in chilly November (shout-out to Mike, Eric, and Frederique!) or skydiving from 13,000 feet (“terrifying” and “freeing” says my brave niece, Laura, pictured). Not surprisingly, skydiving triggers a “fight-or-flight” (literally!) stress hormone response. In one study, 39 men and women who tandem jumped for the first time had increases in cortisol, stress catecholamines, inflammatory cytokines (IL-12 and interferon-gamma), and natural killer cell numbers and gene expression. Manfred Schedlowski, a German researcher I heard at a conference way back in 1993, [...]
