Episode 4.13
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Kathryn White: [00:00:00] Hello friends, welcome to episode 4. 13 of the Living to Thrive with Cancer podcast. In this podcast episode, I am talking about my personal story from diagnosis to celebrating 10 years of thriving. I want to share this with you as a celebration, but also because I want to share with you the work that I've done and the changes I have made to get to this very special anniversary.
If you are a new listener, I want to welcome you to the podcast. I am Catherine White, a stage four colon cancer thriver using my stories and experience with colon cancer to guide you through your walk with cancer. As a holistic cancer coach, I want to help to support you through creating a health building lifestyle, managing your stress, and helping you to [00:01:00] navigate the day in and day out stuff that comes up.
We're from living with cancer. If you find what you've learned here today, helpful, please share it with other people. You know, that could benefit from this episode sharing helps me to support more people living with cancer and to help them move from survivor to thriver and go ahead and subscribe to the podcast wherever you are listening, follow it on YouTube.
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So for those of you not familiar with my story, 10 years ago at 43 years old, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. The primary tumor was in my ascending colon. I had metastases in my liver and in some active lymph nodes. Today I am sharing [00:02:00] my year by year account of my walk with cancer in hopes that it will help to inspire you to have hope, to believe in possibility, and To change yourself and to take action.
The underlying theme here is about change because we cannot heal from the place that we currently exist in. Healing requires change in the body, mind, and spirit. So I am going to address. So I'm going to discuss each of the years and just share with you what has happened along the way. It all began back in 2015, the year I was supposed to be on leave.
In January of 2015, I was supposed to be on a six month sabbatical from my teaching position so that I could rest and reset. I needed a change and I got what I wanted, just not in the way that I wanted it to happen. In January, I went to the doctor to get a pre op checkup because at this point, we knew that [00:03:00] something was going on and I was going to have to have some colon surgery.
Um, and we were Just, uh, you know, at the end of navigating a doctor who refused to talk about cancer, who was insistent that I have an upper GI bleed when an ultrasound actually showed that I had multiple spots on my liver. It was a walk in clinic doctor that set me for that ultrasound because my family doctor did not want to talk about the possibility of cancer.
And those spots were found and everything moved very quickly from there. So, still refusing to discuss cancer, my doctor sent me for an upper GI scope, which took me to that pre op checkup that I was telling you about. When I went for the checkup, uh, no.
So we'll start with 2015, the year that I was supposed to be on leave in January of 2015, I was going off of work [00:04:00] for a six month sabbatical from my teaching job to rest and reset. I needed a change and it seems that I got what I wanted just Not in the way that I wanted to, to happen at this point, since November of 2014, we had been navigating a family doctor who insisted that there was nothing happening and I didn't have to be concerned about what was going on in my body, even though I had expressed that I was having changes in my energy, in my bowel movements, in my, um, um, Overall wellness, I was having abdominal pain and I reminded him that my dad had died of stage four colon cancer, but he didn't want to talk about cancer at all.
Instead, he insisted that I was having an upper GI bleed and wanted me to just be medicated for that. I actually ended up at a walking clinic where the doctor on call listened to my concerns and recognized what was happening. [00:05:00] He sent me for an ultrasound where they discovered the spots on my liver that turned out to be metastases.
And from there, everything moved really quickly. My family doctor ultimately did send me to a surgeon for an upper GI scope, but when I shared with the surgeon, what was actually happening in my body, that I was exhausted, that my bowel movements were dark and thin, and that I had ongoing abdominal pain, the test changed to a colonoscopy.
The surgeon. Couldn't complete the colonoscopy due to a blockage and so surgery was booked. I needed a right hemicolectomy to prevent a full blockage. So we didn't really know that it was cancer at this point. We just knew that there was a blockage. There was a strong suspicion, um, but the, the colon had to be dealt with in order to prevent my bowel from becoming completely obstructed.
So. In January, I went to the, my family [00:06:00] doctor to get a pre op checkup for the surgery we knew was happening and what I expected to be a standard checkup for blood pressure and height and weight and all of that turned out to be him sharing with me that they were 99 percent sure that I had cancer and I was very angry and I was very angry.
