Breast Cancer Survivor (and caregiver), Ginny Brant, Shares her Path to Healthiness.

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Call 866-WINASIA or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to CritterCampaign.org. This is October, and it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and so Jenny Dent Brant has graciously agreed to come back and talk a little bit about this, her journey with this. She was on several months ago with her new book. It's called Unleash Your God-given Healing.

And Jenny, welcome back to the show. Well, it's great to be here, and I'm happy to talk about this because I would love to help some women, even some men, avoid this journey. Before I get into this, did your book Unleashing Your God-given Healing, did this come out of your journey from breast cancer? Is that what sparked this particular journey? Yes, it did. Okay, good.

That's what I thought. It did because it sent me on a quest to figure out what caused it and what I was going to do to help my doctors to beat the cancer. And so it certainly did. I learned so much. I said, goodness, people need to know this because some of the same mistakes I made are the same mistakes a lot of people are making. Well, knowledge is power, and we are all about equipping, educating the family caregiver, and this is a disease. I don't have the stats in front of me, Jenny, but this is a disease that affects an enormous amount of women and men. One in eight women. One in eight.

That's too many. Well, I've had several friends that have gone through this. It's a tough thing. We had a lady on the show several months ago who's got a special needs son, and she was dealing with all of his stuff that had some kind of tumor situation going on. They were in the throes of that, and then she got the news for herself that she had to deal with breast cancer.

And so it's there. And so this month, we take time out as a nation, really worldwide, to recognize the journey that so many have to take and the steps that are being taken. So take us back to do you start off with this, and I don't want you to share anything you're not comfortable sharing, but was this a historic event in your family? Did you have a history with this or does this kind of come out of the blue with you? Well, it was not a history in my family, but my mother got it at 82 years old, and she died.

It was four months after she died that I found a lump in my breast, so it was really raw, and I was still grieving her loss when I found it. So it really, that began the history in our family, but the doctors at Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Chicago tested me because there are eight risk factors for breast cancer, and when I didn't have one of them, they said, well, it must be genetics. So they did extensive genetic testing.

Nothing showed up. So I had no risk factors and no genetics, and that's what sent me on the quest to find out then what caused it. Something caused it. It didn't just happen, you know. So that's why I went on the quest and did all the research and, you know, just studied and read medical journals and went to cancer conventions and, you know, read books by doctors who were experts in cancer. And I started connecting the dots and saying, okay, I'm seeing some things here.

Yes, there is a reason. I got a breast cancer I had no risk factors or genetics for. If you don't mind, and I feel a little bit queasy asking this, but how old were you when you were diagnosed with this?

I always feel queasy asking a woman how old she was at anything. Oh, that's okay, because today is my birthday, and I just turned a little bit older. You beat me to that. I knew it was your birthday. I knew it was your birthday, so happy birthday to you.

John, are you going to sing to her? I think I can spare us all that and just wish you a very happy birthday. Well, thank you.

It's been a good birthday. But age is a risk factor. 60 and up is where the risk really increases. It's not that you can't get it before, but it starts to rapidly increase when you get 60 and up because your immune system is aging. Of course, we discussed before all these things you can do, so your immune system doesn't age as much like diet and exercise and hydration and sleep. There are certainly things you can do, but I was 58, so I was close to a risk factor on that one, but the doctor said technically you don't have that risk factor. Obesity is the number one risk factor for all cancers, and I did not have that risk factor. But in my research, I learned that the more fat cells you have, estrogen stores in those fat cells. And so we don't want to get overweight because of the risk factor for any cancer. And that has caused me, even though the doctor said I wasn't overweight, to lose an additional 15 to 20 pounds because I was up 30 pounds from when I got married. Well, why did I need that extra weight? It's not doing me any good.

One of the issues that virtually every caregiver deals with is excessive weight gain. It's one of the landmines I put in my book, Seven Caregiver Landmines, and I soared up pretty high. I mean, I tell John I got so big that I left shoe prints and dry concrete. I mean, it was so good. You were walking down the street and the policeman says, hey, break it up. I broke my family tree. Took two dogs to bark at me. My picture fell off the wall.

