ALYSSA PHILLIPS’ REASONS FOR BEING (PT. 1 OF 4)

Kamala Appel: 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 couldn’t 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.

Kamala: That’s such good advice, you know, support your body. And that’s something that, you know, you do kind of learn as you get older how important it is. It’s good to challenge your body but it’s also good to take care of it and nurture it just like you would someone else. I mean, you know, sometimes I think I might be more strict with my dog’s regimen sometimes than my own at a certain point but then I also challenge him. So I think sometimes treating your body as you would someone else’s body.

Alyssa: Right. Well, it’s interesting because when I was going through these things, you know, I had just run my best time in a half-marathon. That’s not a short race. I was kind of pushing the envelope and it’s one of these things that helped save my life because I had to kind of run a race on different levels. It was an endurance race. It wasn’t a sprint. And I really leveraged that, I guess, discipline and endurance that I had again, unbeknownst to me, been training myself all this time for, and yet on the physical level, I really had to take a step back and it was very clear that this was not the time to tear down and things like that that I was able to do before. You know, I could go for a sprint workout and then recover for a day. But even at that, the body is meant to move and I would power walk for an hour every day on the bone marrow unit.

Kamala: Good. I think that’s good. I think that might have increased your ability to heal faster.
Alyssa: It does. And you know, mentally and physically, it’s good. You don’t have to beat your body up doing it. But the body is meant to move, and walking is one of the best forms of exercise, just getting the endorphins up. I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t go in the general public for over a year. So exercising was a way to, you know on some days, it was a way just to stay sane.

Kamala: And why couldn’t you … because of your immune system? Is that why you couldn’t go out?
Alyssa: Yeah. So they wipe out your immune system with the bone marrow transplant, and they did that twice. So I was on, I jokingly called it, house arrest. When I wasn’t at the hospital, I was to be at home because it really was dangerous for me to be out.