I was very shocked by the news. It wasn't what I was expecting at that moment. Um, and I was really disappointed in my doctor that he knew what he was going to tell me and that he did not invite me to bring my husband, who was home. He just didn't need to come to a pre op weight and blood pressure checkup with me.
So that is definitely something that I have learned along the way is to always make sure that I have my husband or someone with me at an appointment. For Because sometimes things change direction when you least expect it. At any rate, in February of 2015, I had the colon surgery and I was [00:07:00] going through recovery.
And I was sent to, um, an oncologist on March the 18th of 2015. We had our first meeting and that's where he told me that it was in fact stage 4 colon cancer and everything from there became a blur as you know or can imagine. I stopped hearing words and everything was just fuzzy and I was looking to my husband for some guidance and understanding of what was going on.
So we walked out of that appointment. a bit broken, but we had a plan. So medically 2015, my change in my life that year was not traveling and reading books and relaxing, but was instead spent doing colon surgery, five rounds of chemotherapy, a right hepatectomy to remove the right lobe of my liver that had the metastases and then seven more rounds of chemotherapy.
So that's the, um, the medical part of of what I went through and what was [00:08:00] changing. But personally, I was navigating fear and emotional overwhelm. My family had to try to learn how to support me while still living their own lives. We did what we had to do, figuring it out as we went along. And we all had to make changes, difficult ones and uncomfortable ones so that we could keep moving forward.
I knew instinctively that I needed to keep living in the moment to support my belief that I would survive this. So I adopted the philosophy of enjoying life while I was feeling well and resting when I wasn't. I traveled with my husband, I went to my high school reunion, we had mandatory family fun days with our sons to make memories, and So much more.
On December 22nd, 2015, I rang the bell and stepped into the next phase of my life. And this was the beginning of changes, both subtle [00:09:00] and overt in order to, to not just heal, but to rebuild my life because they had said, you know, congratulations, go out and live your life. You can go back to living your life the way you were.
And I knew that that was not realistic. I didn't want to go back to being. Who I was pre cancer and I didn't know who I was now that I was in the recovery phase of cancer But I knew that something had to change So 2016 was the year I was lost and needed something to give me purpose This is the year that I wandered around my house trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I did not go back to work. I was very fortunate to be able to make that decision. And, um, and my husband was very on board with that decision. I, as I said, had been a teacher. And so early on in the diagnosis, Um, before I'd even had my first surgery, [00:10:00] we had decided that going back to teaching was not in the cards for me.
I knew my real purpose moving forward in early 2016 was to heal and to hit reset on my life. But as a person who doesn't sit. Inquiet very well. I also needed more and little did I know that at the time, um, that one of the qualities of exceptional healing patients is, is the patient who overcomes their diagnosis to become an outlier is to have a purpose.
Little did I know at that time that one of the qualities of exceptional healing patients, the patients who overcome their diagnosis to become outliers, is to have a purpose. So I unknowingly, in trying to find this bigger purpose in my life, started exploring Eating healthier and making lifestyle changes, not knowing that this would be [00:11:00] the key to the foundation of my healing.
This was the heal my body phase that at that time was the work that I knew I had to do and that I thought was maybe the only work that I had to do. I went back to yoga. I started to find new routines in my life. I made changes to what our family was eating and a chance encounter with a friend one day.
introduced me to the first program that would change my life and my health. I signed up for Megan Telpner's Culinary Nutrition Expert Program, where I learned so much about food and the healing power of food. So, I was very excited and motivated by this program and really was realizing that there was still big change that needed to happen.
And I completed the program and graduated in January of 2017. 2017 It was the year my purpose started to reveal itself to me. Finishing the culinary nutrition program was like [00:12:00] the reset on my life and my purpose. I became excited again about teaching and I used what I had learned to make even more changes in my life, and then to start a small business.
Seeing the impact of food on a person's health made me want to share with women in my community what I had learned. So I started running nutrition workshops where I cooked with the guests and, uh, educated them on healthy eating as I was cooking. And I even started to take on some private clients to support them with meal planning and create healthy lifestyle choices for them as they were moving through their own stories.
