By Carin Michaels

I am a T.E.A.L. survivor. T.E.A.L.® stands for Tell Every Amazing Lady about ovarian cancer. It is an organization (and national movement) started to help women identify signs and symptoms and urge them to seek medical help in its early stages, because ovarian cancer is often overlooked until it is too late. When it declares itself with debilitating symptoms, usually in stage III or IV, the prognosis is poor, so in an attempt to get the information out there, I share my cautionary tale.

At 59 years old, cancer is my lived-experience. A lived-experience is having personal knowledge attained through first-hand involvement in events, and those perceptions become valuable narratives for phenomenological research. With an estimated 1.6M cancer cases in the U.S. in 2020, and with approximately 37.5% (600,000) fatalities, cancer is the second leading cause of death, and also a treasure trove of stories. While my knowledge is empirical, my husband has always expressed admiration for my ingenuity—particularly with perseverance. Hence, I will share my survival secrets after being diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. I endured radical debulking surgery, chemotherapy, Parp chemo maintenance medication, and conversations with two children in their early twenties about mortality.

I was genuinely happy when undergoing the rigors of cancer treatment, in spite of social advocate and thespian, Anna Deavere Smith’s description of chemotherapy in her one woman show, Let Me Down Easy. She states, “Cancer therapy is like beating the dog with a stick to get rid of his fleas.” It’s rudimentary. Dr. Azra Raza concurs, the author of The First Cell, a memoir chronicling the treatment of her cancer patients. She wrote, “Since 2005, 70 precent of approved drugs have shown zero improvement in survival rates while up to 70 percent have been actually harmful to patients.” When close friends and family learned about my diagnosis, I thanked them for their concerns but, let them know I was good. Their remorse confused and inspired me to document the deeper journey of my joy, because ideas shape beliefs, and beliefs shape destinies. These lessons, or articles-of-faith, are for my children—with the pulse of the Ella Fitzgerald song, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Fitzgerald sings this song to a man, but in my mind, she sings to death, and so with the air of a jazz riff, I tried to recapture my lessons learned as if practicing the musical notes of a love song. Lesson number one: Believe in miracles.

Our chaotic and stressful world doesn’t offer us time or space to convalesce, but it is my testament, when honored, the healing journey is profound. I broach the phrase “spontaneous remission” cautiously, as it is unscientific and rare, defined by the cessation of a disease without any treatment or an unexpected cure with some treatment. In layman terms, it’s about beating the odds. Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, a cancer bible written in plain English and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, warns, “I am not opposed to optimism, but I am fearful of the kind that comes from self-delusion.” In concurrence, I say medicine saved my life, but spontaneous healing as a modality, if understood, works. Similar to Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual definition of awakening, spontaneous healing must be experienced independent of thought to be realized. In an attempt to share my story, at times up-close-and-personal, I asked myself why this miracle befriended me.

Oncologists frame their patient’s survival rate against a five-year backdrop. I was diagnosed on January 8, 2020 with stage IV ovarian cancer and my chances of surviving until January 8, 2025 was 17 out of 100. This stat didn’t factor in recurrence rate, only mortality; so in the next few years, it appeared I’d be negotiating for my life. I welcomed the challenge. My doctor said, “Your attitude will benefit you greatly.” Another physician friend explained that medicine doesn’t talk about miracles—everyday miracles—because they can’t be quantified. My instinct was to lighten my load and find humor in my unexpected and utterly terrifying diagnosis. You know the expression, “If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry,” and while cancer jokes aren’t funny, it was vibrationally healing to enjoy a sick joke at my own expense. I felt better when laughing, like when I realized I lost all my hair before my balding husband which leads me to lesson number two: Find bliss.

My go-to for healing aches and pains has always been a “required reading list” to help me find the appropriate words to articulate an experience. So, I did a deep-dive into cancer literature. In Cured, by Jeffrey Rediger, M.D., M. Div., he calls for clinical investigations to move beyond medical intervention and redress spontaneous healing which “offers us a rare window into the root causes. We have a responsibility to study these cases and learn everything we can from them.” He continues further down the page, “I investigate just how interconnected radical healing is with our thoughts, beliefs, and even our most fundamental, often unexamined sense of self. I found myself asking the question: Can my identity, in some way, determine my ability to heal? The answer is both revelatory and complex.”

