Believe Big Podcast

45-Alison Gannett - Surviving a Terminal Brain Cancer Diagnosis

• Ivelisse Page with Alison Gannett • Season 1 • Episode 45

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It's been 10 years since Alison Gannett was diagnosed with "terminal" brain cancer and given approximately six months to live. 

How has she managed to beat the odds?

Cancer is not a "generalized" disease to be treated like you're on a conveyor belt.  It's an "individualized" condition, and Alison credits cancer for waking her up to the root causes of disease that were plaguing her.  She describes her "check engine" light as being on, yet ignored as she tried to push herself and prove herself in life (something we are all guilty of doing whether we have cancer or not).

This incredible story of self-discovery and positivity may be just what you need to hear today.  Join us on today's podcast as Alison and I talk about the importance of lab testing, knowing and acknowledging your family history, genetic makeup and so much more!

Connect with Alison Gannett:
https://alisongannett.com

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Ivelisse Page:

Hi, I'm Ivelisse Page and thanks for listening to the Believe Big podcast, the show where we take a deep dive into your healing with health experts, integrative practitioners, biblical faith leaders, and cancer thrivers from around the globe. Welcome to today's episode on the Believe Big podcast. My name is Ivelisse Page and it's an honor to spend this time with you. I have a special guest on today who is going to share her story on how she has survived a terminal brain cancer diagnosis when told she only had months to live. Okay, that was in 2013. Alison Gannet is the founder, director and head coach for Personalized Anti-Cancer Nutrition. Alison also became a world champion, extreme freeskier in Canada in 1998. That's amazing. She won titles in South America and Japan. She and her husband Jason, currently live and grow and raise almost all of their anti-cancer foods at their Holy Terror Farm in Colorado. Welcome Alison to the show.

Alison Gannett:

I am so excited to be here.

Ivelisse Page:

So our audience is always curious to discover what our guest's favorite health tip is. So what would you say is yours?

Alison Gannett:

Oh, I had such a hard time to decide which one. I ended up with two, so I hope you don't mind.

Ivelisse Page:

Sure, bonus.

Alison Gannett:

The first one is really the mental component because I feel that your website says it all, Believe Big. Because it's very overwhelming when we get diagnosed that we wanna be a statistic, and they say we're only gonna live 6.8 months, and we've gotta do X, Y, Z PDQ and it doesn't look good. There's no cure for my type of cancer. I love to say, I love proving everybody wrong and I wanna say to everyone out there that we are not statistics and we can take charge of our health and knowledge is power. You don't have to just sit there and wait for your next scan. There's so much we can do every day to take charge of our life. And I have to say, I'm happier and healthier now than I was when I started 13 years ago and was told that I wasn't gonna make it.

Ivelisse Page:

That's incredible. So yes, definitely the mental tools for believing that you know what is being told to you isn't necessarily gonna be your case. Really believing big. I love that. Okay, so what is your second tip?

Alison Gannett:

My second tip, it's really exciting to get out there and do research into the root causes of why we got sick, but it tends to be really overwhelming. You might read one day that coffee's good for you, and then one day coffee's bad for you. One day red meat, great, the next is it causes cancer. The real answer is that we're all different and that we have unique DNA, we have unique labs, we have a unique cancer, and that we need to have coaches like myself that can help you navigate this awful maze of stuff out there. And once you look at your genetics, for example, I can process red meat, but my husband would be the worst person to eat red meat. And of course, I was a vegetarian eating the wrong diet for me. He was a red meat eater eating the wrong diet for him. Same goes for dairy, chocolate, all those different types of things. So get some help out there because it is tough to navigate this whole process and we wanna test and not guess, We wanna see if what we're doing is working and we wanna see that. And I love the science. It makes it exciting instead of sitting there and living in fear. I get so excited when my new labs come in, or I've got a scan coming up because they're not good or bad, it's just information. And so we have to take in all that information and add it to our plan.

Ivelisse Page:

And it changes. So let's get into a little bit, before we share about what you do as a coach. Can you share with our audience a little bit about how you found out you had brain cancer?