But no, I know that there are a lot. I think for me, Jenny, that I saw a lady pushing her elderly mother in a wheelchair at the hospital the other day. And the woman that was pushing her mother, taking care of her mother, because I heard when they were checking in, just she introduced herself to the ladies as her daughter. But she was morbidly obese. And the mother was real skinny and frail, but this girl was morbidly obese.

And I was just like, oh, my heart went out. And so I know that this is a problem for so many family caregivers and so many family caregivers are women. And if they're overweight, guess what? This is a risk factor. And so this is why it's so important for you to come on and talk about this, because there are women right now that are listening that are thinking, OK, all right, what do I need to do?

And so what did you do? You said you were 30 pounds overweight, which is not bad. We were all skinny when we got married.

Yeah, but you know what? What's bad for one body? Some people need 50 to 100 pounds overweight for their blood sugar and their blood pressure isn't impacted. In my case, I think it only takes 20 or 30 pounds.

So it was not needed in my case either. And I did from the moment they said you have cancer. That kind of curtailed my appetite, if you know what I mean. When you start eating foods that aren't high in the carbs and you start eating healthy things, then automatically I started losing weight. But I also do some intermittent fasting where I don't eat until 10 or 12 in the day.

And then I finish at six o'clock at night and I don't eat again until the next morning. I drink water, but I'm not taking in any calories because it allows your body to lose weight and it allows your body to go into autophagy, which is where your body starts killing off those cells that could become cancer cells. What sort of things did you add to your diet? I mean, the antioxidants, you know, berries, that kind of thing? Berries are anti-cancer, but the American Cancer Society even said this back in the 1990s. One of the best things you can do to avoid breast cancer is to eat cruciferous vegetables because they contain sulforaphane and that lowers your estrogen load. And a lot of breast cancers are estrogen-fed in men as well. Men that get breast cancers are 90% estrogen-fed, and that should not be.

But if you eat these cruciferous vegetables and things like flax seed, you're going to lower that estrogen load and that's going to help you to reduce your risk for breast cancer. So I have a smoothie recipe in my book that's banana chocolate blueberry smoothie that helps your brain, it helps your heart, it reduces your risk for cancer, and it contains two servings of cruciferous vegetables as well as the ground flax seed. So both of those are... How does it taste? Actually, a lot of men, a lot of doctors have been in my home and I've made it for them and they said, you know, I can drink this, I can drink this. The chocolate and banana covers a multitude of things you would not normally eat.

That's all I can say. And I can't find anything to cover as well as the chocolate, and this is raw cacao, the really healthy chocolate, that covers the other things in there that you might not want to eat. So I have a lot of cancer patients that can drink it, a lot of people doing it just to be healthy, and they say, I like this. My husband and I drink it every day and I can't drink something I don't like.

Let's put it that way. Well now, what kind of cruciferous vegetables do you put in there? Well, I put in things like kale, I will put in arugula, I can put in cabbage, but I alternate between kale and arugula and all different kinds of greens. Well, I've started to eat kale, by the way, and I'm making a pretty good stab at it.

It's different, but I'm making a good stab at it. Some of the kale salads are really good. You put nuts and different things in the right dressing.

You know, you have to make it so it's palatable for you. But let's get back to the weight for a minute. I said estrogen stores in fat cells, but when your body is overweight, the stress on your cortisol levels also increases estrogen. If your blood sugar is not below that A1C, that 5.7, then your estrogen levels go up when your blood sugar goes up.

Now, people having high blood sugar is a prevalent problem in this country. If you get your weight down, your blood sugar and your blood pressure may go down and your estrogen load may follow. It's the estrogen load over a lifetime that is driving these cancers.

So we have to look at everything that adds to that estrogen load. So your book basically is a journey through all of this of rediscovering how you can take a little bit more control of your health. When you went through this, when you got this diagnosis, and this is what I'd like for you to spend a few moments with, and I'll tell you kind of where I'm going with this as we traveled on the road. Take us to that moment when you got the diagnosis. It was devastating. I just lost my mother and been through the journey with her, my sister and I both, and there was no way I wanted to go through what I saw her go through. And here they prepare me that I'm going to go through it. And I'm like, this just can't be. But then to hear that you don't have the risk factors or the genetics, I mean anybody would say, well then what caused this?

