Episode 21: The power of lifestyle changes and the combination of distraction + mindfulness to surpass median survival stats from a 22-year indolent cancer patient

I heard a nutritionist speaking to a group of cancer patients at a local wellness center. And I found that what she was recommending was so different from the way I ate that I thought it was radical. So I made appointments with two other nutritionists specializing in cancer patients, and all three of them were advocating the same healthful diet. They were advocating a plant-based diet avoiding red meat and processed meat and filling your plate with vegetables.

There’s a very powerful essay written by a famous biologist, Stephen J. Gould, and the title of that essay is “The Median Isn’t the Message.” He was prompted to write this essay because he had just been diagnosed with a very rare form of GI cancer, and he quickly dug up a medical paper and learned that the median survivorship of this cancer was 8 months. The essay describes how he dealt with this. He convinced himself  that he would live longer than that, and most people do live longer than the median. He lived for another 20 years and died from a different type of cancer.

What has really helped me since that first year after my diagnosis are two things. One is distraction. I distract myself by keeping very busy on projects that are larger than myself, for instance writing scientific papers and more recently working with three climate action groups. I find this work very fulfilling, and it does distract me, but you can keep yourself too busy and that can rob you of time with family and friends, which is also important, so I try to balance distraction with something called mindfulness. Mindfulness is the idea of living in the moment, and it’s been very helpful for me.