Alison Gannett:

Well, it was interesting, it happened slowly, and I think a lot of people can relate to this is you just thought I'm getting old, or I'm tired, something's a little off, but it's not a big deal. There were two big things that happened for me. I was speaking to Microsoft on achieving your goals because I was this crazy skier jumping off cliffs for a living and I forgot to get on the plane. Then when I got on the stage, I completely blanked out and gave the wrong presentation. Interestingly enough, I don't remember any of this because the brain tumor was so big and we can post a picture of it. It literally had taken over almost, I don't know, two thirds of my brain power up there. My whole skull was filled with this tumor and my husband knew something was off, but he thought maybe I was having an affair on him, or like I was just acting really strangely. And one day I was cooking bacon and it caught on fire and the flames were like shooting up to the ceiling. And I was just sitting there thinking how pretty they were. At that point, my husband was like, no, something's wrong, and we're going to the ER, and we found out that night that I was dying from cancer.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow. what did the doctors tell you?

Alison Gannett:

I actually don't remember that much being there. I do remember bits and pieces. I remember them being like, Oh, no problem. You're young and you've got this. I was 48. I felt like I was in good shape. I felt like I was eating the right thing. I felt like I was growing and raising my own food and I was exercising and I was doing all these amazing things. So I really went through like the stages of grief and the first one is denial. And so it was hard to let it sink in and luckily, they rushed me into surgery. I had this 10 hour surgery, which I miraculously survived, which was step number one. And when I woke up, luckily they said, that was so traumatic. We don't want you to start chemo and radiation right now. You need six months to recover from this surgery. And luckily, during that time, I found Dr. Nasha Winters and my whole life turned upside down for the best possible way.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow. So we know that there are many pieces of the puzzle when healing from cancer, but what do you feel are the top three things that she shared with you or that you did that helped you to heal?

Alison Gannett:

I literally could list a hundred things because really, I think of cancer as this really big thousand piece puzzle, and you're trying to put the puzzle together, literally. But what I've decided over the years of working with a lot of other clients, because I fell in love with this process so much about myself, that I went to school to do this And I came up with an acronym called SIT, which is Stress, Insulin, and Toxins. And so I like everybody to just sit and let's talk about sit, because there isn't a person out there that doesn't have 20 things that fall into stress and 20 things that fall under insulin or blood sugar, carb control. And then toxins, of course, is like a big bucket to dig into.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah. And so many hidden things that people aren't aware of. What would you say are some of the things that fall into each of those categories?

Alison Gannett:

I would say for stress, and I'll just use myself cuz it's easy to remember. I would say the mental, emotional component I always thought that since I wasn't like physically abused as a child, that I was just the adult child of an alcoholic. That the absence of a big trauma didn't seem like a big deal, but I think it is actually a huge deal for me to repair not feeling emotionally safe as a child. And really just the only emotion we were allowed to feel was joy. And if you felt sad or if you felt angry or if you felt bullied you couldn't bring up any of those things. So I'm working through that actually a lot right now. I do somatic experience, tapping, and I also have a therapist and I read a lot of books. I also do a ton of meditation. You see this a lot with brain cancer people, especially is the overactive brain. And I think this, for a lot of cancers, is we either go numb or we're overdoing everything. We're the helper. We just help everybody else except for ourself. And so I have been learning how to help myself before I help other people. Hormone imbalance was a huge stressor for me. Immune system disruption, huge stressor for me. Found out I had Lyme disease, parasite, gut imbalance, a vitamin D3 deficiency. My sleep hygiene was horrible. I did all my work at night and never paid attention to the circadian rhythms of the planet, and now everything's different for me. My whole life revolves around sleep first and then probably food second, and water. So those are the main stressors I would say for me personally. Every single person's gonna be different. We need to find out what's in your stress bucket and go from there.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes. I completely agree. and I think. One thing that we've been trying to share too, we had Susie Larson on the podcast, she wrote a book called Fully Alive. I think you'd really love it. And she talks about the emotional trauma that she went through, and how she says what happens in your soul expresses in your cells and she shares that she couldn't even absorb the waters and the nutrients because she was caught in that fight or flight. So I think you're right. We're so focused on the physical side of cancer or disease that we don't take time to think about our past and not that we have to have that victim mentality, right? We address it, but then we can move forward knowing that we just haven't shoved it down and said, okay, I'm not gonna even address that.