If I don't find out what caused it and identify some factors, how can I stop it from coming back? The doctors may kill it. My what? Your sister. Did this affect her? I mean did she have the same problem? Well honestly, I wouldn't tell her until the genetic test came back because yes, I was very concerned about my sister hearing the news after she had lost my mother.

And then she finds out her only sister has it. I mean that's scary. So I waited until the test results came back and said it wasn't genetic. Because then I could say you don't have to worry. It's not an automatic thing. Well yeah, there's no need to create more stress than we need to until you have some more data.

We can do an entire show on that by the way. Yeah. When the doctor told you this, were you with your husband at the time? Or were you by yourself?

How did that work? I was by myself. I was by myself. Each time they gave me bad news, I just happened to be by myself. The next week they told me it was aggressive and then the next week is when they told me from the MRI it appeared it was all over my body. And so each time I got bad news, I happened to be by myself. It's not the way we planned it but my husband has a full-time job. So yeah, that was a bummer.

The reason I'm asking this is because there are a lot of people that do have very very scary diagnoses and they're alone. And I would like for you to tell what was that car ride home like? What was that like? Well my husband picked me up and thought I wasn't going to get bad news. And we drove straight to the Atlanta airport because we were going for a second opinion. Once they said it was aggressive, that was our cue. Get a second opinion. So we hopped on that airplane.

We were both in shock. And then when we got up to CTCA, it took them five days to do a second opinion and to tell us, you know, it is aggressive. Your life is in danger.

Every weapon of mass destruction is going to be brought out to save your life. However, it may not be all over your body. What we saw was, we think, is inflammation from a bad biopsy. So I just had to get the, you know, not so good luck that the biopsy went bad and through a debris of inflammation all over my body. Which was not good but at least it wasn't cancer all over my body.

That must have been a very long plane ride though. Yes it was. Go ahead, John. I'm sorry.

Go ahead. No, no, no, no. I'm just like, hey, this is bad, the bad biopsy. But by the way, not cancer.

Yes. And when they finally confirmed that, and they wouldn't know for sure until the surgery, when they finally, you know, said it is not all over your body, then I knew I would have more of a chance of living. A stage four cancer, aggressive, they can only extend your life, okay, if they can beat it. And so you might live an extra year or two but then you're going to die from all the, you know, they're going to have to keep treating you and you're going to die from either the chemicals or from the cancer, whichever comes first. So, you know, to know that it wasn't all over your body meant I had a chance, a better chance of living.

So that was a big, huge relief. I did not want the chemotherapy. But as I said in the book, I figured out how to get through it, how to use exercise and water and diet and sleep and all these things and nourishing my gut to make the prognosis better.

And I went through it with flying colors, which is rare for what I got. But what I want your listeners to hear is some things that just help everybody avoid breast cancer, things that people don't know, like, you know, you heard the president this week was on vitamin D because of the coronavirus. And even Dr. Fauci was using vitamin D, but it's recommended to avoid cancer. Because of breast cancer, there is critical research that shows it lowers your risk for breast cancer if you will keep your vitamin D levels high through this vitamin D 25 hydroxy blood test that your doctor can do on you.

Even three doctors told me if you had had your levels between 70 and 90, you might not have gotten cancer in the first place. I'm like, whoa, wish I'd known that. Sadly, that information was a little tardy, wasn't it?

Yeah, I wish. But if you're a caretaker and you're taking care of someone day in and day out, hey, get those vitamin D levels up. You've already got stress, you've already kind of confined and, you know, you're already having enough struggles, get those vitamin D levels up. And another thing that's important that was a shock to me when I got to CTCA in Chicago, they said, oh, we had them send up your mammograms from your previous years. It was missed on two mammograms. This cancer was there two years ago and it got missed.

Why? Because I had dense breasts. 40 to 50% of women have dense breasts.

I did not know it. Now the radiologists have to tell you, but if yours is not telling you when you go for your mammogram, I want every woman to ask this question, do I have dense breasts? And if they tell you you do, then you have to realize you need to really do the self-checks, keep those doctors' appointments every year. You're not going to be able to depend on the mammogram itself to diagnose like someone who doesn't have dense breasts. And they do have a 3D mammogram now, so that's a little more accurate. But my doctors don't even trust that for me. So you have to look at the self-checks are important.

