Review: Conquest Over Cancer talk

Last night I went to the Conquest Over Cancer talk. It was an inspirational talk featuring 3 cancer survivors: Dee Page, Clint Heal, and Ross Taylor. To me, it was a strange experience, because I wasn't sure what I was doing there or who the rest of the audience was. Their overall messages were about taking control of their lives, and a lot of the speeches were just the people telling their own stories. I'll do most of my write up after the jump, but I'd like to give one point here. One of the speakers, Clint, is about 26 years old, and has had metastatic melanoma for 4 years now. He started a support group and website called Melanoma WA, with the aim of "awareness, information, support."

I need to start this with a disclaimer: all these people are very much into complementary and alternative therapies, which seem to have worked well for these individuals. Though I am reporting on what they said, I do not advocate or support any of their ideas or claims. I don't necessarily disagree with them either, but let me just reiterate a statement I made in a post yesterday: if you decide to try alternate therapies yourself, you need to consult your oncologist and a pharmacist to make sure you're not accidentally harming yourself or rendering your treatments impotent.

The first speaker and MC of the night was Dee Page. She has recovered from 5 cancer diagnoses, undergoing almost all traditional treatment options and a couple experimental treatments and radical surgeries. She described how her main goal was to boost her immune system, and to this end she adopted a vegan diet with deep sea white fish, and started taking supplements for vitamins A, C, E, and selenium. She teaches meditation and such, and her next talk is "Stress Diffusion Made Easy", which she's giving Saturday, July 16th. I had written down her web address that was on the screen, but I just tried the link and it doesn't exist, so she must've put in a typo or something.

The second speaker was Clint Heal, a 26 year old who has had 34 metastatic melanoma clusters removed from "heel to neck" on his body. He's the founder of Melanoma WA, and was awarded the 2011 WA Young Person of the Year. His talk was mostly about his own journey. I can't help but share this, though it's not terribly flattering: the last couple weeks I was grading my students on their oral presentations, which were the final project in my class. Most of the kids are not great public speakers, so I was writing down notes for them like don't look back at the screen the whole time, you say "um" too much, etc. While Clint was talking, that's all I could think of, and almost starting writing it down on my notes from his presentation.

The main speaker was Ross Taylor, who had his first metastatic melanoma diagnosis 18 years ago, and is a mentor to Clint. He used to be a self described "international jet-setting businessman," but now spends him time doing these talks and writing books, and apparently uses a significant chunk of his time making vegetable juices for himself, as he says he drinks 5 a day. His speech was very rambling, and he jumped all over topics, so here are a couple succinct ideas that I think are useful enough to pass on:

   Stress is a derivative of fear (and another note: when he was talking about this, all I could think about was Yoga from Star Wars telling Luke "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering"). And then he defined fear through an acronym, Forgetting Everything is All Right.

 Another good point he talked about was that meditation doesn't have to be going out into the woods and chanting ohm. He gave an example that I realized is very true for me, that washing the dishes in silence can be meditative, as the task is so menial that without external distractions, your mind can relax and shut down for a while. So next time you have to do chores, maybe turn the TV and radio off and just let yourself run on autopilot for a bit.

 His final interesting point was "Who has a WAIT problem?", with the idea being too often people wait around for something trivial to fall into place before they do something meaningful. It was his own take on carpe diem, but still a good version of it.