Read related article: Congratulations on Your Diagnosis — Taking Charge of Chronic Illness

Honestly, spontaneous recovery wasn’t even part of my discourse during treatment. I just kept laughing, smiling, and making snarky comments such that one nurse thought I was mentally unstable, when I just felt blessed. I spoke to my husband about these awkward moments, and he logically explained that cancer’s high fatality rate requires reverence. In Dr. Mukherjee’s cancer compendium, he states, “Cancer was an all-consuming presence in our lives. It invaded our imaginations; it occupied our memories; it infiltrated every conversation, every thought. And if we as physicians, found ourselves immersed in cancer, then our patients found their lives virtually obliterated by the disease.” Hence, my impetus was to turn-the-tables on death and rebalance the scales with joy and humor. A major hallmark in cancer treatment is a patient’s one-year anniversary of living-cancer-free. Almost two years later, I am still in remission. Maybe I am one of the 17 in 100 who will survive.

I don’t want people to say I battled cancer. I want to be known for my joy, one moment after another, such indescribable experiences savored as memories. One of my favorite quotes from Esther Hicks, author and inspirational speaker is, “When people say what are you doing? You say things that please me. And they say toward what end? You say pleasure. And they say but really what are you working on? And you say, having a good time. And they say, but what do you hope to accomplish? And you say, living happily ever after.” Her teachings based on the Law of Attraction, focus on our positive vibrations, imagined or real, that reverberate and create a continued windfall of uplifting power. But, when enduring painful cancer treatment, finding bliss can seem impossible. Dr. Rediger in Cured seeks to identify a methodology toward wellness as explained, “We need to place the extraordinary on the operating table so that we can dissect and learn from it, so that the possibilities for the extraordinary that exist within all of us are illuminated for everyone.”

I am by no means “extraordinary,” but I do think I should have been a comedian—except it’s probably easier to survive cancer. My neighbor, concerned about my glib attitude, asked me if I ever cried during my treatment, and I said, “Once.” Soon after receiving my diagnosis, I read an essay that my youngest child wrote for an acting fellowship. The piece, which was about something I had taught her, was her way of saying, “I love you, Mom.” A real tearjerker. I made minor corrections and sent it back, commending her writing. I feigned exhaustion, but my daughter could read between the lines. Immediately, my older daughter called me to offer a pep talk. I relented and said I was afraid to leave them on this earth alone. My diagnosis was serious. I shouldn’t make light of my circumstances. She agreed but articulated that my diagnosis can’t preclude me from living a good life. She, as a cancer researcher, has seen stage IV patients go on to live vibrant lives, including one who ran the NYC marathon. We laughed that night on the phone and determined that I had a choice: glass half-empty or glass half-full. Obviously, I chose the glass half-full, but decided to fill it with champagne. I never looked back once after receiving my daughter’s permission to live my best life. It helped knowing she was happy and thriving.

Prior to diagnosis, I led a very stressful life. I was a federal investigator raising two children with a husband who traveled for work and who had no family nearby. Regretfully, life’s experiences also garnered me with another diagnosis of PTSD. I believe the aforementioned, along with my sugar highs, be it from Zingerman’s Bakehouse or high-quality liquor, delivered me the cancer diagnosis, since cancer feeds on sugar and stress. There were no hereditary factors. At age 59, I awoke after an eight-hour surgery and was told my mass was malignant. My doctors performed a hysterectomy and resected my bowel and colon. I remember being unphased when learning this, probably because I was loaded up with drugs. During my stay in the post-op ICU, when the nurse tried to orient me to person, place, time, and situation, I answered, Carin Krishnan at St. Joseph Hospital on January 2020 with stage IV ovarian cancer, and that produced noticeable sadness in her. I wanted to say that my life wasn’t sad. Instead, I asked her if there was a stage V cancer. Her eyes bulged, because there isn’t one, so I immediately said, “Just joking. That’s me wondering if things could get any worse.” We both smiled.

