Topic: Overcoming a Cancer Scare with Healthy Habits

Kamala: Hello everyone! This is Kamala Appel. I’m here today with Alyssa Phillips.

We are continuing along the journey of exploration of living a healthy life and a mindset of people who have made a commitment to living a healthy life. Alyssa, please introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a little bit about your background.

Alyssa Phillips: Sure. Hey, everybody. My name is Alyssa Phillips and I am a physician assistant and I also have an undergraduate degree in nutrition. I’ve been a long time runner. I fell in love with running about 20 years ago.

But, ironically, we had a crash course in the other side of medicine and had to leverage what I had been training for unbeknownst to me my whole life both personally and professionally when I was given a less than 5% survival just six weeks after running my best time in a half-marathon. I was diagnosed with a really rare type of cancer and, among other things, had two back-to-back bone marrow transplants, and I was only 31 at the time.

Kamala: Wow! So was that an “A-ha!” moment for you? Was that a moment that made you … It sounds like you were already a pretty healthy person.

Did the bone marrow cancer scare make you really commit to overcoming every health challenge you have or were you kind of already on the path?

Alyssa: You know, it’s a bit of both. I was definitely on the path.

I think one of the reasons, you know, among other things, I was young, healthy and people would tease me that I was the healthiest person they knew, that sort of stuff.

But something like this, you know, you never think it’s gonna be you and I had already lost my younger sister when we were in college. And it just seemed absolutely impossible and yet I could not argue with the fact that I had all of these resources that even though I was facing this seemingly impossible challenge …

I mean, nobody expected me to make it … the stuff that I was doing became the anchor to hold on to. And, you know, it really shifted my whole perspective of everything. Even though I had been taking care of myself in really great ways and stuff, it just shifted my whole perspective from pushing, doing, running, all of this stuff to nurturing, balance and really giving my body what it needed.

I was asking it to do this huge thing and to go through these really significant treatments. But I was in a position where, you know, it was really catastrophic. By the time it was found, the primary lesion had quadrupled in size in like six days.

So I had to go through these treatments just in order to have a chance. And my whole intention was supporting my body the best I could in doing that.

I hope this interview excerpt provided you with some Everyday Health Tips.

The rest of the interview with Alyssa is available in the Reasons For Being Healthy book at Amazon.com. Click here to purchase on the Amazon website. (This leads to an external website).