All of this reinforced for me what I needed to do to support my health and healing. And it also gave me purpose again, which is one of the characteristics, as I said, of an exceptional healing patient. So I continued at the same time to enjoy time with my family, continued to do some traveling with my husband, and we found ourselves [00:13:00] really embracing doing fun things because in the back of our minds was always what we had almost lost and fear of the future possibilities of recurrence.
So we really just started to live our life out loud and say yes to fun. And in 2017 I ran my sixth marathon. Take it back to 2015 when I was in the hospital getting ready for my colon surgery. There was a whiteboard at the foot of my bed that said, my goal is, and I said to my husband, I'm going to run another marathon.
And so we set the goal for this marathon in September of 2017 and we did it. Friends flew in from across the country and we ran this race together, the Scotiabank waterfront marathon in Toronto, Ontario. And I knew that That was something that had kept me going to [00:14:00] have this goal to have this purpose. It wasn't my fastest marathon It wasn't super pretty but I did it and I was determined That this race was going to happen as a part of my physical and mental healing So I want to offer to you that a lot of this was mindset and determination.
I decided, and I'm not one to back down on a decision, so this was a super powerful motivator for me, this decision to run this race as part of my healing, and part of proving to myself that I could still do things that I had been doing pre cancer. And I did. And it was great, and I am grateful that I did it.
This took me into 2018, which is the year where I looked into my soul. It turns out in 2018, I was back in surgery for a small lump in my abdomen. It wasn't [00:15:00] metastatic, but it was, um, cancer related to, we think, to my colon surgery that just, it had developed beside the original surgical site. So this really threw me for a loop, um.
And I didn't know what to do. It, it set me back in the momentum that I had had moving forward. And one day my niece came over for a visit and we were sitting in the living room chatting and she recommended that I take yoga teacher training. And I didn't jump at that opportunity. I didn't think that that's what I wanted to do, but she really felt like that would help me to heal my soul.
So I signed up because I had nothing to lose and thought that maybe if nothing else it would make me better at yoga. I was doing a lot of work on my body at this point, but I really wasn't addressing the inner healing that needs to happen when you have received a cancer diagnosis. I was still working in culinary nutrition education.
[00:16:00] I was coaching people. Um, I was, I was trying to help support others. But I wasn't looking inside of myself and in November 2018, two months into my yoga teacher training, I was devastated to learn that I had a metastasis in my right lung that was going to require surgery. So I stayed the course with the yoga teacher training and It was the best decision that I ever made because the people in that group and, and what I was learning in my training really supported my mental and emotional health, but it also gave me a purpose as I awaited my surgery.
My, um, I was told in November of 2018 that I had a metastasis and I didn't have my surgery until May of 2019. So that really was, um, The best place for me to be in order to keep moving forward and to trust that the tools I was learning in yoga teacher [00:17:00] training would help me. So 2019 was the year my inner work started to show me results in my life.
As I said, in May of 2019, I had my lung surgery. It was a quite a big procedure, but it went well. And, um, I, I've truly believe that, My healing went as well as it did because of the work that I'd been doing. I had integrated lifestyle changes related to nutrition deeply into my life so that now they were just what I did.
It wasn't something that I had to think about anymore. Yoga prepared me physically as my body was strong, but my spirit was also stronger. And I could do this surgery. from a place of a positive mindset and the belief that everything was going to be fine. I ensured that I maintained my nutrition habits and healthy eating by having my husband bring me food in the hospital.
I knew that health building food would make a difference post surgery and I wanted to [00:18:00] make sure that I was strong and I was nurturing myself and that I was sticking to my healthy eating habits. So after all of that was done, and I graduated from my teaching program, I started to teach yoga classes while still building coaching and around nutrition.
And these practices weren't just for me. I was starting to see that I was experiencing healing in the process, but people were actually starting to see results from it and that it was something that was missing. In, in my community and in, as I started to reach out further, and so I found myself feeling motivated to keep moving forward, even though I'd had some setbacks, I found myself more connected to my body and my mind and my spirit and the world around me, which is really an important part of the healing process.
This took me into 2020, which was the year that I learned about coaching. [00:19:00] Five years out from my original diagnosis, I started to have big questions coming up around my spirit and inner work. And I think yoga had activated that part of me that needed to heal on a deeper level. As fate would have it, I met a life coach in a program that I had joined and knew she was who I wanted to work with.
