Candice on Cancer, Part II

[Written by reader Ella as a guest post].
Candice on Cancer, Part 2.

Things have a blown up somewhat over at Facebook, which reminds me why I so rarely go there. Candice is very angry that Violet and other sense-talking people are demanding clarification of the more outlandish aspects of her story, and Candice’s supporters are equally crabby. In fact, Candice has alleged that we are all different iterations of Violet, or a small army of humanoids, all called Violet.

I’m compelled to point out that Candice is the one who chose to make her story public. When you publish something, it’s fair game. I mean, I don’t mind if Candice wants to claim that she lives in a pineapple under the sea. But if she wants to claim that pineapples shrink cancerous tumours, and to pitch that claim to the public with a falsified personal story, then she needs to be prepared for a detoxifying dose of reason.

Candice on Cancer, Part 2: “There’s no, ‘here you go, here’s some broccoli.’”

Picking up where we left off yesterday, Candice had visited a “laboratory in Fremantle” that deals in “natural cancer cures.” but she didn’t follow through with it. She says:

CANDICE: “I ended up being scared into the surgery…I went to two different surgeons, and they both said the same thing: total thyroidectomy, take all the lymph nodes out, then radiation, possible chemo, blah blah blah. When I went in there and I said to them ‘look, I want to do it naturally,’ he was just like ‘oh, okay, yeah. If you do it naturally, if you leave it for another year and it takes over, you might lose your voice, you know, it will probably eat at your vocal cords’ – really scare tactics – and he was like ‘and then you’ll probably die.’ Like, literally.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Candice’s oncologist is deploying “scare tactics,” in the same way that my dentist uses scare tactics when she tells me my teeth will probably decay if I don’t brush them, or my bungee instructor tells me that jumping off a bridge without a rope would be less fun than it sounds.

CANDICE: “So I just sat there sh*****g myself thinking ‘okay, why is my head saying that I can do this without this mass corporation? Why am I thinking that I can? Maybe I’m wrong.’ So I just started doubting myself, questioning myself […]. And you’ve got these doctors and surgeons in high-up places who ‘know their s**t’ [finger quotes] telling you that you’re going to kill yourself if you don’t do it their way. And they did say that, you know. It was THAT intense. Like ‘if you go that way, you’ll probably kill yourself.’”
[…] I was just like, ‘I don’t want to kill myself, okay I’ll go your way.’ […] And then, 90% survival rate, they gave me, from doing it their way. They were like, ‘yeah, high chances, we’ll just take out the thyroid, you might not even need radiation, we’ll see how you go.’”

Note that she is now saying the doctors have given her “high chances” of recovery and a “90% survival rate.” Just moments earlier, she told us that when this mysterious doctor  - let’s call him “Doctor Pilbara” - delivered her initial diagnosis, she was told “my chances of survival are very slim.” Presumably what she means is that without treatment her chances are slim.

SNARY: “But they’d pretty much written you off if you decided to go the natural route.”

CANDICE: “Yeah…because it’s…all over my neck, they say basically it’s just going to keep growing and take over. I was like ‘there must be something more you can do.’ […] Straight away you are given an oncologist, [put] into their system; a surgeon, radiologist…like, there’s no ‘here you go, here’s some broccoli,’ you know, ‘that helps with cancer.’ There’s none of that.”

I’m trying really hard not to keep interjecting, because I think Candice’s spectacular stupidity speaks for itself. But I can’t let this one slide. Candice is complaining that when diagnosed with a serious disease she was referred to three relevant specialists very quickly, and that those specialists did not offer her broccoli. Now, I’m not based in Perth, but I am Australian. Where I live, medical specialists have waiting lists and broccoli does not. In fact, any individual of modest means can waltz into any supermarket and purchase broccoli over the counter, no questions asked. So I’m not sure why Candice feels she needs medical specialists to prescribe the…you know what? You get the picture. Let’s move on.

SNARY: “So they don’t look at it from more [of] a holistic manner, it’s just surgery, treatment…”

