The best way to fight cancer? Tell it to go to hell!

When Sophie was told she had terminal cancer she almost gave up. Then she decided to seize control — and EVERYTHING changed

JUST over a year ago, SOPHIE SABBAGE, then 48, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The mother of one says the real challenge is not so much the cancer as not becoming ‘the cancer patient’. Her remarkable book, self-published two weeks ago, has become an instant ebook bestseller. Here we publish an extract:

MY HUSBAND John came to the hospital with me the day I had my first radiation treatment. While we were in the waiting room, I received a deeply tender text from a friend and I let my tears roll freely.

The nurse assigned to my care hurried over to ask if I was OK, but her concern felt suffocating, as if she was trying to stop me crying rather than support me — as if my tears might harm me in some way or alarm the other patients or, worse, give them permission to cry, too.

Yet what better time to cry than this? What better time to grieve for the future that was being wrenched away from me?

I became conscious of the stoic silence that hung like fog over the radiation waiting room. The numbness. The shy terror. The intensity of diverse groups of patients waiting for some part of our bodies to be radiated.

‘Are you OK?’ the nurse asked me again with more urgency, her anxiety burrowing into my skin. I touched her hand lightly to comfort her, before replying: ‘I think I might be the only one here who is.’

She stepped back, confounded, unsure what to say or how to help if I couldn’t be talked out of my tears. So she slipped away quietly and kept her distance at my future visits to the hospital. I was a vulnerable anomaly in a place where sorrow seemed to be censored.

Following that day’s radiation to my neck [lung cancer had spread to my brain and bones], another nurse approached me and handed me a piece of paper. ‘This is the date of your next appointment, Mrs Sabbage,’ she said matter-of-factly, assuming there was nowhere else I needed to be that morning.

I looked at the date, checked my diary and told her I wasn’t free. And there it was again: alarm on the face of a nurse because I had given the wrong answer.

‘But it’s your radiation appointment,’ she responded.

‘I see that, but I’m not available,’ I persisted. Maybe I could have rescheduled whatever else I had planned, but something rose up my diseased spine that made me stand firm. I wasn’t having it: I wasn’t going to be told to show up, on command, without being asked if I was available.

DESPERATELY ill as I was, I knew it was vital for me to make my own choices every step of this journey, to schedule my treatments around my life, not my life around my treatments; to be the author and the protagonist of my story.

As soon as I believed I was going to die, I started dying. Within 72 hours of being told my cancer was ‘incurable’, my life force began to dissolve. My cough became relentless. My pain intensified. My energy thinned like drifting smoke.

Before long, I was unable to pick up my daughter Gabriella, then five, or even lie next to her for more than a few minutes. That was when my heart broke.

Yet two weeks earlier, I had felt normal, healthy and pain-free. The awareness of my cancer changed everything. My mental landscape shifted: a small creek of anxiety became a raging wall of water flooding my senses with foreboding and, try as I might, I could not shake the powerful feeling that my death was inevitable.

I became conscious that I hadn’t given myself a chance to write my own version of the terminal cancer story. I became convinced that saving my life began with shifting my perception that the sun was setting on my final days.

Then my first oncologist unwittingly provided the perfect spur for the psychological shift I needed to make. Having told me that my disease was incurable, he declared his aim was to give me a good ‘quality of life’.

Reasonable as that may sound, I was livid. How dare he decide what we were going to aim for without giving me a say? This was my life. And I would be the one to decide what to aim for.

In particular, I was rattled by the turn of phrase ‘good quality of life’. I wanted to scream: ‘NO! I want a full life, a long life, an exhaustive, unabridged, fulfilled life! I want to get well, damn it! I want a cure!’

Later, I realised his words had cut deeper than my understandable refusal to accept what he was saying. He was reducing ‘quality of life’ to managing pain; being made comfortable and minimising physical suffering.

But, for me, this wasn’t something to settle for.