Alison Gannett:

And I thought, I didn't have severe trauma, so I thought it wasn't a big issue. And I think even just my mechanism of becoming a professional extreme skier of doing all these things so well was a coping mechanism as being a small child, not being seen, not being heard, just not being validated. And so I've had to do all these crazy things. And I almost think that my body, one of the crazy things my body did was like, okay, now you have cancer. Now you have the biggest thing possible. And I really think of cancer as a messenger, that it's there to tell me something about my life. And in the beginning I really wanted to go back to my old life. Everybody talks about this with cancer. Like I wanna think about me before cancer, because that was when everything was great. But the reality is our normal gave us cancer. So we have to create a new normal that's bigger and better and more wonderful and more complete than my old self. And I'm very much more appreciative of the little things in life. I always say if I'm not in the hospital and I'm not looking up at the hospital ceiling, if there's a blue sky and green grass, I mean having a gratitude journal, like all these things, appreciating just being alive cuz we're all gonna die. We don't know if we're gonna die tomorrow in a car crash or if I'm gonna die from cancer. But that whole, like not knowing about when I'm gonna die is what I've been learning to embrace. What we have is this beautiful moment right now with us interacting with each other, and that's all we have. And so let's go for it and enjoy life as much as we can.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah. Take each day as it comes and make the most of it. I really love that. What about insulin? Most people think of insulin and they think of diabetics. Oh, I don't have an issue with insulin cuz I'm not diabetic. But what does that really mean?

Alison Gannett:

Well, I originally called it sugar, and everybody always says like me, oh, I don't eat sugar. Well, do you eat wheat bread? Do you have pasta? Do you have broccoli? Do you eat beets or potatoes? Every single thing has a certain amount of a blood sugar index effect on our body. What I didn't realize when I was eating all these amazing foods that I grew on my farm was that all the foods that I ate really caused my blood sugar to rise. And if you look at all the studies, they kind of vary on how much sugar affects cancer, but they all kind of agree that there is a glycolytic component of cancer. That means it could raise your IGF-1 or it could raise your hemoglobin A1C, or it could raise your fasting insulin, or it could raise your fasting glucose. There's so many blood glucose markers and we need to look at all of those and see if insulin and blood sugar is a problem for you. Everybody tells me I don't eat sugar. Everybody tells me I don't know why I got sick. I eat perfectly. Some people say, I know why I got sick. But the bottom line for me was I didn't know that the things I was eating was developing insulin resistance in my body. Cancer basically acts I always say like a Walmart scanner, like those little guns, and it's looking around for its preferred fuel and it's preferred fuel is some kind of glucose or carbs that you've eaten. And really, how you eat that carb is as important as what carb you are eating. For example, I found out through testing that every time I ate broccoli, my blood sugar would go up. But if I ate broccoli with a half a cup of let's say my homemade salad dressing, or if I deep fried my broccoli, or if I served it with a quarter stick of butter, then that would mitigate the insulin effect of the broccoli. So how you eat is as important as what carbs you eat. And so I've had to change basically everything. What I was taught in school in the eighties about nutrition was wrong. It said eat five servings of grains. I was doing exactly that. My blood sugar was going through the roof. I was eating lots of legumes, my blood sugar was going through the roof. We call it the keto diet, but I like to also call it therapeutic carb reduction because what we're doing is we're really paying attention to what kind of carbs go into our body and the quality of those vegetables. Of course, they should be organic and chemical free. But also a really wide variety of vegetables. I try to get, if possible, 20 vegetables a day into my diet, and also nine cups of vegetables into my diet in the day. So when I was a vegetarian, I didn't eat vegetables hardly at all. Now that I'm on Alison's anti-cancer therapeutic carb reduction diet, I eat tons of vegetables, very small amounts of very high quality protein, and then really high quality fats. I find that I need to eat the equivalent of about three sticks of butter a day. Now, of course, we don't know if you can metabolize dairy or not, or if saturated fat is good for you or not. These are all things that we're gonna find out when we dive into your DNA and your labs.

Ivelisse Page:

I love that.

Alison Gannett:

Yeah, a lot of people eat low carb, but they forget about the fat.

Ivelisse Page:

Yeah. And it's so important. Even growing up fat was the bad word, and no carbs and all these things. Again, I wanna stress if there are patients listening like we've mentioned before, what Alison's saying is absolutely correct. You have to be tested to find out what your sensitivities are, what your body chemistry is, so that you can be on the right diet best for you. Great example for me was I thought, okay, I have cancer. I'm gonna have this green smoothie juice, and this green smoothie that I thought had all these good things in it made my sugar level skyrocket cuz I'm super sensitive to sugar. So I had eliminate all the fruits in there. I could only have blueberries and then I added the spinach and added some protein to it. But it's amazing how everybody's body's different. So just because you hear it from another patient or a friend that this works for them, it really is individualized and you really need to seek someone like Alison that can really work with you to really dive in to say, okay, what is gonna be most therapeutic for you? And let's touch real quickly on the last one cause I wanna hear more about your story and toxins. Most people think toxins and they think about glyphosate or things like that. So what is encompassing of that?