My cancer journey, unbeknownst to me, began approximately one-year prior. I thought it was food poisoning from a hotel sandwich purchased at a spiritual retreat. When I confessed to fellow devotees that I had to take the night off because I was ill, they said our guru can bring out cathartic repressed physical reactions in all of us. This resounded over the next year. I had weight loss, experienced fatigue, pelvic pain, change in bowel habits (appropriately termed), vaginal bleeding, nausea, vomiting, and I would obsessively document these maladies with an online symptom checker to determine an appropriate diagnosis. I used the app so many times one day that it banned me from the site and told me to seek medical help, which I did, multiple times, in multiple towns, and was discharged with multiple diagnoses, all plausible given the test results.

In my final iteration with doctors in October 2019, I recall one scheduler telling me that I could only be seen after January 2020. I begged for a sooner appointment because I said, “I’ll be dead by then.” My intake exam was customary with instructions and a follow-up in four weeks. Recent bloodwork had been done by two other doctors. Within ten days, I called my newest doctor back complaining of severe abdomen pain. I explained that I needed to go to emergency department because the 1000 mg of Motrin daily wasn’t working. I asked him if he could intervene and help me. Dr. Andrew T. Catanzaro of Huron Gastro in Ypsilanti, MI, discovered a huge mass in my lower abdomen the size of two large fists, almost six centimeters in size. Specific blood tests, a colonoscopy, and multiple scans later brought me back to my gynecologist who referred me to an oncology surgeon. The mass I was carrying was too large and intricate for a gynecological surgeon, yet my GYN doc told me not to worry, because my CA-125, the cancer blood marker, was too low to be cancer. She was “pleasantly surprised.”

While waiting for my scheduled surgery two weeks away because of the December holidays, I felt like I was going to die. My symptoms became severe. I share them here because very few women rebound from a stage IV ovarian diagnosis and live to talk about it; besides, I want to pay it forward and be T.E.A.L. redeemed. I was nauseous and tired all the time; I couldn’t sit up or stand for very long; I bled from my vagina, had diarrhea with occasional vomiting, and lost 40 pounds (which I was very happy about), but I began to have blood in my stool. The cancer perforated other organs. Before these egregious symptoms, it was assumed many were menopausal with irritable bowel or celiac disease. Remember, my CA-125 was 50, with a normal range 0 to 35. It was considered very low and likely indicative of diverticulitis. Even a friend and fellow stage IV cancer patient, who is a physician, told me her CA-125 was over 400. Also, I was told that a mass that large can’t be cancerous, because I’d be dead. Looking back, I was dying. Lesson number three: Always trust your instincts (or listen to your partner’s complaints) which leads me to lesson number four: Cancer patients need an advocate.

There were so many technical terms shot at us that when the doctors walked into my hospital room, they suddenly looked like Greek gods who appeared wearing white togas to pass down ominous oracles. Words like total abdominal hysterectomy bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy omentectomy radical tumor debulking, open low anterior resection with primary anastomosis and enbloc of tumor complicated by post-operative hypotension and oliguria, were beyond my pay-grade. I decided to keep it simple and live in bliss, and the painkillers, of course used judiciously, helped.

My husband, Unni and I were shell-shocked from the trauma and relied on our older daughter to be my patient advocate, which she did long distance, because during Covid, I was only allowed one person at my bedside, per day. The doctors, my husband, and my daughter would FaceTime, as I listened, barely remembering anything except that my husband was nearby.

Unni and I were inseparable because we didn’t want to lose each other. I recall him staring at my frail naked body hunched over while sitting on a plastic hospital chair under the shower with fear in his eyes. My body had a high probability of rejecting the unplanned colorectal surgery, and I might require a colostomy bag. I don’t favor using technical terms here because they miss the pulse of the human heart, unless we’re talking about cardiology. Needless to say, my husband and I were too numb to advocate for me, especially with cancer markers like High Grade Serous Carcinoma, HGSC, and the corrupt TP53 gene--both death sentences.

Upon discharge, Unni homeschooled himself in oncology and took over as my local patient advocate. He lived and breathed cancer. Doctors enjoyed the rigors of his technical discussions. Unni has his PhD in biophysics, specifically brain science, where he builds mathematical models and computer programs to mimic the human brain. He could read medical papers, books, and consult physician friends and previous coworkers. Before I visited my oncologist at St. Joseph Mercy Ann Arbor Hospital, my husband called his medical colleague in Chicago, who went through her grapevine to inquire about my Ann Arbor doc’s reputation. Dr. Brandy Michaels checked out with flying colors,and she eventually saved my life. Doctors are in the business of saving lives, so they do not mind if you have a patient advocate. They actually encourage it as your questions keep them on their toes to ensure they are providing good patient care.