CANDICE: “Yeah, it’s just ‘take it out,’ it’s just chop and burn, it’s like ‘cut it out, burn it, off you go. You can carry on drinking wine, you can carry on eating your meat, it’s fine.’ [That’s] exactly what they say. 
So when I had it chopped out, I had a horrific experience in the hospital. The surgeon, who is like the best surgeon in Perth, done over 10,000 thyroidectomies, in error, cut out my parathyroids. 
So I literally am in hospital, and I started feeling really ill…all of sudden my body locked up. So my hands just went like *this* [makes clawing motions], I couldn’t move, like literally screaming. The nurse has come in, and [I] was like ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I felt like I was dying, because everything was just seizing. I was like ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I could just feel, like, a tear, trickle down my face, like literally. And I don’t even know, I just, like, my heart, *BOOM,* *BOOM,* *BOOM!* 
And the nurse come [sic] in, and I said…‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ 
And she was just like ‘no, you’re not.’ 
And I was like, ‘what’s wrong with me then?’ 
And she was just like, ‘I don’t know, love.’ [Roars with laughter]. 
And I’m like, ‘Well then how do you know I’m not dying, [for] f***’s sake?’ 
And then an older lady…she [the first nurse]must have been like a trainee. And then an older lady came in, and she was just like, ‘okay, her calcium levels are low, we just checked her bloods, it’s…below 180, la la la la la,’ and then they injected me and put some calcium in my mouth, and then I was just…trying to drink it. And then they started un-prising [sic] my hands apart, and like easing my muscles, and then they found out that, yeah, all my parathyroids had been taken out in error in the surgery. Which is, there’s a lot of cancer there, fine. But you don’t expect that to happen from a top surgeon. So, forever I would have to take calcium tablets as well as thyroid replacement tablets.”

This is baffling. Is she saying there “WAS a lot of cancer” in the parathyroids? Or is she saying that “IF there was a lot of cancer in the parathyroids it would have been acceptable to remove them?” Wouldn’t she have had to take thyroid supplements anyway after a thyroidectomy? At the very beginning of the podcast, Candice says “obviously I'm on replacement thyroid hormones,” but now she seems to be implying that she only has to take them because of the surgeon’s error.

SNARY: “Was there any benefit at all of taking the parathyroid out?”

CANDICE: “No, no, no, he just done it [sic]…no, he stuffed up. It was an error. Like an absolute error to do that, he shouldn’t have taken it out. […] The whole situation was awful in the hospital…the coffee lady comes ‘round with two sugars and stuff like that, you’ve got fried food…”

SNARY [Enraged]: “NO S***!”

CANDICE: “They are keeping everybody, like, ill.”

SNARY: “F***.”

Yeah. Candice has alleged that hospitals are “keeping everybody, like, ill.” If true, this would be a massive, global conspiracy. In fact that concept of conspiracy is at the heart of the “wellness” paradigm.

Candice goes on to complain at length about hospital food. Adrian Snary seems to be more upset about that than the accusations of malpractice Candice has just leveled at the “best surgeon in Perth.”

I won’t include the whole hospital rant, because what we’re particularly interested in is how she arrived at her current understanding of her own prognosis, and why she claims to have cured her cancer herself.

SNARY: “Which hospital were you at?”

CANDICE: “I was at [Sir] Charles Gairdner [Hospital, in Western Australia]. The whole situation there was just not good […]. I was reading this book about doing it the natural way, because…even though I’ve done it their way, I’m still gonna, like, see what I can do myself […]. The whole hospital situation was s***.”

Now this is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a banana skin. If Candice has already had surgery and radiation to treat the cancer, what exactly is it that she is planning to “do herself?” I’m not convinced Candice even knows the answer to this question, as she seems to be unclear on virtually every aspect of her diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

SNARY: “How long were you in hospital for?”

CANDICE: “I was in hospital for a few weeks […]. I came out of surgery with this massive scar on my neck…swollen…given crap food, just constantly pumped with morphine, and…I was out of it, and then…I just felt so depressed, and I’ve never felt that depressed in my life. But I kept getting all these pharmaceuticals thrown at me. Now I’m looking back, it’s like ‘no wonder I was fucking depressed.’ I was pumped with so much crap.” 

I’d be interested to know how she would have fared without morphine and whatever other “pharmaceuticals” were “thrown at her.”

SNARY: “Just crap, yeah. I mean, having said that, I think we should make the point – I mean, I’m not into the pharmaceutical industry and that whole thing, but we have to admit, they do have a benefit.”

:D

CANDICE: “Oh, they do, they do.”

SNARY: “Like, there are some great points to it. It’s just the misuse of it.”

CANDICE: “Yeah, yeah yeah. They do. I just…like, I’m not putting down the health industry or whatever, or the sickness industry…”

*facepalm*

CANDICE: “…I just feel like it’s a  bit twisted, what’s going on. Like, they’re keeping people ill in hospitals with the food […].” 

SNARY: “Yeah, ‘just give me some broccoli, please!’”

CANDICE: “Luckily, I was already pretty healthy. Like, I didn’t do the carbs and all that. I didn’t really give in to the coffees and all that.”

This is interesting, because earlier in the podcast Candice said that prior to her cancer diagnosis: “I didn't treat my body [well] growing up…it was like drink, drugs, partying...I was damaging my system from about 13… partying, having fun.” She adds that as recently as the honeymoon immediately preceding diagnosis, “we [had] meats, drink, cheeky cigarettes here and there. All brilliant stuff for, like, breeding disease.” She’s full of contradictions.

