For ‘miracle survivor,’ Anneke Coetzer, 50, the pressure of being a globe-trotting retail clothing and textiles quality manager was excuse enough to ignore what felt like a ‘tennis ball,’ under her arm – for nearly four months.
When she got so sick that she was constantly coughing, hardly able to walk up a flight of stairs and sweating profusely at night, she finally went for a check-up – in Shanghai where she’d just begun a ‘dream’ new job as the retailer’s Quality Assurance Manager for their China office.
“I thought my travel exhaustion had brought on very bad flu or pneumonia or some kind of chest illness- perhaps set off by the Shanghai pollution,” she says. It was winter and she was sweating so badly she had to change her pyjamas and move to the dry side of her bed. “I knew something was badly wrong. I was obviously very irritated, having just started a new job and now getting ill,’’ she confesses.
When medical aid cover and logistical complications in Shanghai led to her head office in Cape Town insisting she fly home for diagnosis and treatment, it was almost too late. She had Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s B-cell lymphoma. She had told her life partner, Craig, just six months after they met, that if she was ever diagnosed with cancer, she didn’t want chemo. Luckily for her Craig didn’t buy the latter admonition. He met her head-on.
If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.
Anneke’s resistance finally turned to surrender in a Johannesburg haematologist’s waiting room. She had just asked another patient about the chemo-treatment side effects. The man spoke of finger nails falling off, the loss of feeling in his finger-tips, the nausea, metal taste in the mouth and the loss of any sense of taste. Anneke’s opposition reached its zenith when he told her that, “the chemo stays in your body for at least 10 years”. She burst into tears, and reiterated her ‘no-chemo’ stance to Craig. “He eventually calmed me down and told me there was no way he was going to let me die in three months’ time – especially when he’d just met me a year ago. Anneke firmly believes that were it not for Craig, and her having added complementary medicine to her mainstream treatment regime, she’d be long gone.
“I agreed to take the chemo, but under protest, with scepticism and a lot of anger”. So, the first of what were to be two chemo regimes began. “The first session was the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my entire life. The oncologist said it was a good thing my cancer was so aggressive. It was so fast moving that it would respond well to the “poison”’’. Back home at 2am after the first one-day drip session, she had a virtual out of body experience. “It felt like I was standing outside my body looking at someone dying…I was burning, aching, and nauseous. The worst was the burning. It felt like I was on fire from the inside
Life – but not as we know it
In the days that followed, everything changed for Anneke, who up until her cancer was a regular half-marathon runner. “The way food tastes, your urine smells metallic – they’ve poisoned you to the point where you only just don’t die. Then they give you cortisone to prevent you from going into complete shock. The cortisone prevented me from sleeping and I was exhausted, I lay in bed for a week, feeling like I wanted to die. By the seventh session of chemo-therapy, she’d had enough. “No more,” she cried. Her oncologist couldn’t say with certainty that stopping chemo one session short of the eight scheduled sessions would be enough –because the [clinical] jury was still out. So, she capitulated, under protest and against her better judgement. Three months passed and she celebrated Christmas 2013 with her nearest and dearest, feeling relatively well and believing remission was a distinct possibility.
However, the respite was short-lived. In February 2014, she felt a painful lump near her collar bone and her oncologist confirmed it was the cancer. He told her she’d probably never been in remission. Second line chemo-therapy was indicated – and her second nightmare began. Her hair had only just begun to grow back. Explains Anneke; “my body had an adverse reaction to the second (different) chemo-therapy – it was even worse than the first one. Not even the doctor anticipated it.
Another down side; was what Anneke calls ‘chemo-brain,” more commonly labelled by doctors as straight fatigue. “It affected my ability to communicate,” she adds. Depression set in. The oncologist, by now desperate, and with fast-diminishing options, suggested radiation. Anneke says she and Craig looked at one another and almost wordlessly agreed that “if this doesn’t work, I must get my stuff in order. In other words; prepare for the ultimate’’. She had 23 consecutive daily radiation sessions, all in her shoulder area. Her skin felt like it had been micro-waved and turned angry and red, but the physical side effects were not nearly as bad as before. “At least I was able to sleep (no cortisone). Intermittent scans continued and the outlook once more turned positive.
Then she developed Radiation Pneumonitis and her fears came rushing back. The doctor told her to relax, a mixture of steroids and cortisone was all that was needed.
Called it all off
“I went home and thought to myself – I’ve been listening to doctors for two years now. And it’s getting worse and worse. I’m done, I’ve had it. I’m not taking a single tablet more. How can I take these alternative medicines if you put all this poison into my body?”. She decided to ‘detox’’ entirely; not easy because no cortisone meant her lungs stayed swollen, making breathing extremely difficult. Craig begged her to swallow the cortisone, fearing she would literally die of oxygen starvation, but she held fast, pleading with him to ‘trust her’ Her holistic route took the form of a GP doctor who focused on Cancer treatment. She administered several Ozone-enriched blood transfusions and intravenous Vitamin C. But Anneke was simply not getting better fast enough.
Her practitioner referred her to another healer in Durbanville, this time a spiritual one; “I went thru a process of spiritual understanding and dealing with the emotional side that caused the cancer in the first place”. She repeated the one hour-long sessions twice more over three weeks. The woman refused to charge her a cent. Since then, to use Anneke’s words; “I’ve been as healthy as can be”.
She’s not so naive as to believe this alternative treatment was solely responsible for her recovery. In hindsight, she wouldn’t change anything. “It’s hard for me to say just one thing worked, but every incident brought me to the place where I went to God and just said; I surrender”. She believes healing is a “medical, spiritual and emotional thing. “God brings you to the point where you’re on your knees – and then He can heal you”. Anneke is also convinced that willingness to stay alive and having “hope” are the biggest factors in getting better.
She says her GP advised her to address her cancer on four levels; lifestyle/diet, emotion, chemical toxicity, plus any trauma in her past which could have impacted on a cellular level.
She tried it all and is still busy with a lot of inner work. Her oncologist believes her recovery to be a miracle, especially after she refused the bone marrow transplant recommended after her radiation and repeated chemo treatment seemed to fail. She never had the very high-risk bone marrow transplant – and lives to tell her tale.