Navigating your own journey with cancer is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. That’s why so many patients place themselves in the hands of their oncologists without questioning the treatment being offered or exploring alternatives.

But I realised I needed to do something for myself, instead of waiting for my oncologist to do something for me. That deci - sion was a pivotal psychological shift for me — a way of encouraging myself in the face of a seemingly insurmountable challenge and placing myself at cause in the situation instead of at its effect.

To some extent, it didn’t matter if my choices were sane or crazy (which some said they were). What mattered was making the choices, lifting my head above the parapet of despair and impossibility so I could take the next step forwards.

It seemed to me that if I let mysel f become a victim of cancer, then cancer would win.

One of the first things I did was to see a nutritionist, and before long I had pulled together a programme of alternative treatments, including supplements, detoxing protocols, juicing, ozone therapy and mega doses of vitamin C. I also moved Living with incurable cancer — but thriving: Sophie Sabbage my care to another oncologist, a gentle man with a dry sense of humour who has worked hard to understand me and respect my need to direct my own treatment as much as I can.

Just to be sure I knew where all my tumours were, I asked him to point to each one on my body.

He was hesitant at first, concerned it was too confrontational, but I assured him I could handle it. If I have a tumour on my rib, I needed to know which one so I could protect it when my daughter throws herself into my arms.

If I felt pain in my back, I needed to distinguish a spinal tumour from a muscle spasm. If my throat was sore, I needed to know if it was swollen lymph nodes or a cold I was catching.

The data gave me power. It gave me confidence. It gave me the freedom to choose.

Ten months after diagnosis, I still have cancer, but almost all the tumours in my brain and bones have gone. Hats off to the tumour-inhibitingtu drug I am taking,ta which has made a massivema difference to my physicalph wellbeing.

ButB that is not the only reason I feelfe so very alive. My cancer is ‘incurable’,‘in yet I am thriving wit with it.

I listen to my doctors, for wh whom I am immeasurably grateful, and attend all my appointments.men But now I’m asked when I’m available and my doctors suggestsug rather than tell me what to do.d We have become collaborative partnerspart on my journey, instead of st staying caught in the top-down doctor-patientdoct dynamic that still so oftenof prevails.

THE fact is my disease may well still kill me. But I choose to recognise this without giving in to it. I am under no illusion as to the gravity of my condition, but I am able to lean ever so gently into tomo tomorrow without fear of falling or drow drowning or bursting into flames.

IwI want to live almost more than anything. Almost. I dedicate my days, hours and minutes to extending my life with a fierce and unwavering intention to raise my daughter into adulthood and grow old with my beloved husband.

But the biggest win is not surviving cancer, epic as that would be. The bigger win is preserving my personhood, whatever the outcome — that hard-won ‘I’ that neither belongs to my body nor will disintegrate with my body.

The bigger win is knowing that I have cancer, and that cancer does not have me.

A few weeks ago, I was putting Gabriella to bed after a first tooth had fallen out and she asked: ‘What do we do when we die, Mummy?’

‘Our souls leave our bodies and go to Heaven,’ I replied without thinking. ‘ Sometimes they come back to live in new bodies and sometimes they stay in invisible places on Earth to love their children from.’

‘If you die, does that mean you’re better?’

‘No, darling, that would mean I didn’t get better and you wouldn’t be able to see or touch me any more. But my soul would find an invisible place to love you from.’

‘ Does dying hurt the soul, Mummy?’ ‘I don’t think so, darling.’ ‘Good. Because I love your soul, Mummy,’ she said ever so softly, before falling asleep with her tooth under the pillow, hoping the tooth fairy would come.

I live for those moments. Literally. I am pulled forwards into life by love for my family and their love for me. This is the best medicine.

ADAPTED from The Cancer Whisperer: How To Let Cancer Heal Your Life by Sophie Sabbage, £1.99 as an ebook from amazon. For information on Cancer Whispering: The Course, go to sophiesabbage.com