One of my favourite parts is coming up. Candice tells Snary that the hospital offered her “brown bread” and a “fried pancake with [beef] mince in.” That is just too much for Adrian Snary to handle.

SNARY: “That is f****d, Candice.”

CANDICE: “I’ll tell you another f****d story that’s even more f****d than that. So when I was in radiation, so anyway I had the surgery and then they booked me in for radiation, so that was gonna mop up all the rest, so they got the most out and…”

SNARY: “How long after you had the surgery did they start that?”

CANDICE: “So that was October. So September…um, no, October I had the surgery and then December I had the radiation.”

Candice describes the radiation at length here. I’ll skip most of it, because it all sounds pretty routine. What is interesting, though, is that she seems to have interpreted the procedure itself as a personal insult. She does that a lot.

CANDICE: “[I’m] Sitting in there, and then they come in, there’s this woman in a space suit. Like, no s***. It’s a massive, like tripled-her-size space suit. And like she’s got this capsule, it’s like something out of a movie…and then she’s got these tweezers, and then she’s talking you through it, and she’s like, ‘okay, Candice, I’m gonna take the tablet.’ Like, ‘you take it.’ Like literally she’s covered, and I’m just standing there like *me,* like…”

SNARY: “You’ve got an alien standing in front of you.”

CANDICE: “Yeah! I was just like, ‘what is going on?’ And she’s got this capsule, and she said, ‘I’m going to open it, I want you to take it, and then drink some water.’ So she passed me this capsule, and I’m just like ‘oh my god, this is like…I didn’t feel anything, I couldn’t see any radiation, you know what I mean?”

No, Candice. We don’t know what you mean. In fact I personally would be more worried if you could see the radiation. I can certainly imagine how Twilight-Zoney the whole radiation process is. But I can’t relate to Candice’s sense of outrage that anyone would submit her to the procedure in the first place. She is clearly under the impression that was unnecessary, and unnecessarily weird. As though the space suit is a superfluous and ridiculous detail meant to alienate the patient.

CANDICE: “She just looked f****** weird, and scared me, and I was like, ‘why are you that protected, and I’m not.’ And then I took the tablet, drunk [sic] the water, and then she stood back, and she went *WOO WOO WOO* with this [waves an invisible radiation monitor].”

SNARY: “WHOOAAH!”

CANDICE: “No s***! She scanned me. Then she’s like, ‘so you are reading blah blah blah,’ like high numbers of radiation. She goes, ‘just keep drinking water, pass it through your system, and then you can be let out when it’s at this number.’”

After a long discussion about hospital food, things get interesting. This is where Candice explains how she arrived at the conclusion that she only has five years to live.

CANDICE: “Then I had to go into a…it was like a special cancer, kind of, outhouse [does she mean “outpatient” facility?] where you just…it’s a stop-gap, so you don’t go into normal society, because you’re still radioactive. So you’re not allowed to…sit on toilets, and la la la, like, without passing the radiation through, or on buses. So I just stayed there for a week […].  
The Monday after [radiation] I went in for a scan…and my doctor wasn’t there, and the guy that was there, he was all, ‘oh I think I’d rather your doctor gave you the news.’ 
And I was like ‘No, I don’t want to wait, she’s on holiday. Can you give me the news?’ 
And he was just like, ‘are you sure?’ 
And…I was just like…‘Tell me. Like just tell me.’ 
And he was just like ‘I’m really sorry to tell you this… the cancer has spread. It’s now gone into your right lung, it’s gone more down your chest lymph nodes, it’s in the back of your neck – the lymph nodes that weren’t affected – I had five tumours on my liver…they were benign, but they were still there…and he said basically, ‘you’re looking at like five years left to live.’ 
And I was [sic] just looked at him, and I was just like…instantly, I was like, ‘how do you know five years? Instantly, I was like ‘where do you get five years from?’”
[He said]: ‘Oh, just, you know, because cases, and, you know, we’ve seen this happen before, statistics, la la la. It’s about five years, you know, give or take.’ 
I was like, ‘oh, give or take.’ I couldn’t believe it.”

They were benign, but they were still there. What does that mean? Why is she under the impression that the benign tumours in her liver had anything to do with the malignancy in her thyroid? Were the “precancerous cells” in her right lung actually due to the thyroid cancer metastasizing? Or could they have been attributable to the smoking habit she repeatedly references in this interview? Who was this “guy” that supposedly told her she had five years to live? Isn’t this the second time someone standing in for her actual doctor has broken the news of a death sentence to her?

Well, fortunately a “certified nutritionist” is about to step in and clear everything up for her, literally. For a small fee of mere thousands. More tomorrow.

FYI, in the interests of transparency, please note that I do not actually have a bungee instructor. And if I ever do bungee-jump, it will be on my own terms, with my own rope, off whatever bridge or tall building I choose. Nobody tells ME how to prevent my own death.