June 15th, 2010 - 0 Comments
Interview With Ria Swift – Part1
Ria Swift Interview Part 1
Dave: Hi folks, this is Dave Bernstein, and welcome to Story of Survival. Today, we’re speaking with Ria Swift. She’s from North Hampton, Pennsylvania. She’ll be telling us about her own personal story of survival; how she not only survived cancer, but thrived in its aftermath. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and welcome Ria Swift. Ria, how are you today?
Ria: I’m good Dave, how are you?
Dave: I’m doing great. Thanks so much for asking. For the listeners out there, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, as well as your original diagnosis and prognosis.
Ria: Originally, I started out as a dancer. I left New York in the ‘70s and ended up working with children after that. While I was working with juvenile delinquents, I found a lump in my right breast. I went to the doctor and did the typical, traditional medical thing. To be honest; I don’t recall whether it was Stage 4 or 5. It was bad. Because I was only 35, they suggested the most extreme treatment of that day, which was a modified, radical mastectomy and chemo. Then I did reconstruction.
I did 6 months of chemo and then 6 months of reconstruction, and then 6 more months of chemo. After the first round of 6 months, with chemo, I got so sick that I couldn’t function. I almost died. I could feel that one foot was very peaceful, and I was more than ready to just let go. Luckily, my mother who was a control freak at the time, refused to let me die in her house, which were her words. “I’m not going to let you die in my house.”
She dragged me down the steps, put me on the playroom couch, and that’s where I spent the rest of my time. I did a Pittsburgh trial. It was one of the worst chemos they ever made. It was an experimental drug at the time. I decided not to do that ever again because it was just too violent for me. After the reconstruction when there was supposed to be more chemo, I did it once and I just stopped.
About two and half years after that, I found another lump in my other breast. I want to point out that I found every cancer I had. I felt it first. I was a dancer, so I was in touch with my body. I had also meditated since ’74, and this was in ’85. I think that had a lot to do with my finding it, detecting it, and trusting my intuition as to what and what not to do. I think that’s key for people to know, instead of freaking out and having surgery right away.
When I found the second in time, of course it scared the crap out of me. I went to really old mammographers. I went to Cleveland Clinic, and some place in Philadelphia, and the local hospital. I thought if I could find someone who had been looking at mammographies for 40 years, they could tell me clearly one way or the other.
The problem is that when you have had a mastectomy and reconstruction done, they operate on both breasts so that you’re even. When they operated on the second breast, they left a lot of scar tissue. When I found the lump in my other breast, they couldn’t tell whether they were looking at scar tissue or if they were looking at a tumor. That went on for several months. Finally I said, “I can’t do this anymore. This is driving me insane.”
I went to see a resident in the town that I lived in, in Delaware. He was a very unfeeling young man, probably overwhelmed in his position. He said to me, “It’s just a breast; cut it off.” That sort of freaked me out a little bit and I said a few choice words and walked out the door. I screamed and yelled at God and I meant it. I just said, “You either heal me or kill me; just do it right away. I’m not suffering anymore. I’ve had enough. No more research.” I’m a researcher and I just threw down the gauntlet.
Within about a week, everything changed. I went to my local health food store, and an acquaintance came up to me and asked, “How are you doing?” I was beside myself because I just found out I had cancer again. I told her and she handed me a card that said, “stress elimination.” I went with it.
I met a woman named Joan Hulse who developed this technique called “thymo-kinesiology,” which is a permanent integration of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Thymo-kinesiology was started – the very basis of that right and left brain integration comes from Dr. Dennison’s work. Dr. Dennison was a specialist with eyes. I forget his exact specialty. He himself was a dyslexic. He postulated that part of the reason that his dyslexia persisted was because his right and left brain were not integrated. He got together with a bunch of other doctors and they started researching. Their goal was to find a way to get the right and left brain integrated.
Joan Hulse was in that group. She was an X-ray tech. I don’t know how she met these guys. She was an X-ray tech who had cancer. In her own thinking, she agreed with them. After being with them for several months, she decided there was a way to permanently integrate the right and left hemispheres of the brain. These doctors said they didn’t believe it was true.
She left them and went out on her own. It took her about a year but she figured it out. It’s a 3-hour process and you only do it once. It integrates the right and left hemispheres of your brain, which takes the stress off of your immune system.
If anybody knows about Donna Eden, who wrote Energy Medicines, she is very popular in that field, one of the most popular. She’s out west; I think in Colorado. She said, “If you’re right and left brain are not integrated, and you’re in a “homo-lateral craw” pattern, which is in the pattern of an infant, there is so much stress on your immune system because your brain wants to be integrated. It’s almost like having a short circuit all the time. When you remove that homo-lateral pattern of the brain, which means the right side of the brain is controlling the right side of the body and the left side of the brain is controlling the left side of the body, there is always a dysfunction. The body is always in stress.
When you remove that, the immune system functions better. It was a very powerful process for me. Many things happened in switching those two things and in getting my right and left brain talking. I realized how crazy I was. I had dysfunction in my family and consequently I was dysfunctional. My diet changed immediately. It changed my focus on life. I was no longer severely, overly emotional because I was a dominant right brain which is emotions and intuition, Gestalt thinking.
I could access my left brain which helped me think better, helped me process life better. Before that, I would think something or feel something and I was like a runaway train; one emotion led to another, another, and before you knew it, I was sitting still, staring at the wall, and not being able to move. It stopped that and really changed my life on many levels.
