Before the Storm

I hop you had a great summer and start to fall. This summer was of prayer, and a summer of surprises — the kind that make you stop and pay attention.

A while back I texted an old friend to wish him a happy birthday. We lost touch over the years, but we've always managed to catch each other's birthdays. This time he wrote back that it wasn't a good one. He'd been having some health problems. And then he told me: colorectal cancer. Wow. That one hit. You never expect it, even though somewhere in the back of your mind you know these things happen to people we love. I've been walking alongside him since, however he'll let me.

And then, right in the middle of writing this very letter to you, I got a call. A dear friend of mine had passed. We went through our naturopathic and Oriental medicine training together, years ago. The diagnosis was cancer.

Here is the part I keep turning over. If you had asked me to name someone who would live to be a hundred, it would have been my friend. She ate beautifully. She moved her body, drank her water, seemed to handle her stress well. She did everything we tell people to do — and did it with joy, not as a chore. So when the news came, the first thing my heart said was the same thing yours probably just did: what happened?

I don't have a tidy answer. One of the doctors I've respected for years, Dr. Neil McKinney, has spent his whole career caring for people with cancer, and he says it about as plainly as it can be said:

“I often had people ask why they got cancer, despite a healthy lifestyle such as good diet and regular exercise. I cannot say exactly how genetics, toxin and radiation exposures, and many other stressors combine to create the disease in any given case. What I am sure about is that going into cancer with good habits, good diet, emotional support, and other markers of a healthy lifestyle tends to lead to better outcomes. Those who correct these issues after diagnosis may still see gains in quality of life and a better response to interventions.”

Read that last part again, because it's the hopeful part. He isn't saying none of it matters. He's saying the opposite — that how we care for ourselves genuinely shapes how things go, and that it is never too late to begin. Katie's life wasn't a cautionary tale, and neither is my friend's. I'm not telling you their stories to frighten you, or to suggest anyone did something wrong. I'm telling you because they made me stop — and I'd rather you get to stop and think now, in good health, than be made to later.

Because here's the truth underneath all of it, the one we don't like to say out loud: there are no guarantees. Not for my friends, not for me, not for any of us. We can do everything right and still be surprised. That sounds frightening for about a second — until you turn it over and see the freedom in it. If certainty was never on the table, then we were never really chasing safety. We were choosing how to live. And that, we absolutely have a say in.

So I've stopped thinking about health as an insurance policy against bad news, because it isn't one. I've started thinking about it as something closer to respect — the way you'd take care of a home you love, or a friendship that matters, not because it buys you anything, but because it's the right and good thing to do with something precious.

In our world we have a word for the ground all of this stands on: your terrain. It's just the overall condition your body is in day to day — how well you sleep, how you handle stress, how your gut is doing, what your hormones are up to, how much inflammation you're carrying, the nutrients you're actually running on. Whatever life brings you, good or hard, your body meets it from wherever that terrain happens to be. And unlike a lot of things in life, this one on which you can actually work.

The tricky part is that most of it is quiet. Your body is a wonderful compensator — it will keep you feeling more or less fine while it works overtime behind the scenes, sometimes for years. Someone can be running on high stress every day and just call it a busy life. Someone can have a fasting insulin creeping up while their regular bloodwork still looks normal — and never know to look, even though insulin is one of the body's biggest signaling hormones. At a cancer conference last October, Dr. Paul Anderson, NMD, talked about four of these quiet influences worth keeping an eye on over a lifetime: stress, sugar, toxins, and infections. He referred to them as four big triggers for disease. Not things to fear — just things worth knowing about, because the sooner you see them, the more you can do.

This is really why I ask the questions I ask. People come in tired and wonder why I want to talk about their digestion. They come in with a sore joint and I'm asking about their sleep. It's not that I've wandered off the subject — it's that the body doesn't sort itself into neat little boxes, and neither does health. It's all connected, all the time.

And here's the thing — none of this is only about cancer. It's about your whole health, and about the things that hide until they don't. Let me tell you about my friend Dale.

Dale felt fine. No symptoms to speak of, and his bloodwork was clean across the board. He came in for a thermography scan on our Alfasight 9000, and it flagged something worth a closer look in his chest. Not long after, he started having what felt like reflux — and because that scan had put it on his radar, he didn't brush it off. He went to the ER while on vacation. They found an artery roughly eighty percent blocked, bad enough that he needed a graft. When he went to the cardiologist she told him if he had not had the assessment or had not gone to seek further care, his condition would have been far worse. Dale had no real warning, no symptoms. In his own words, he never would have gone to the doctor without that thermography nudging him to pay attention.

I share Dale's story not to sell you a scan, but because it is the whole point in one man's life: the body keeps its secrets until something helps you see them. My friends and there health stories remind us there are no guarantees. Dale reminds us that looking — early, on purpose, before anything hurts — can change the whole story. (Dale has generously offered to sit down with me and tell the whole thing in his own words, and I'll share that with you soon.)

So here is what I'd love for you to take from this letter — not worry, not a warning, just one caring nudge. Don't wait to be forced into paying attention to your body. The wise among us don't. They look, they learn, and they act on what's true instead of what they assumed — not out of fear, but out of respect for the one body they were given. That might mean finally looking at something you've wondered about for a while. It might mean a number you've been meaning to check. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It just has to be honest.

So if you'd like help knowing where to start, we are here to help you start your process. Thermography is one good way to look behind the scenes at whatever your body might be quietly working and help you in next steps. It doesn't have to be dramatic. It just has to be a real look. And if there's bloodwork you've been meaning to check, we can help with that too.

None of us knows what tomorrow holds.

None of us chose the body we were given. But how gently and how wisely we tend it — that's a choice we make every day.

So the question I'll leave you with isn't what if. It's this:

What is one thing I can do this week to honor the body I have?

With love and gratitude,

Dr. Kirby Thompson, ND, MSOM, LAc, MA Ed.