I Learned so much about myself through her coaching through her questions through her Encouraging me to go inside and ask myself the questions and find the answers for myself She didn't tell me what I needed to know I had to find the answers inside of myself because that's how coaching works she called me on my stuff and she made me start looking at what I was still holding on to and what I needed to release because it's not just about talking about what is what you're feeling inside.
It's about learning how to actually let it go. [00:20:00] This deeper healing felt really uncomfortable at times. I, I got angry and I cried and I resented being called out on my stuff. But once I knew what my stuff was, I was able to start addressing it to look at it in the eye and say, okay. Now I understand. It, it just.
Is such an important of the healing process because we cannot heal from a place of old wounds. We have to take a new perspective in order to heal. So, working with Kelly, my coach, inspired me to become a coach. I really felt ready to teach on a deeper level and felt called to having a bigger purpose. And this is where Cancer Coaching was born in me.
I signed up for my training through BeatCancer. org. The center for advancement of education around cancer. And I discovered that. All that I had learned in my culinary nutrition training and my yoga teacher training aligned [00:21:00] with holistic cancer coaching. This is where I was meant to be. I really felt like this is where I was meant to be after all that I had experienced.
I also want to share on a personal note, um, something very personal that happened in my life that I believe is relevant to the deeper healing that I have been pursuing and continue to pursue. In March of 2020, my brother chose to end his life, and this rocked my world, as you can imagine, creating very deep grief in my soul.
Um, and because we were unable to have closure due to COVID, that grief settled in my body and my soul. I didn't have great outlets for it. I didn't know what to do with it. It was very painful and, um, You know, in hindsight, probably should have addressed it [00:22:00] more deeply, but I wasn't ready at the time, so I just tucked all of that away, unable to process it, and you will hear that it came back to visit me because grief does not last.
want to be ignored. In 2021, I found this to be the year that my true purpose became my reality. In January of 2021, I officially became a cancer coach and I have not looked back. Admittedly, Working with the amazing women I have had the honor to work with, um, has served to help me continue down my own healing path and actually served as an inspiration for me writing my book, Living to Thrive, A Holistic Guide to Living with Cancer.
A lot of the content in there is my own experience, but it's also based on the women that I started working with and their experiences. The decision to become a coach [00:23:00] created change in my life. In that I felt fulfilled in my personal life and in the support that I was now offering from a place of lived experience.
I started speaking publicly about my cancer story, which again would become part of my healing process and allowed me to share what I'd learned and my thriver story with others who were looking for hope. 2022 was the year that a setback moved me forward. Just as I was settling into comfortable, I had another shake up.
I found a second abdominal mass next to the site of the first one that I had and on January the 17th, the day before I turned 50, I was able to have that Spot that lump removed like the first one. It was cancer and also was not metastatic, but it was still devastating and disappointing to say the least you can imagine I had [00:24:00] to keep plugging ahead.
I could not let this take me backwards, which it could have very easily done. This was my Fifth cancer related surgery, but I decided that I was not going to allow this to get me down, but instead remind me that I had to keep supporting my body through healthy food and movement and mindfulness. I started working with a Reiki practitioner who channeled energy that I was holding onto and helped me to release.
Not just energy, but thoughts and patterns in my life that were holding me back. She helped me to make spiritual changes that have truly become a part of my thriving life. And, determined to keep moving forward, I started this podcast, the Living to Thrive with Cancer podcast. The intention behind this podcast has always been to reach as many people as possible to provide support and to spread my message of being a cancer thriver.
So, thank you for being here. [00:25:00] In 2023, this was the year that grief came back to visit me. It was a very interesting and devastating turn of events. On July 18th, 2023, which is my brother's birthday, I was told that I had a metastasis in my left lung. Now, in Chinese medicine, the lungs are associated with grief.
And I had been holding on to unprocessed grief around my brother. In August of 2023, I had a left lung resection to remove the tumor, and I believe, or rather it is believed, that working, it is believed that working in the lungs allows us to let go of what no longer serves us. Including grief to allow a space for healing and peace.
By no means was I thinking that this [00:26:00] was a great life lesson. I was not happy about having another surgery. I was terrified and I was angry. Probably the angriest I have ever been. Because I really felt like I was on track. And I couldn't understand why this was happening again. I really could understand why this was happening again.
