In early 2020, I heard the words no one ever wants to hear: terminal cancer.

Up until that point, my life looked pretty normal. I run a sign business in Slayton, Minnesota, a small town where everybody knows everybody, and I’d built a life there I loved. I wasn’t the type to think much about my health. I went to work, came home, lived my life. So when a softball sized tumor turned up in my right kidney, it didn’t just scare me, it didn’t make any sense. One day I was fine. The next I was staring down a diagnosis of stage 4 renal cell carcinoma, a cancer that gave me something like a 5% chance of living another five years.

That number alone was hard enough to take in, and then the scans made it worse. The cancer had already spread to my lungs, more than 50 separate nodules. I remember sitting in that room hearing the word metastasized and feeling like the floor dropped out from under me. I wasn’t ready to accept it, so I went for a second opinion. I drove to the Mayo Clinic still holding onto some hope that surgery might be possible, that maybe they could just take it out and I could go back to my life.

Instead the news got heavier. Doctors found sarcomatoid and rhabdoid features in the tumor, which meant this wasn’t just cancer, it was fast and aggressive and unpredictable. They told me, as gently as they could, that I wouldn’t survive removing the kidney and tumor. My body wouldn’t have time to heal before the cancer took over again. Mayo’s estimate was six months, maybe less. 

They told me to go home, get my affairs in order, and spend whatever time I had left with the people I loved. 

Even with that prognosis, there was still one option on the table, a clinical trial combining two immunotherapy drugs, offered at Sanford, closer to home than Mayo. Nobody oversold it to me. The doctors were honest that if it worked, if my body could even handle it, it might buy me a few extra weeks. Maybe, if I was lucky, a few more months. It wasn’t a cure. It was just a chance to hold on a little longer.

But before I could even start, things got more complicated. A biopsy led to a complication that forced an emergency surgery, removing my kidney and then an emergency procedure on my bladder. The surgeries themselves went fine. What came after didn’t. I developed an ileus, which basically shuts your digestive system down, and I ended up spending almost two weeks in the hospital. For six of those days I had a tube down my throat pumping my stomach, and all I was allowed was a few ice chips a day. I remember how badly I just wanted the feeling of water in my mouth.

On top of that, this was 2020, so COVID restrictions meant my family couldn’t be there for most of it. I spent long stretches completely alone, staring at the ceiling, wondering if this was how it was going to end. But somehow, against what anyone expected, I recovered enough to go home.

Coming home didn’t feel like a win. It felt like starting over from nothing. But I made a decision right then that I was going to do everything I possibly could to give my body a real shot, whatever that ended up meaning.

I found a medicine woman trained in Native American healing traditions, and together we rebuilt my life starting with what I put into my body. I cut out sugar almost completely. I filled my plate with organic fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, anti-inflammatory foods, things I’d honestly never paid attention to before. Around that same time I also started taking an Apan mushroom extract, something I’d learned could support the immune system, and I made it part of my daily routine.

I couldn’t tell you the exact day, but within a couple weeks I started feeling different. Not cured, just stronger. More like myself. I started walking. The first day it was thirty feet from my front door and back, and even that wore me out completely. I kept at it, a little farther each day, until I was walking over a mile at a time. Eventually I got on a bike and started riding several miles a day. Every bit of movement felt like I was pushing back against something.

I started with Apan+ Max Daily and committed to at least 120 days before making any judgments.

When you’re fighting a major illness like cancer, what you put into your body matters just as much as any treatment a doctor gives you. Food became something I paid attention to for the first time in my life, not just as fuel, but as something that could actually help my body fight. I’m not saying it replaces medicine, because it doesn’t, but I do think giving your body the right building blocks gives it a better shot at doing what it needs to do. 

Here’s a look at what a typical week of eating looked like for me during my recovery:

Morning: Every day, start with a Herbal Immune Power Smoothie.

Apan+ Max Daily: Take 12 dropper squeezes of Apan+ Max Daily every single day. .

Three months after I got out of the hospital, I went in for another CT scan, bracing for it the way I always did by then. What came back wasn’t what any of us expected. The more than 50 nodules in my lungs had dropped to fewer than 20. Other areas that had been affected showed complete remission. My oncologist called the results extremely encouraging, and hearing that from a doctor who had been honest and careful with me the entire way through meant everything.

Three months after that, another scan showed the cancer was over 90% gone. Not long after, I got news I’d stopped letting myself hope for. I was in complete remission.

Where I Am I Now?

These days I still go in for regular scans to keep an eye on things, and I still take a maintenance dose of Apán+ Max Daily every single day. I believe it played a real part in helping my body fight back when it mattered most.

But if you ask me what really changed through all of this, it’s not just my diet or my routine. It’s how I look at everything. I care less about material things now and more about the time I get to spend with the people I love. I’ve decided to spend the rest of my life doing the things that actually make me happy, and one of those things is telling this story. If sharing what happened to me gives even one other person a little more hope while they’re facing odds that feel impossible, then it’s worth telling, again and again.