With Unni as my new patient advocate, I felt safe knowing he was working hard to ensure my longevity. It’s important not to worry when healing. Hence, lesson number five: Find love.

I have a list of family and friends who I’ve thanked repeatedly for their help. My husband and I didn’t have to cook for six months. It is critical to have a support system for healing, which for me included Unni, my patient-advocate-ninja. He relied on two friends specifically: one who is a nurse practitioner and works in oncology; the other is the physician I mentioned earlier who has stage IV cancer. She is participating in her second clinical trial—part of a research study that tests new approaches to treating her type of recurrent cancer. Unni also called in some favors having worked in hospital settings and medical schools. Our friends were impressed by his cleverness.

Unni loves solving problems. He discovered through his contacts that my stage IV diagnosis qualified for extensive genome testing at University of Michigan’s Center for Translational Pathology in The Rogel Cancer Center. My patient-advocate-ninja had more questions than answers as to why a healthy person such as myself who exercised, ate well, meditated, and did yoga, got cancer and he thought U-M’s Oncology Sequencing project would offer us deeper insights.

When my report came back, some details were confusing. Unni wanted to discuss the findings in a supportive environment, so he looked up the name of the cancer researcher who signed off on my report. Unni discovered that they both went to the same prestigious technical university in India. Somehow given Unni’s cleverness, he gets an invitation for chai at this researcher’s house to discuss mutual collegiate experiences. When he sees this guy is affable, Unni confesses his real reason for being at his home: to better understand my genome report. My husband was doing everything in his power to keep me alive. But these efforts made me feel guilty. I didn’t want him to hurt if I died.

Suleika Jaouad, author of the eloquently written New York Times Bestseller, Between Two Kingdoms, A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, talks about living in the cancer canyon, from illness to recovery, herself diagnosed with early onset acute myeloid leukemia. Her title comes from a famous quote by Susan Sontag often used in cancer literature. “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” As I continued reading, I feared that I lacked the sophistication or courage to discuss “that other place” with its harbingers of natural selection. I was a jokester. My highest achievement, aside from boasting about having the most frequent flyer miles in the nearby hospital, is that my two beautiful daughters came out of that system. But Jaouad expressed a desire to interrogate her illness. She was not afraid. Jaouad shared with readers of her blog “The Isolation Journals,” that in December 2021 the cancer, which almost took her life, had returned.

While I initially thought Jaouad whined too much, I came to understand that she was speaking as a Bodhisattva warrior striving for unimpeded enlightenment. She said, “I thought with incredulity how I won’t get to see or do things and then I realized that my loved ones would be living with that grief of my absence in their lives, so I decided to make the most of my moments with them.” The operative words here for me were “living with that grief,” and while this rite of passage seems universal, it reminded me of my daughter’s fellowship essay. She exposed a layer of her grief then, and the kicker was that she quoted me. I had no idea she was listening intently a few years back when I said, “Once in love, always in love. Even after 35 years of a challenging marriage to your father, he still teaches me about love.” Her thesis, if my ramblings were correct, argued that her heart felt like it was breaking, having just come off a long-term relationship, and expanding, because of what she learned. Her life pulsed with emotions, and she had the means as an actress, filmmaker, writer, singer, and producer to work through her feelings. I could let her go and trust the universe would be kind to her.

With my glass half-filled, I took the bull by its horns and embraced my “other world.” I remember during treatment that there were many tests. They were constant. My hair fell out. My nauseousness required stillness. My bones felt like drill bits were boring holes in me and my body felt old. I almost itched myself to death. While being poked and prodded, I found comfort in the book, Cured. I abandoned using the term ‘life-lessons’ and used the word ‘beliefs,’ because I didn’t want to be a liar. We are all so unique. We are not whiners; we are winners given the fact that we make it to another day. Dr. Rediger addresses spontaneous remission as, “I knew that whatever was happening wasn’t primarily caused by something external. It wasn’t a pill, a medicine, a surgery, or a healer’s miraculous hands that held the key to these people’s recoveries, as tempting as it might be to believe in these simple and seemingly clear solutions. Something was happening within these individuals that made their recoveries possible.”

