Determined mom makes progress in cancer battle

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This article was published 28/12/2017 (2820 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Julia Stoneman-Sinclair is certain her modern and natural healing methods will render her cancer-free.

“I honestly believe I’ll be fine, I believe that 100 per cent,” said the 28-year-old student pursuing her masters at Brandon University and working as an Indigenous student success officer.

She states this knowing her colorectal cancer diagnosis progressed to Stage 4, providing a 12 per cent survival rate five years from now.

However, those statistics are based on people double her age.

“They have no stats for people my age, because people my age don’t get it,” Stoneman-Sinclair said.

Her doctors have talked cure from when she learned of her Stage 4 diagnosis a few months ago.

And yet even medical professionals were startled when the chemotherapy designed to treat colorectal cancer reduced her liver lesion from approximately 1.6 cm to 9 mm.

“They were always just telling me to be realistic, not to hope that what was in the liver would go away (from chemotherapy),” Stoneman-Sinclair said. “Right now, all we’re hoping for is that it doesn’t grow even more, so the fact that it’s actually shrinking, they’re really happy about that.”

She credits her success with taking her survival into her own hands. In addition to the treatments prescribed by doctors, she has followed traditional healing practices. She attended four days of healing sweats, taken various medicines provided by elders from her First Nation and visited a naturopath. She has switched to a paleo diet, ditching refined sugar and processed foods in favour of veggies, fruits and meats.

“I found with the chemo and medicine, you’re not doing anything, you’re just expecting them to put this into you,” Stoneman-Sinclair said. “But you’re taking no responsibility for what you need to do. Everything that I’m doing with the eating and the medicine and the supplements, it’s going to fix it, it’s going to heal my body.”

She didn’t hold this optimistic view when she was diagnosed in July, rushed to an emergency surgery days later to remove a tumour and 35 of her lymph nodes.

In the summer she went through stages of being angry and depressed, in between another surgery, unrelated to the cancer, in mid-August, she said.

“Then I just decided that I’m not leaving my kids. There’s nothing that’s going to make me leave them, and then I started doing anything I could.”

Stoneman-Sinclair has already gone through three surgeries and four rounds of chemotherapy.

This month, she has been hooked up to chemotherapy non-stop, evidenced by the pouch she carries, and does radiation every weekday.

After completing this treatment in early January, she’ll wait six weeks until liver resection surgery. Four more rounds of chemotherapy follow another six-week break.

It might be around May when signs of remission begin to show.

“If not, we just keep going,” she said.

However long the fight lasts, Stoneman-Sinclair has a supportive team behind her. Among them, her home communities of Lynn Lake, her band, Grand Rapids First Nation, and her city the past decade of her life, Brandon.

Her support network has come through. An online fundraising effort to offset travel and medical costs exceeded $17,000. And in October, a Halloween benefit social in Brandon was held in support of her. Tickets sold out in advance.

“I have the best support system,” Stoneman-Sinclair said, gratefully. “I can’t even put into words how much people have helped me, supported me. I had people travel 13 hours just to be here for this social.”

She credits her boyfriend Kasey with helping her through the worst days.

“He’s really been that person who’s been beside me for everything I’ve been through.”

The devastating diagnosis put the family’s plans on hold. Her thesis on Indigenous governance is written but not yet defended. She wants to pursue a PhD in Indigenous governance at the University of Victoria.

Those plans are simply postponed, she said confidently.

Indigenous advocacy is “what I’ll do the rest of my life, I know that’s where my place is,” she said. “That’s probably what I miss the most about being sick is just not being in the community, doing those things.”

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