Through May and into June, her alternative therapies seemed to be serving her well. She was feeling good and was pretty much back to her normal routines.

Toward the end of June, her therapies seemed to be losing their effectiveness. Throughout all this she had continued working (she was a sales representative for a printing company), and as an effort to conserve energy she made arrangements to do most of her work from home.

July didn’t bring any improvement. Toward the end of the month she told me that “Maybe I was sicker than I thought.” She had never completely accepted the cancer diagnosis and the realization that she probably did have cancer—and that her remedy efforts weren’t bringing the results she expected were troubling to her.