WE ARE NOT ALONE

[Kathleen O'Keefe-Kanavos]

We Are Not Alone
Even in our Battle against Cancer
Cancer is Humbling. It is guaranteed to knock you down with its series of crisis, beginning with discovery and continuing through treatment, often with no end in sight. Upon hearing a diagnosis of breast cancer many women feel devastated, confused and alone. However, nothing could be farther from the truth: We are never alone!
If you are reading this article, odds are good that you or a loved one has been knocked down by illness and you are searching for answers that include and go beyond scientific facts.
I know because I am a two-time, ten-year breast cancer survivor who found out the hard way that not all cancers are discovered by conventional medical tests. Intuition can play an important part in diagnosis.
I am a wife, teacher and a psychic who always suppressed her supernatural skills. Fortunately, I am under the watchful eye of much more than my doctors. I am under the protection of “spiritual-guides” who were at odds with my doctors and the tests they relied on. My story explores my search for a cure for cancer by challenging medical authority with serious information from the psychic realm, accessed by meditations and dreams and how I found my life saving “inner selves” in the process. This same process can be used by anyone concerning any life concerning crises.
The first time I had cancer, rather than believing the test results that came back negative, suggesting that the lump I had discovered four months earlier in my breast was just “in my head,” I summoned the courage to defy doctors and used everything available in this world and the next, to save my life. The doctors and tests on which they relied had missed the 2.1cm tumor that was Stage Two cancer- invasive ductal carcinoma which had already infected one lymph node.
It’s time to stop ignoring ourselves. No matter what stage of treatment someone is in, patients and their families should listen to their intuition when it doesn’t jive with the expert’s advice. It’s time to let that inner voice guide every decision to be made about the health of the patient, then use modern medical tests and evaluations to validate what that voice is saying: Listen, believe, and then validate! The inner voice that I listened to was a special but familiar one, and it literally saved my life. Listening to your inner voice may save your life, too.
Spiritual guides, angels, intuition, gut instincts, call them what you will, ‘voices’ have gotten a bad rap in society (just ask Joan of Arc.) Yet in addition to saving my life, they were a comfort to me while I underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Without the intervention of those voices, I believe I would be dead and my story buried. They are as much a part of my battle with cancer as the medical staff and treatments. Their “inside information,” imparted through dreams and meditations, proved that they often knew more about my cancer than the doctors and tests revealed.
After multiple mammograms, blood tests and physical exams over a three month period, I should have been diagnosed with cancer, but the tests were negative. My lump was invisible to the medical community with whom I consulted. However, my persistent self advocating with the unwavering help of my “spiritual guides” finally resulted in convincing my doctor to perform surgery on a spot that he couldn’t feel and the tests didn’t show. During one of my many dreams,my guides had armed me with an angel feather to fence with against my doctor's indisputable medical information. My feather-fencing worked. I convinced my doctor to perform an operation I knew I needed, even though it was against hospital policy and his better judgment. The result was a diagnosis that shocked the medical community and changed my life, forever.
One of my biggest and most pressing challenges throughout this ordeal was in deciding whom to trust - my doctors and their results, or my voices and their messages. I decided to listen to both! I requested different procedures and medical tests and cross-checked them against my “guided information.” This “mystical information” came to bear on me in ways that I never imagined, as I ran the race of life against time.
I remember the exact moment when I received the validation of my dreams, inner voices and spiritual guide’s information.
“Pathology didn’t like what they saw when they cut the tumor open,” my surgeon said after closing the security curtain behind him.
“So, is it cancer?” I asked, while holding fast to the hospital gurney, bracing myself for the answer I already suspected and feared.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I’ll be referring you to someone else now- a specialist.”
So my “voices and dreams had been right, the doctors and first tests wrong. With my surgeon’s words, the first shop of my ensuing battle had been fired, and it was not a warning shot across my bow- it was point blank into my breast. I glanced down at my painful wound and wept.
Thus began my Alice in Wonderland’s steady decent down the dark rabbit hole of breast Cancerland. My thoughts suddenly shifted from my serious predicament to that of my mother’s death, thirteen months earlier, from colon cancer. I hadn’t had time to fully grieve her death and now I may be grieving my own.
The moon was full the night my mother died. She silently surrendered her body but not her soul during what she called the “Hour of Souls,” that special time between 2:00AM and 4:00AM; different from the “Witching Hour” of midnight.
As a nurse and psychic-in-denial, due to her Catholic convent upbringing, Mom had seen enough people die to know this was indeed a special time for death. She described it as the time souls often chose to free themselves of their worldly bodies. Did she chose to die during this hour or did it just happen? Do we have control over our time of death or are we suddenly somewhere else, dreaming a dream from which we cannot awaken, confused, frightened and alone? All of those questions were answered throughout my ten year battle with cancer.
The moon became many things to me during my cancer treatment: my shield and personal symbol for survival, but especially a sign of love. Anytime I gazed at it from the darkness of night or life, I would whisper, “Look Mom, there’s our moon,” and I’d know in my heart that she had heard me and nodded in agreement.
With my intuitive suspicion of breast cancer medically confirmed, I was slammed to the ground and there were brief moments when a part of me was at odds with my inner-warrior. I considered suicide as a means of freeing myself from painful uncertainty. I was engulfed by the fear of the unknown and wanted to avoid my Mom’s gruesome death. Fortunately, armed with lessons I had learned while caring for her, my inner selves united in my goal to survive. Everyone battling a life-threatening illness or crisis has his or her own set of questions concerning survival, and each must find individual answers to meet their needs.
“I’m too young to die!” I cried after my diagnosis. But was anyone listening? They were! Hearing my cry for help, my spiritual guides, often accompanied by my Mom, turned up in surprising places and became very active in my fight to survive. Ask and you shall receive.
Five years later, my guides again told me that I had cancer during the reading of my “healthy” mammogram. Again I had to self-advocate for the correct medical tests to prove that my guides were correct and the medical tests wrong. If my fist diagnosis was considered a fluke, this second time proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the healing power of the universe was at work, with its commanding message: “We are not alone!”
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; It’s about learning to dance in the rain: Two steps forward—one step back. That is the dance of life. Now I live by that mantra, after being humbled but not defeated by cancer. And whenever I dance in the glow of the platinum moon, I know I am not dancing alone.

Author’s Biography- Kathleen O’Keefe-Kanavos was born in Germany to military parents, and raised in Europe. She is a two time, ten year breast cancer survivor (1999-2009), retired teacher with a degree in Special Education, taught Psychology at the University of South Florida; Fort Myers Branch and is a Reiki master. Kathy contributes to emagazines Cape Women Online Magazine, www.capewomenonline.com. and Connections for Women at connectionsforwomen.com. This article is from her book, SURVIVING CANCERLAND: The Psychic Aspects of Healing, the Pink Pages of which have been added to the BLOCH CANCER FOUNDATION reference booklet. www.blockcancer.org
For seven years, Kathy has been a phone counselor to women throughout the United States and foreign countries for the R.A. BLOCH CANCER FOUNDATION. She also works as a cancer mentor for WE CAN www.wecancenter.org You can visit her at www.survivingcancerland.com