Alison Gannett:

Where I start first for every single person is I take the zip code or where they live cuz most of my clients are international and I look up superfund cleanup sites. I look up water toxicity reports for their area and everybody thinks that you know their area is clean or they know that it's dirty, but they really don't know what the toxins are. So I wanna find out what is in their water, and then I wanna find out what is the right water filter to work for them. For example, a lot of people will have a really good reverse osmosis water filter for their tap water, but then I might find out that their water's radioactive and that they're showering in it every day. So we really need to find out what the chemicals are and then we gotta come up with a strategy of how to get them out. Then we dig into air and look at the air pollution for their area. We see a ton of rise of lung cancer, and that is because of air pollution. And air pollution could be traffic on the street. It could be oil and gas drilling, or it could be radon. Or it could be wildfire smoke, it could be hundreds of different things. So we really wanna dig into that. We wanna look into food toxins. What are you eating? What are you drinking? What are you doing for home cleaning products? What are you doing for your dentistry? How about biotoxins, like mold and Lyme disease, C.diff, bacterial infections, viral infections, parasites, SIBO, constipation, colitis, diverticulitis. Going down the list, it's process of elimination. What I have realized over the years is we wanna just cross all these things off the list and say, okay, this one is not a player.

Ivelisse Page:

Yep.

Alison Gannett:

Because I had a reoccurrence in 2018 and another one in 2020. How can this be happening to me? But the reality was I missed radon in the beginning, and I also faked meditation. I knew I should do it, but I was like, I'm doing enough. This is fine. And then that recurrence, like I said, cancer's a messenger. It slapped me upside the head and said, Alison, you're not doing enough. You need to do more. Every time I've had one of those recurrences, it's been like this horrible thing that's turned into another gift. This last journey, I discovered that I had Lyme disease, so that was another big one in 2020. And also, I had faked dealing with my trauma as a child. So I thought, oh, it's not that bad. And so I was like, look, I have nothing to lose. I might as well dig in to my trauma and see if anything's there. I feel like we all have grown up with good things that happened to us and bad things that happened to us. And it's not like we have to remember all of them, but we have to integrate them into ourself. I'm reading right now, The Body Keeps the Score. Holy moly. The body really does keep the score and there's a reason I got cancer and it's not just because I was eating high carbs and getting lots of all the things I listed, it's more than that.

Ivelisse Page:

It's interesting cuz people will say, I can't believe this person got cancer. Even myself, I can't believe that you got cancer Ivelisse because you and Jimmy eat organic, you exercise. So I have the MTFHR gene and so it makes it really hard for me to process things out. And I've shared this before, but in the past I went on a mission trip and I had to get nine immunizations and they gave them to me within a two month period, all nine of them. And, a year later, I'm stage four cancer. So I know that was the trigger. I don't want people to be concerned to think, oh, I have a family history of this. I'd love for you to chime in on the fact that we can switch on and off those things based on what we do. I actually switched it on not knowing.

Alison Gannett:

Yep.

Ivelisse Page:

So speak to that for us.

Alison Gannett:

A lot of people are focused on cancer as a genetic disease, and that has been disproven. We could do a whole show on that. We're not going to but less than 4% of cancers are genetic. And even if they are, let's take the BRCA gene for example. The BRCA gene is very sensitive to insulin and toxins. So the BRCA gene can actually be protective for people with cancer, if you take care. If you know that you have that gene and then you take care of it, how do you take care of your genes? Diet and lifestyle are the two biggest ways that you can either turn on a gene or you can turn off a gene. A perfect example for me is that I have the apoe4 gene, and if anybody knows about that gene, it's often linked to a very high percentage of Alzheimer's. What people don't know is the apoe4 also is very poor detoxer of chemicals. So even though I live in rural Colorado, when you test my body, it looks like I live in Hong Kong because the apoe4 gene and I have about oh, maybe 11 other genes that hold onto toxins like a sponge. And this is why two relatives could live at Love Canal in New York. One might get cancer from the toxins in the soil, and the other one may not because of the genetic predisposition we have. But what's so cool is when I changed my diet, when I changed my lifestyle, and my sleep and my exercise, and taking care of myself, all my blood markers got better and when they get better, you are actually influencing those genes. So if anybody has seen a helix of DNA, it's looks like a slinky that's stretched out. They have these little methyl groups that latch onto your DNA that are gonna turn on or turn off a gene. So if you could look at my apoe4 gene, if I had lots of toxins that gene would be turning on and turning on, if I had lots of insulin based foods, lots of carbohydrates that gene would be turning on. If I remove the foods that trigger apoe4 and I remove the toxins that trigger apoe4, then that gene is, you could call it neutralized. It's basically not going to cause you harm. And the reason we know this is there is a tribe in Africa. They are all apoe34, and 44, and the majority of them are apoe44, which is two copies of the disease, one from your mother, one from your father. There is no incidence of Alzheimer's in that tribe until they leave that tribe and start eating the standard American diet.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow.