Personally, I had dealt with many of my emotional issues pre-diagnosis with the help of a psychiatrist. Perhaps my atman, or pure consciousness, that being beyond identification with phenomena, attained liberation, and in the process my immune system naturally held-the-fort and did what it was called to do: rescue me. “Today, cases like these are ‘miracles.’ Tomorrow, we’ll look back at them and see them for what they were: steps in the long, steep staircase toward knowledge.” Dr. Rediger’s words continue to provide comfort.

A vortex swallowed me whole in the industrialized cancer complex of hospital medicine. I found myself staring into the abyss—which forced me to re-examine my psyche. It was like a self-induced age regression hypnosis where my husband’s unconditional love, which I felt deeply, channeled all previous loves who supported me: my grandmother, my grandfather, my gay aunts who are my surrogate mothers, my father, my best friends, my girls, my previous psychiatrist. Sadly, my mother didn’t make the list, but I heard Dr. Rediger say, “Could this powerful feeling of being loved have been broadcast into [my] immune system, revivifying something deep within [me]? Whether it comes from a therapeutic session, a loving relationship, deep meditation, or focused imagery, love touches and heals something that medication can’t touch.”

As a schooled practitioner of life, I knew there were no clear-cut salves like love to treat cancer, metaphorically or literally. Dr. Raza’s cancer memoir speaks to this because as an oncologist, she not only intimately documents her patient’s experiences, but her friends’, and husband’s cancer stories, too. She states, “Cancer is what I had been treating for two decades, yet until I shared a bed with a cancer patient, I had no idea how unbearably painful a disease it could be.”

After chemo, my next line of defense, recommended by my doctor, was a Parp inhibitor, given to certain stage III and IV breast and ovarian cancer patients after chemotherapy, used as maintenance chemo in pill form. We agreed to give it a try. I deserved the extra 12 months of life it was offering, or rather predicting. This daily maintenance pill cost my insurance company $45,000 a month and it was more brutal—for me—than the chemotherapy. I joked that robbers could gladly enter my house and steal the medicine for its street value, but there wasn’t any. The weekly blood tests that were scheduled for the initial four weeks on the meds, to ensure I eventually stabilized, never stopped. My blood counts were so low that I officially classified myself as reptilian. The fatigue was crushing. I became a zombie. I aired my complaints aloud to my husband, so when I had the courage to stop, he would agree. We were a team.

At that point, I missed having a few good days during treatment and couldn’t even remember what they felt like. Life can be fragile, but if these pills were really going to offer a 12-month add-on to my life, I chose the time remaining that I had left on this earth to be filled with joy. I stopped the medicine and even my physician was empathetic. It was the first time I felt understood. She accepted my defeat. But I walked away with so much more.

We all live with a little black box of unknowing, a kind of knowing by not thinking, and under that guise, I let go of fear, and embraced spontaneous healing. Source lives in us all, and when we stop resisting, it shines. My doctor reminded me that “it is not if my cancer returns; it is when.” I said, “If it comes back, I’m okay with that, because we’ve become friends.” I’m not afraid of death. Maybe that’s the miracle: I was fearless in this major shift. In the whirlwind of impermanence, I learned that my children can balance it, and with that, I moved into daily joy without my knowing it. Every day I focus on my abundance. I have enough. I can’t impart any lessons because life mystifies me. I’m blessed to be alive and to be greeted every morning by the wind, the waving trees, the smell of spring, the birds’ symphonies, followed by the sound of the rain on the blacktop, voices of children playing in the street, and the memory of when my girls came home recently. We had champagne and giggled about how silly I was to believe in miracles. We had a ninja party.

Thank you (alphabetized): Ajitha & Chad, Akshay & Devang, Anitha, Antonio, Anu & Promod, Arul, Asha & Nitin, Chandan, Chewie, Christian, Cindy, Cynthia, DaCool Gang, Emma, Frank & Kathy, Gale, Gill, Jan, Janet & Dave, Jenna, Jill & Pete, Janu, Kelley, Lynn & Eric, Lynn & Rajeev, Madhavi, Maya, Niki & Hass, Nishkama, Pam & Dave, Rahul, Raji, Rosanne & Mary, Shanti & Sashi, Smitha & Chako, Sumi, Susan, Terry, Tony, Trica, Vijay.