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Couple kicks cancer, takes message on the road
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| | | Kevin and Joyce O’Brien of East Northport. Joyce has written an e-book that shares her inspirational message and offers prevention and treatment tips. Courtesy photo (click for larger version) | |
October 14, 2009 | 05:08 PM
After a successful albeit stressful career on Wall Street to a diagnosis of stage four cancer, one East Northport woman has decided to get healthy, chronicle her fight and take her inspirational story on the road.
Joyce O'Brien and her husband, Kevin, have fought back from what seemed an impossible battle — curing themselves of seemingly incurable cancers. The couple's road to recovery eventually took them to Switzerland, where they discovered an approach known as biological medicine.
Given the couple's incredible journey to health, people have often encouraged her to pen her story. Joyce shares her research on biological medicine with her readers in an e-book called "Being Cancer-Free." By removing the root cause of disease, biological medicine allows the body to build itself up again and heal, Joyce said. Chemotherapy, conversely, merely kills the cancer cells without removing the cause.
"Once I realized how much it meant to me, I realized I had to share this message," she said. The final impetus to write the book came about a year and a half ago, when she was visiting her father, diagnosed with lung cancer, and met a woman younger than she in the cancer ward. "It really hit me very hard," she said. "I couldn't bear to see anybody else going through what that young woman was going through."
At 31, Kevin O'Brien had a brain hemorrhage, three strokes and was paralyzed. Soon after, Joyce was diagnosed with breast cancer, at age 33. A year later, Kevin was diagnosed with advanced malignant melanoma and Joyce's cancer progressed to stage four.
Cancer is a multi-causal disease, Joyce explained, often brought on by multiple toxicities.
Joyce spent her youth around second-hand smoke from her father's smoking and had a mouth full of mercury fillings, which she said can cause damage to both the nervous and immune system.
Her high-stress lifestyle — working long hours on Wall Street and subsisting on a very unhealthy diet of coffee, carbs and sugar — may have also played a role in her illness.
"And then there are the stressors that go all the way back to childhood that you just keep inside and accept as part of our life but don't realize how it impacts us on a daily basis," she said.
Though most people are not aware they have any, food allergies also stress the immune system as it works to attack allergens in the body.
Because of the Federal Drug Administration's cautious and slow approval process, biological medicine is not yet commonly available in the U.S., though it is steadily gaining a foothold in this country, she said. Whole body hyperthermia, which deliberately raises a patient's body temperature, is one treatment that awaits FDA approval.
Joyce's new "alkaline" diet consists of mostly raw foods, as many vegetables as she can eat and lots of quinoa, a grain notably high in protein. "What you're trying to do, especially in the beginning, is get as many greens into your body as possible because that's how you're going to heal."
Four weeks into her new diet, she claims she was already feeling better.
Still, a good mental outlook might be one of the most vital aspects of the healing process, she noted.
One of the first things people must do is to take control, she said, "and to convince yourself that number one, nobody knows what your outcome will be. It's an approach of, 'I'm going to take it on. I'm going to heal my body.'"
These days, Joyce is out on the road, lecturing others on how to cure themselves and to prevent illness. Meanwhile, Kevin is walking again and for the time being, is back at work. Once the book is published, he plans to join his wife on the road, spreading their message of healing and hope.
"This is our mission," said Joyce. "We just feel so incredibly blessed."
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