Guest blogger, Audra Wilford, proud mom of CHOC patient, “SuperMax,” and founder of MaxLove Project – a community organization dedicated to helping childhood cancer families beat the odds – shares how her son has benefitted from CHOC’s integrative health services.
A few years ago, our son Max was diagnosed with brain cancer. After a difficult brain surgery, where only a portion of the tumor could be removed, and almost a month in the hospital, we faced the biggest challenges of our lives. After the surgery, Max lost his ability to walk, talk and use the left side of his body. He was going to need an unknown amount of chemotherapy and radiation to try to shrink the tumor left in his brain. We knew we were going to need an all-hands-on-deck approach for fighting the cancer and for restoring Max to health.
What we didn’t realize at the time was how many hands we’d need – it takes a whole multi-disciplinary team. But what happens when we leave the hospital? Who helps with nagging side effects, lingering stress, optimal nutrition, strengthening exercises and healthy sleep?
For us, it started with one amazing CHOC practitioner: Ruth McCarty. Ruth is the country’s only traditional Chinese medicine specialist at a children’s hospital who is fully integrated into every medical team in the hospital. When we first met with her, she put us at ease immediately. As we told her about Max’s neuropathy, sleep problems, headaches, gut challenges, anxiety, balance problems, muscle pain, immune suppression, and so on, she smiled and told us not only what she could do with acupuncture and moxibustion – a Chinese medicine technique that involves the burning of mugwort, a small spongy herb, to facilitate healing – but also what we could do at home through massage and select supplementation.
Over the next few months we saw Ruth every week, twice per week during chemotherapy. Max’s strength, range of movement, mood, pain, gut challenges, headaches, and sleep improved every week. And on the rare week when we had to miss appointments with Ruth, we would notice symptoms returning. During this time we also got to know Dr. Agnes Horvath, a CHOC oncologist who made the rounds in the outpatient infusion center. Dr. Horvath introduced us to bone broth and other healing foods that helped Max thrive through treatment. She encouraged us to think about nutrition as a key component of Max’s treatment. With her help, we continued to transform Max’s diet into what we came to call “fierce foods”: lots of whole foods, limited sugar and processed foods, and a ton of flavor. Max finished treatment in January 2013 and finished up kindergarten just a few months later.
By June 2013, Max’s tumor began growing again. By then, we had become immersed in the latest research on nutrition and cancer, and we wanted to try an intensive therapeutic diet for Max alongside whatever conventional therapies that our oncologist, Dr. Violet Shen, recommended. Dr. Shen took the time to research the diet and gave us her full support. She carefully guided us as we incorporated a therapeutic diet into Max’s treatment protocol.
Today, Max’s tumor continues to shrink and he’s a healthy, happy third grader. Each step of the way, CHOC has supported our family in incorporating the best and latest evidence-based medicine, whether it’s in acupuncture, massage therapy, stress control or diet. The doctors, nurses and therapists at CHOC understand that complementary and integrative medicine is about optimum quality of life, using the best of all therapeutic approaches to support each child and family to thrive in the face of tough odds.
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Learn more about the Hyundai Cancer Center at CHOC
CHOC Hospital was named one of the nation’s best children’s hospitals by U.S. News & World Report in its 2024-25 Best Children’s Hospitals rankings and ranked in the cancer specialty.