This, um, metastases guided me to see that I still had work to do in my healing around my brother and I don't believe in coincidences. But I do believe that it was a message and, you know, you could take that for what it is, however you want to see that, but I don't believe that this just happened accidentally.
It happened so that I could move forward into 2024, the year that I dove into spirit work. This is the year that I went. Way deeper into my healing. I worked with a coach who took me on a spiritual journey emotionally, [00:27:00] physically and medicinally. We talked through grief and anger and explored what was really at the root of my pain.
Like we brought up a lot of stuff that I hadn't even considered. As part of my cancer story, but really going back into memories of being a young adult, of being a teenager, of being a child and of dealing with the death of my brother helped me to move forward. And I have to believe and I do believe that this is the best healing that I have ever done.
In addressing my inner wounds, I released so much pain and anger and my soul feels lighter and I truly believe that my body is healthier for it. So here we are in 2025, the year I am celebrating being an outlier and an exceptional cancer patient. When I was diagnosed in 2015, we made the decision to [00:28:00] not get the prognosis.
I did not want to live by other people's numbers. Instead, we decided that every day would be a 100 percent chance of surviving. And I believe that this thought and decision was a significant piece in my being here 10 years later. I know roughly what the numbers are for stage 4 colon cancer, but I also know that there are a lot of people, myself included, who are outliers.
I know that there are those of us that can live outside of the statistics. This decision to not get the statistics and to just make every day a 100 percent chance of survival back in 2015 was mindset work before I even knew what mindset work was. This was a big mindset decision. And I believe that mindset makes a difference when you have cancer.
So here I am [00:29:00] celebrating 10 years of thriving, celebrating the amazing thrivers I have met along the way, and sharing with you in the hopes that even one message in this episode will resonate with you and give you the belief that change does not have to be a problem. Change can be a catalyst to creating a whole new realm of possibility for yourself, to support you in your desire to thrive.
And in creating self love. So I sit here today humbly recording this podcast, believing that everything that has happened along the way from 2015 and maybe even before that to today has led me to recreate my life, reinvent myself, to deal with my stuff, to find a different way to live and to live truly the happiest and healthiest life that I have ever lived.[00:30:00]
Cancer changed my life in many ways, but I also want to say that I believe that cancer changed my life for the better because it was the wake up call that I needed. That leave in 2015 was supposed to be for fun and enjoyment and doing cool things, and instead it turned into the reset that I believe I actually needed.
And it doesn't happen that way for everybody. Everybody's story is different. But maybe, like I said, there is something in here that will resonate with you, that will help you to see that there is a different way to live with cancer, and that you can live outside of the doctor's office, you can live outside of the statistics, you get to make your own decisions and create your own path to thriving.
I hope that this podcast episode is something that you can come back [00:31:00] to when you are feeling like you need to revisit possibility and that it will be a roadmap for you to create your own roadmap as you learn to thrive with cancer.
So, I would love to share with you everything that I have learned about living to thrive with cancer, and that is why I wrote my book, Living to Thrive, A Holistic Guide to Living with Cancer. You can learn more about me and my story, and more about tools and strategies to support you in your goal to become a thriver, and that is available online.
on Amazon, and you can also, um, go to my website and, and find the link for it at the top of my website. And also on my website, I wanted to share with you that I've, I have a monthly membership, and also I wanted to share with you that I have a membership. [00:32:00] That is designed for people like you who are looking for a self guided program, one that you can work through at your own pace to learn about some of the things I've talked about here today, and some of the things that I talk about in my book.
This membership is available to you on my website, katherinewhite. coach, and I will link that in the show notes. It is an opportunity for you to find some answers to questions to find resources to support you and also to come to our first Wednesday of the month group coaching calls where we talk about our theme of the month and you get to ask questions in real time to me and to engage in conversations with other cancer thrivers.
Thank you so much for being here today. I would love to invite you to watch the next episode that is coming out later in March of 2025, and it features a very special guest, Jocelyn Laidlaw, the National Ambassador for Colorectal Cancer [00:33:00] Canada, who shares her story of overcoming and moving forward and how she is using her story to help others.