They're going to pull out an MRI for me from now on. Almost every year I'm going to have to do that because I have dense breasts and I have an aggressive breast cancer. But what I'm saying is these self-checks are important because I found mine by accident, but if you're self-checking every month and you have an aggressive cancer, by the time you get back around to that doctor's appointment, it could have grown out and gotten to your lymph nodes by then because it's aggressive.

So I really recommend these self-checks. A lot of women find their breast cancer because of the self-checks. 72% of caregivers don't see their own doctor regularly, and the vast majority of caregivers, over 60%, 65% of them, are women. Now there are more and more men that are doing this, but if you've got that many women out there who are taking care of someone else, and the stress, you know, you did it with your dad, the stress is unrelenting and without mercy.

Then you couple that with the fact that they're not seeing their doctor regularly. This is why I had you on the show because I want people to understand how you can take charge of this, even while you're dealing with all the caregiving stuff. You've got to do these things. You've still got to take care of your own needs.

That's right. You do. In the last few minutes, I want you to say something. I don't rehearse questions and things with folks because I just find like it's just, it comes across to, you know, cable news. And this is where we're just having a conversation. We're just sitting, just this couple caregivers sitting around talking about our own health. What would you like to say to husbands who are picking their wife up at their doctor after hearing a news like that and taking them to the airport like your husband did? I mean, what would you want to say to those men out there who are trying to care for their wives in getting this kind of diagnosis? What are some things you'd like to share with them?

Love them unconditionally. I have to tell you this. I mean, after I lost every hair on my head and I was a little bit less weight and my eyebrows were gone. OK. My husband looks at me every morning. I would wake up and he would say, honey, you're still the most beautiful woman east of the Mississippi River.

Now, I'm getting worried about what those women look like. Right. Because I didn't look too hot. But the point is, he loved me anyway. Unconditional love helps you to heal.

If you sense that that person doesn't love you because you don't look as good. I mean, that's that's tough. That unconditional love. And I think of the of the women who don't have a husband to pick them up.

Maybe they're alone in this world. Then you would need your church family and other friends to come around you, sit with you during chemo. I had a different person sit with me. My husband couldn't fly to Chicago for every chemo. I had a former principal sit with me. I had some friends from college at week from Wheaton College come and sit with me during my chemotherapy.

It was an all day marathon. You know, so I think it's important that the husband do it, if at all possible. But if they're if they're working, someone needs to be with you when you go through that chemotherapy so that your mind is occupied on positive things and not just sitting there and sulking the whole time. That positive attitude, that love, knowing someone loves you and cares makes a difference. Did your mood change? Did you go through a lot of mood swings through this? You know, I went through a lot of fear of waking up and saying, oh, honey, do I really have cancer or is this is just a nightmare that I can't wake up from?

But he would he would lift me up and I'm not the kind of person to stay down very long. And I used exercise to keep my moods up because that serotonin goes off when you exercise. I kept busy. I kept busy praying, studying his word, concentrating on the good things and singing, laughing. All these things lift your mood. I mean, it makes chemicals go off in your body that help you from becoming depressed. But you have to learn that you cannot ride the roller coaster ride of emotions and just let it get out of control the whole time because your body is set to heal.

When you calm the emotional brain by using prayer, by using his word, meditating on his word, gratitude and looking for all the good things that happen along the way. Those are beautiful words, Jenny. Well, well put. The book is called Unleash Your God Given Healing. And the author is Jenny Dent Brandt. And she and I are fellow Carolinians. And we we're just grateful that she came on the show during this month of breast cancer awareness. But this is going to be every month is an opportunity for you to take control of your health. And this is Jenny's message that it's there. The path is there. She's laid it out for you.

Would you take advantage of it? Get her book today and start becoming healthier as you serve as a caregiver. Healthy caregivers make better caregivers. Jenny Brandt dot com. G I N N Y B R A N T dot com. Jenny, thank you so much for being a part of the show. Thank you. All right. We've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. This is Hope for the caregiver.

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