Good to Read................

NOTE: We all should eat the right way! Somehow I feel that one cancer case and the other are not exactly the same.

Stage IV cancer without chemotherapy
By Leila Roche (Contact) Suffolk News-Herald

Published Saturday, February 27, 2010

EDITOR’S NOTE: In support of Suffolk’s Relay for Life, the Suffolk News-Herald will feature a series of stories in the coming months about how cancer has touched the lives of area families.

Sylvia Bilby has been on a Relay for Life team for the past 15 years, after watching her father battle bladder cancer and two uncles and an aunt who had cancer.

“I’ve always known people with cancer and after studying the stats and learning one in four people have it, it’s always been something I’ve been passionate about,” Bilby said.

About five years ago, she walked as a survivor after she won a battle with skin cancer, which was removed from her leg after she caught the growth early.

“It wasn’t something I was really a survivor of though,” Bilby said. “I felt like so many people walking had life-threatening cancer and mine wasn’t.”

But she has since earned her spot on the track.

On April 24, three weeks before the 2009 Relay for Life, Bilby was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.

“I always thought I was healthy and cancer was something other people got,” she said. “For weeks I couldn’t believe it. I never asked, ‘Why me?’ but it was still hard to believe.”

Bilby said she began having stomach problems in March 2009, which progressed to nausea and severe abdominal pains, but CT scans showed nothing.

On April 14, she went in with more pains and the doctor discovered she had an intestinal blockage.

“After it was cleared, they tried to see what the cause of it was, and they saw a tumor on my colon,” she said. “The tumors were so large the food couldn’t pass. I thought I’d just have surgery, and they’d remove it, and I’d be just fine — but then it got worse.”

When the doctor went in to do surgery, he found she had calcified tumors on her ovaries.

“On May 1, I was supposed to have a hysterectomy, but they couldn’t do anything because the tumors were so massive,” she said.

Her doctor recommended three sessions of chemotherapy to see if they could perform the surgery after the tumors got smaller, but “after one time I told him I wouldn’t do it anymore,” she said.

“I always said I’d never have chemo, but I never thought I’d have to make that decision.”

Although her family was against it, she decided to try a holistic approach using natural remedies instead of chemotherapy.

“It’s a personal decision, but I’d just seen so many people who’ve had such horrific effects from chemo,” she said. “I felt that for me, if I wasn’t going to survive the cancer, I didn’t want to be sick on my last day because of the chemo. I’m convinced now that was the right decision for me.”

Bilby went to a ministry in Colorado Springs for a week in June with her husband. She fasted for eight days to detoxify her body and learned how to begin a new life with cancer by changing her diet. She has since lost 70 pounds and eats an 80/20 diet — 80 percent raw food and 20 percent cooked food — and has eliminated sugar, meat, dairy and white flour.

“It took several months to start feeling better,” she said. “When I first started telling people the Lord was gong to heal me, I didn’t say it with a whole lot of conviction, but now I know it is.”

She attributes her success to the healing of God and nutrition, which she said she hopes the American Cancer Society will do more research on.

“In studying nutrition, I got to Genesis 1:29 where it talks about how God put the plants here for us to eat,” she said. “I grew up eating meats, but today is very different from 40 years ago. I would like people to be more aware of eating too much processed foods.”

Her last CT scan was in December, and she said her doctor was amazed at how well she was doing.

“It didn’t show they’d gotten smaller, but he was amazed they hadn’t grown,” she said. “When I was first diagnosed I told him I didn’t want him to tell me my diagnosis because I didn’t want to hear it. He later told me, after I decided not have chemo, that he had expected me to have another blockage, and if that happened he wouldn’t have recommended chemo. It’s by the grace of God I’m still here.”

Bilby now visits her doctor every three months for a CT scan to monitor the tumors, sticks to her diet regimen, walks 45 minutes on the treadmill every day and has prayer time every morning.

“I believe there is a connection between the mind, body and spirit,” she said. “It’s holistic and the most important thing in healing.”

While they’re monitoring the cancer, Bilby still works at Keller Williams Realty, is active in the Relay for Life and enjoys spending time with her grandchildren.

“One of the things I decided early on was I wasn’t going to let cancer rule my life,” she said. “I may have cancer, but it doesn’t have me.”