My equilibrium got better. I always swam. I was a better swimmer. I did Tai Chi at the time and I was better at that. What happens on a broader scale for people is that any remedy you take, any medicine you’re taking, any therapy whether it’s massage or chiropractic adjustments, any healing work you’re doing, everything works better because your body is in a better place to receive it.
You want to take your body out of survival, and put it into a more relaxed state so everything functions better. That was the first thing I did. I went on like that. I was doing shiatsu at the time, as a profession. After I was diagnosed the first time, I studied shiatsu and that’s what I did to make a living.
With my hands on people, I started seeing things inside people. I started seeing pictures of their father yelling at them in the living room, or a constant “no, no, no” by a wagging finger in front of their face, and different things like that. I didn’t really know what to do with it. I would tell people that in the ‘80s and they would kind of look at me like, “Oh, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” It was a little too much for people.
That kind of started my intuition. I’ve always been intuitive; I didn’t know I was intuitive. I thought everybody was like that. When that happened, it just started to develop.
Dave: I think that’s an amazing history of all the therapy that you’ve gone through. Definitely, for the benefit of the listeners, I want to expand on several of those points. There is a lot of good information hidden in what you just said, and I want to make sure we share that with everybody.
Taking you back to when you first found out you did have cancer, obviously, that was devastating news. You had a supportive family. You said your mother refused to let you die in her home. What was going through your mind, through her mind? Did you do any research on cancer? Were there any books or websites or anything that you went to, to learn all that information before you started going into alternative medication?
Ria: The first time I had cancer, people weren’t online researching. That was ’85 and it was new. I was living in Miami at the time, and didn’t really research anything. My father was a pharmacist, so medicine was not unfamiliar to me. I was born sick; I had really bad kidneys as a kid, really high fevers, so I was in and out of the hospitals for 13 years of my life trying to figure that out and heal that.
When I got the diagnosis, I sort of felt I had no choice. I literally ran to the doctors, got in my car and went someplace. I ended up at the University of Miami. I had a big fight with the insurance company. They wanted to send me to a general surgeon and I refused to go.
I would say to anybody in that position, fight for what you want if you have to. It’s up to us to take care of ourselves. If the medical establishment is not going to give you what you think you should get, stand up for yourself. I did. I fought with this woman. I called her every day at the HMO because they didn’t think that I should go to a specialist. It was because of the radius that I lived in, 50 miles away or something. I just bugged her every day and finally she relented. I guess she wanted to get rid of me. I refused to go to a general surgeon.
I ended up at the University of Miami, which is a research cancer hospital. They were awesome. That guy, Dr. Richard Shultz was his name. We were the same age and the University of Miami is a great place to go. You get a whole team. You get a research nurse, an oncologist, a medical oncologist, and a chemotherapy oncologist – five people at your disposal.
That was pretty amazing. What I didn’t like was because I was only 35, this older doctor came in, who was “the man.” He came in and he does a feeling thing. He’s the guy who had operated on people for 30-40 years. He said, “Immediately go get it taken out, like tomorrow.” They scare the crap out of you so you do what they tell you to do.
After chemotherapy, I had to leave Miami and go live with my parents. I was alone in Miami. I went to live with my parents because I couldn’t work anymore. The chemo was just too violent. I just knew. Something just told me to stop the chemo. It was strictly intuitive. It was killing me and I knew it. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t even get up to pee. I couldn’t get up to drink water. I was done. That’s what changed everything for me. I realized if I kept doing it I would probably die. I stopped.
My family knows me; I’m stubborn and nobody ever said a word. They may not have agreed but they just let me do my own thing, which is important; people let you follow your own guidance, for lack of a better word. That’s what I did.
Dave: You told me you had conflicting attitudes with the doctors. There was one doctor who just wanted to remove it and get on with your life. Obviously, surgery – all the treatments that you go through, the traditional treatments take a taxing toll on the body. That didn’t seem like the way you wanted to go. When did you start checking into alternative treatments, such as energy medicine? I know you’re very big on energy medicines. Let us know about how you got into that.
Ria: When I got the second lump, and I got the card in the health food store, and I did the right/left brain integration, part of me knew there had to be a better way. I figured I had nothing to lose. I didn’t know anything about cancer. I didn’t think the doctors I was going to knew enough, because obviously, I wasn’t healed. I wasn’t going to put myself through that again. It was very painful to go through what I went to. That changed everything.
When I surrendered, I believe it was my surrendering and when you’re that scared and that up against the way, when you say, “Okay God, you do it,” and you mean it; I think we surrender a lot but don’t mean it to the degree that we need to mean it for it to happen. That’s what changed everything. People just started coming to me. It was amazing.
The first thing that happened was Joan. I met her, and I did whatever showed up. Somebody gave me a card and I followed the lead. I didn’t really get what was happening to me until several years later.
For the second cancer, I was living in Delaware. I ended up in South Carolina for a while. The second cancer was healed by what Joan did. I moved to South Carolina and was doing shiatsu and this process of thymo-kinesiology. My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was dying. She was misdiagnosed for about a year and by then it was pretty much too late for her.
I tried to get her to do what I did but she couldn’t do it. We found a healer through a friend and you asked me what got me into it; it was just my intuition.
