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As part of Fresh Farm Boxes and the Bosch distributor business that Jeremy started, we created a website to help sell these products. We put it all under the umbrella site of Realfoodcentral.com. We had links to our products that we were selling and we decided to add recipes that used our products to make them. The frequent repetitive phone calls I was having also prompted the creation of two pages that we could refer people to: one was a list of books and media that we used to create my diet plan; the second was my treatment plan spelled out completely. It has lists of items to eat as much as you want, items to eat sparingly, and items to absolutely avoid during the first 3 months. It also includes a list of supplements to include with the approval of a licensed Naturopathic Medical Doctor (NMD), items to avoid using in order to reduce your chemical exposure, and other thoughts to consider to improve wellness and increase immune system health. It was so helpful for me to have a website to refer people to when they asked about my diet so I wouldn’t forget to tell each person every part of the protocol in every phone call. There were just so many details that I would unintentionally omit parts each time. This was an easy way to refer someone to my website and then have them ask more specific questions after they review the information. I also used this website to store my recipes that I altered to fit my diet. I learned to make several favorite recipes using vegan substitutes that the whole family enjoyed, including a vegan macaroni and “cheese” recipe that uses vegetables and nutritional yeast to make the “cheese” sauce. It looks like the creamy Velveeta stuff, and doesn’t really taste like cheese, but it is delicious. I also posted recipes to show our Fresh Farm Boxes customers how to use the produce in their box. For several weeks I was posting a new recipe every week.
Jeremy also began teaching nutrition and juicing classes and bread-baking classes out of our kitchen. He even taught a pizza-making class where the participants made vegan pizzas: made with vegetables and no cheese. For a while, he was teaching a class almost every week. He didn’t charge much. It was mostly a way to spread the information of healthy living to others. It was also a way to entice people to buy the Bosch and juicer products we were selling. We met quite a few other people, mostly from the West Valley, who were struggling with cancer or other health problems at this time who were looking for a healthier way to treat their disease.
During this time, one of Jessica’s friends, Kristy, was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma. She and her husband came to one of our classes. They stayed for a while afterwards where we learned about her situation. We gave them more detailed information about what I had been doing–the diet, the juicing, the IV vitamin C and hydrogen peroxide treatments. They jumped on board completely and went out and bought a juicer and started juicing and following the diet religiously. They would get together with Jessica and help her juice as well. Jessica had been told that her pancreatic cancer was getting worse and her health was declining. Jessica and Kristy began seeing Dr. John and receiving IV vitamin C. Jessica started improving for a few months. But it didn’t last. Unfortunately, Jessica’s energy levels started to drop and she couldn’t keep up with the juicing or the diet. Her cancer was spreading.
Watching Jessica’s health decline was so hard to watch. She had become a friend and ally in this journey. She gave me a lot of hope early after my diagnosis. She was a ray of positivity to all around her. When she passed away in February of 2015, she left an entire community in mourning.
Kristy, on the other hand, was religious about her diet, juicing, and treatments–like I was. She, too, was seeing Dr. John regularly and following his advice. But her lymphoma was not responding as well as she would have liked. One tumor had disappeared, but she still had others, and she was struggling with a persistent itching that was related to the lymphoma. It was disheartening. We didn’t understand why it wasn’t working for her when she was following the same regimen that I was, just as strictly. After several months without much progress with Dr. John, Kristy began seeing a different naturopath and a doctor who recommended a specific type of chemotherapy that was targeted to her lymphoma. They were hesitant to do chemotherapy; it went against everything we had learned regarding the natural treatment of cancer. It was a poison that would suppress the immune system rather than build it up, like we were working hard to do through juicing and a clean diet. But they felt like it was the right thing to do. We didn’t have any better ideas so we supported them and hoped and prayed for the best.
Kristy continued to juice, receive IV vitamin C infusions and she began using CBD oil in between her chemotherapy treatments. She didn’t experience many of the negative side effects of chemotherapy. Within a year, she too was considered “free of disease.” I admit, I was a bit incredulous that the chemotherapy worked for her. I was fully expecting her health to decline once she started the treatment, just as I had seen so many others do. Her experience opened my mind: apparently not all cancers respond to all treatments the same. Some don’t respond well to natural treatments, like I had assumed all would. Whatever worked for my cancer, by healing the whole body and supporting the immune system, should work for all other cases because it enables the body to heal itself. It just made sense that it should work for everyone. To be a witness to this anomaly made me question my thinking.
In the course of my research and studying about natural and holistic treatments vs chemotherapy, I read that chemotherapy is especially effective for two types of cancer: lymphomas and testicular cancers. So it now made sense in my mind that Kristy’s lymphoma would have responded positively to chemotherapy. It was also so comforting to have another survivor that we knew–someone who overcame the odds and was alive and able to be there for her family. We could rejoice together over our fortunate recoveries.
To continue the story go here.