Alison Gannett:

Once they leave the tribe, they eat the junk that I was eating when I got sick, then the disease has a very high proportion of expressing itself. And again, Alzheimer's is like cancer. It's a big puzzle, a thousand piece puzzle, that we need to put together. But I know that for me, the gift that cancer gave me is that I will never get Alzheimer's is what I fully believe because I've made so many changes to my diet and lifestyle for cancer. Those are the same changes I needed to make to prevent Alzheimer's.

Ivelisse Page:

I've heard that the ketogenic diet is fantastic for brain cancer and also Alzheimer's. So for those people who are listening who don't know what a ketogenic diet is, can you explain what a ketogenic diet is, and then also the difference between that and a therapeutic one. You touched on it briefly before, but just so it's a little clear. For those who aren't familiar.

Alison Gannett:

The first type of keto, which is short for ketogenic, is what I call dirty keto. It's also what I call internet keto. Basically, if you go on the website and you Google around, all these people are eating like sausage and cream cheese. The quality of the foods is not good. It's very high fat and very low carb. That is what a ketogenic diet is. But what is the quality of those carbs? What is the quality of the fats? For example, so I could eat sausage and cream cheese, but in my case, I have a gene that doesn't process dairy, so I can't have dairy in my personalized low carb diet. I also have a gene that doesn't process coconut oil, so I can't have coconut oil or palm oil, very saturated fats in my diet, whereas a lot of people out there on the internet are saying saturated fat is good. In general, yeah, it's way better than vegetable oil. We wanna stay way far away from vegetable oils, seed oils, those kinds of things over-processed high Omega-6s but we also need to look at your genetics and say, what kind of fats can you metabolize? Okay, back to keto. So we've got internet, dirty keto. Then we've got the high quality keto where you're eating lots of vegetables. Generally we avoid, carbohydrates like bread, rice, and pasta. We're also avoiding most fruits. A lot of people think like fruits are this big antioxidant. The truth is, if you want lots of antioxidants, you'll get the same antioxidant power from like yellow Swiss chard as you would from like a high carb thing like an orange carrot. So we say mostly we're going to eat above ground vegetables. That's the easiest way I describe it to everybody. I've also written a cookbook. I've also have like my"yes" foods list, my"no" foods list, where to buy healthy foods list. Those foods have to be chemical free. They have to be grown as close to you as possible, so we're not losing all that nutrition while they're driving in a truck for three weeks. And we also really need to focus on the quality of, especially things like proteins. There are studies, a lot of people have read them that say meats can cause cancer. The reality is the meats they tested were conventional meats. I'm a beef farmer. Our cows graze in these beautiful pastures with all this healthy vegetation. They're rotationally grazed. They're happy, they're healthy. They have clean water, clean air. Cows that you buy at, I'm gonna pick on my mom, supermarket When she goes to supermarket, she's supporting cows that are raised indoors often and they're fed anything from corn to candy to anything they can get their hands on. That is cheap, and then they give them, because they're so sick from those things they've eaten, they give them lots of antibiotics and then they wanna make more money. So they give them growth hormones, to make a small cow become a big cow, also make a small tumor become a big tumor. So we really wanna have quality proteins. We also wanna look at the DNA and see which proteins you can eat and should not eat, because that gets more complicated as well. So we've kind of got now a clean, healthy version of keto, focusing on quality and quantity. Quantity for therapeutic keto, we generally put people at 85% fat, 5% carb, and 10% protein. Now, I don't know your metabolism or anybody's metabolism, so we generally strive to test for ketones. So if you have a low grade cancer, you might want to have your blood ketone tests, say something from one, two, three, and we call that nutritional ketosis. So that would be more like maybe 75% fat, maybe more like 15% protein. and then people who have higher grade cancers, more severe cancers or cancers that we know really love carbs and sugar. Pancreatic cancer is one of them, triple negative breast cancer, brain cancer loves sugar. I don't think there's a cancer out there that hasn't been shown to be glycolytic. So we wanna have some kind of therapeutic carb reduction for everybody, but we just don't know exactly what yours should be until we work with your doctor and we look at your DNA and we look at your labs and we look at your health history. All of those come together and we make a customized, low carb, high fat diet, which you could also call the therapeutic.

