You Need Humour With a Tumour (ebook)

Argumento de You Need Humour With a Tumour (ebook)

Annmarie James-Thomas was a fun-loving mother-of-four. When she was diagnosed with an inoperable cervical cancer in 2011, her love for her family and a desire to be there for them drove her to pursue alternative treatment in an attempt to ensure she could live her life to the fullest. She lived in a converted barn in the Brecon Beacons with her husband, Geraint, and four sons with her husband, Geraint, and four sons Zack, 22, Harrison, 18, Harvey, 16, and Roddy, 13.

Chapter One I Always Knew I Was Going to Get Cancer

Within everyday ordinary people, if you look closely, you can find some extraordinary things

Joseph L Badaracco

The comedian Spike Milligan once said that when he died, he wanted to have the words I told you I was ill carved on his headstone. Im the same, because I always knew I was going to get cancer. I know that sounds silly, or like Im making it up now because I have it, but it isnt. Ive always been spiritual a bit psychic, if you like and have often seen things happening to me before they do. And so there was always this feeling, a bit of a premonition really, that at some stage in my life I would get cancer.

Its not just me my grandmother, Peggy, is very much the same way, though I think that its a little more developed in her case than mine. And I think that its this spiritualism and faith in God that has helped me deal with being diagnosed with cervical cancer, and given me the strength to follow my own path to conquering it.

Now dont get me wrong, Im no one special: Im just a typical 40-something housewife and mother of four from Merthyr Tydfil. At that time I was living in a nice house on a nice little development on the outskirts of Town with my husband of more than 20 years, Geraint, our four boys Zack, now 22; Harrison, 18; Harvey, 16; and Roddy, now 13 and our slightly smelly pooch, Lulu. We had the same stresses and strains as everyone else.

But fate chose to lob a dirty great stone into our little pond when, in April 2011, I was diagnosed with cancer of the cervix, following months of pain and medical investigations. And since then, my life has been anything but typical, as I chose to meet my cancer head on. The last thing I wanted to be seen as was a victim. Dont ever feel sorry for me is what goes through my head all the time, because Im not being sorry for myself.

Having watched my dad, Roy, succumb to bowel cancer almost two years before I was diagnosed, I had no desire to follow the same treatment regimen that he had undergone. Instead I went in search of something different. My journey since diagnosis has been literally that, taking me across the Atlantic in search of another way of combating the tumour that was growing slowly then not so slowly within me. The lessons I learned there about how to change the way I ate and drank, to effectively clean up my lifestyle and stop the cancer spreading, Ive brought back home with me and tried to put into practice.

Its been hard, sometimes very hard. But there have been lots of highs along the way to counterbalance the lows. And thats why I want to tell people about what I did, and why I did it my way rather than the conventional way.0