We Certainly Need Doctors But …
We Certainly Need Doctors But …
By Sandi Gold
In 1986, five neurosurgeons told me I had less than a year to live. Since everything is energy – including me – and love is the highest form of energy there is, to keep myself from dying, I chose to use love.
Following my diagnosis, I spent two days in a hospital being tested. After being discharged, I was home alone, thinking about the artwork I had recently created and what, being an artist, I might be leaving to the world. I’d painted a bouquet of dead pink carnations, a woman holding onto a grave, a dead fish hanging by its tail from a thin rope, and a sepia-colored portrait of my fraternal grandmother who had died of a brain tumor before I was born.
When I saw death was the obvious theme, I gasped and panicked. I couldn’t breathe until I felt pure love envelop me and everything around me brighten. I decided I’d rather follow this than follow my doctors who offered me no hope.
Years later I began writing I Chose Love: How to Thrive After a Life-Threatening Illness Using Love to Guide You because I felt a responsibility to share what I’d learned. People need to know that they didn’t have to believe everything their doctors said as if it came from the lips of God.
It was only after my grim diagnosis did I learn that whether we have a life-threatening illness or not, trusting our bodies’ loyalty and love for us and understanding its language is one of the most useful things we can do for ourselves. We’re already doing this on a basic level: our bodies tell us when we’re hungry, tired, too cold, or too hot. They’re always trying to protect us 24/7.
The more we pay attention to what we feel in our bodies, the better we’ll understand its language and gain from its knowledge. Especially for those who have a life-threatening illness, learning this is paramount. I was fortunate to have two body-centered therapists in the late 80s and mid-90s who taught me the importance of using my body to find answers or I might not be alive today. So how could I not have had a fervent passion to write a book to share this?
To my delight, what I’d discovered was that I could even use my body’s wisdom to successfully navigate through the often dysfunctional medical system. Because so many people would benefit from knowing this, that had to be included in my book.
I had to let people know that much of our healthcare is not healthy. For example, the first time I saw a neurologist, knowing I’d just been told I’d soon die, he insisted I wasn’t telling him all of my symptoms. I kept telling him I was, but he became rude and dismissive of me. Because I didn’t fit into some kind of template that he’d devised, he decided I had to be wrong. He asked my boyfriend who was sitting beside me if I was telling the truth. I told this doctor, “If this is how my body is responding to having a brain tumor, then this is how my body responds.”
Decades later two doctors told me I had to get a mastectomy. Thankfully, by then I’d gotten quite good at understanding my body’s language. Upon hearing the word mastectomy, my body shouted “No!” I chose to listen to it and declined to have the mastectomy.
“If you don’t have the surgery it could cost you your life! You’re playing with fire!” my doctor said. Perhaps because I’m a gardener, it made more sense for me to change the “soil” in my body so the cancer couldn’t grow rather than have my right breast removed. Using a natural treatment and no doctors’ help (because I was a struggling and often ill artist, I couldn’t afford one) just five months later, I was cancer-free.
With so many interactions with the medical world, what I was learning kept exponentially expanding. So, I just kept writing. After many years, I’d written what amounted to two books before I realized I had to stop. I deleted over half of what I’d written and only kept the most important parts.
We need doctors. Many are impressive and quite skilled at what they do but if our bodies didn’t know how to heal themselves doctors wouldn’t exist. They’ve spent years learning critical skills to assist our bodies’ healing abilities. Yet the majority fail to recognize that their patients have access to their body’s healing capabilities too. And most people need to recognize that our bodies’ innate abilities are available to them 24/7 and the benefits they’ll gain when they learn the language that their body speaks.
Imagine if patients and doctors worked together using our bodies’ wisdom to help us heal. My hope is for my book I Chose Love to demonstrate, proclaim, and encourage this, for it truly cannot happen fast enough.
For those who wish to learn more about how love helped to save my life, I Chose Love: How to Thrive After a Life-Threatening Illness Using Love to Guide You can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and my website www.sandigold.com in softcover, eBook, and audio. And while you’re there, sign up for my free newsletter to keep yourself updated for I’m always learning and am happy to share!
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Sandi Gold has been featured in the New York Times, People magazine, the Boston Globe, and USA Today. Her feature on ABC’s 20/20, about her Temple of the Soul mural, was in the top three most popular shows the year it aired. She’s been interviewed on National Public Radio and its Connecticut affiliate. Sandi was the keynote speaker for the Calgary Cancer Center in Canada and has spoken at Brown University, and the Brain Tumor Society in Boston. She has won numerous awards for her art and been recognized for her many contributions to her community. Sandi is a certified Expressive Art Specialist and has a Kripalu Holistic Teacher’s Certification. She has worked for hospitals, and for Hospice using Expressive Art to assist her patients’ comfort and healing. She was nominated for the National Athena Award and has received a Rhode Island Citation Award and The State House of Representative Citation.
Dr. Bernie Siegel called Sandi “a survivor and thriver.”
In I Chose Love, artist Sandi Gold chronicles her transformative journey from having an inoperable, life-threatening brain tumor at age 33, to her miraculous recovery, followed by decades of physical and emotional challenges — including breast cancer, financial struggles and a dysfunctional, unsupportive family.
Driven by her determination to survive, she learned to listen to her body and embrace love as the ultimate path to healing. In this inspirational page-turner, Sandi demonstrates the many ways she opened her heart and helped her body to thrive.
Written for people with cancer, cancer survivors, and anyone living with a serious illness or post-traumatic stress — as well as their caregivers and loved ones — this book shares valuable lessons from a unique and rare perspective. Journaling exercises at the end of each chapter guide readers on their own healing journey to achieve both health and happiness. I Choose Love.
BUY I CHOSE LOVE HERE
Category: On Writing
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