Ivelisse Page:

I actually glanced at your anti-cancer cookbook and the recipes just look delicious. And sometimes people think, oh, ketogenic, that's so limiting, but it really isn't when you're putting the right foods together. And so I would encourage everyone to take a look at your anti-cancer cookbook and we'll put a link in our show notes for that as well.

Alison Gannett:

I'm glad you brought that up cuz it has to be fun.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes.

Alison Gannett:

And I think if you think of this with dread, it will be dreadful. In the beginning, everything seemed foreign and scary. How do I eat this fat and how do I do this? I walk you through it step by step. But also the way I look at it now is I get to eat my dairy free ice cream, and my low carb, grain-free brownies every single day and maintain healthy weight and all that ice cream and brownies, it sounds like junk food, but every single ingredient there is healthy and good for you.

Ivelisse Page:

Are those recipes in your cookbook?

Alison Gannett:

Oh, absolutely. You've gotta have a replacement for everything. So you know, if you love bread, what is a ketogenic version of anti-cancer bread? Most of the recipes out there that are keto are made with almond flour, and I'm just gonna go ahead and say that I'm not a fan of almond flour, very high in carbs, so people think they're doing the right thing but nuts vary in their amount of carbs. And the other thing we found with almonds and certain nuts is they can be heavily sprayed with glyphosate and atrazine. And those are two known carcinogens.

Ivelisse Page:

Even organic raw ones?

Alison Gannett:

They did a test and I'll have to pull up the, PubMed or it was NCBI, I can't remember who did the test, but they tested all the packaged organic foods in Whole Foods, and they found traces of glyphosate in all of them.

Ivelisse Page:

Wow.

Alison Gannett:

And everybody's oh, Allison, this is such a pain. How am I gonna make my brownies? How am I gonna make my granola? How am I gonna make my bread? One of my biggest tips when you get diagnosed is, I felt terrible and I didn't have time to cook or even think about cooking. Hire a local teenager on Facebook or a friend of a friend. Have them make your five, can't live without foods. For me, that was brownies, ice cream, salad dressing, herb puree, my dairy free cream. I had to have those in the refrigerator. If you have a bad day or you're feeling sorry for yourself, I need a way to feel like I'm cheating, but I'm not really cheating. If I'm craving coffee cake, I created my keto coffee cake so that I could have that experience of eating this delicious coffee cake on Christmas that we do in our family every year. So I help my clients recreate those family recipes that you can't live without because that's the only way you're gonna succeed.

Ivelisse Page:

Alison, you are a wealth of knowledge. We're gonna have to have you back on again and share more. I'm so grateful for your time and being with us today. And, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would wanna share real quick before we close the episode?

Alison Gannett:

I would just say, bring joy to your life because I spend a lot of time and energy loving my cancer to death. I used to say fighting my cancer. I'm not fighting my cancer anymore. I'm working with myself and loving all these things that went wrong, that went right. I spend about half of my day on self-care, things like detoxification with a sauna, and cooking the right foods and exercising and being outside. But I also wanna spend half of my day having fun and a lot of people forget that as soon as you get diagnosed, you can apply for disability and if you do qualify for disability, then you can get a chunk of money and then you can use that money to hire. For me, I don't like cleaning my house, so I hired someone to help clean my house and I hired someone to help cook for me. So get rid of the things that you don't like to do and try to focus on how am I gonna live my life with love and passion. It's really brought me close to my family and my friends in a beautiful way. And asking for help is hard, but it's like breathing all my life, I've been breathing out, I've been breathing out and helping other people. I need to learn to breathe in, which is helping myself, and then breathe out and help other people. It has to go both ways.

Ivelisse Page:

Yes, a hundred percent. And I would always say to my family, even for myself, is, that's why the meditation for me in prayer is so important is, I have to fill my cup with Him first, so then I can pour out because I can't be in a state of emptiness and feel like I can still serve. So it's so important that you're filling yourself so that then you can give back. So thank you so much for joining us and, and we'll look forward to seeing you soon.

Alison Gannett:

So great to be with you and thank you for believing big and inspiring everybody out there. It really means a lot to me and to everybody else. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support our podcast, please subscribe and share it with others. Be sure to visit believebig.org to access the show notes and discover our bonus content. Thanks again and keep Believing Big!