Embracing Change

Embracing Change with Candace Chisholm

By Alexis Costello

In 2019 shortly after the death of her father, Candace’s 18-month-old granddaughter was diagnosed with a malignant sacrococcygeal germ cell tumor. Dropping everything, the family moved to Vancouver to work alongside conventional medicine approaches and integrate it with muscle testing and nutrition. Click here to watch the entire interview on YouTube.

A: So, full disclosure, this is a little bit different than the kind of interview I usually do for the magazine because Candace is my aunt, so this is family! She is my mom’s sister, and part of that legacy of muscle testing work that you may have heard me speak about before. While we have never worked directly together in the health field, we have been running parallel tracks, so I am happy to have time to talk today about a new project. You and your husband Mike are co-authors of a new book: She Changed Me; One Ordeal Two Perspectives. Tell us a little bit about Elara and what inspired this story?

C: My granddaughter Elara, is currently three and a half, she’s my oldest son’s daughter, and she’s this bright light. . I always thought that being a mom was just the bomb but being a grandparent – there’s nothing like it! KinesioGeek Magazine, www.gemskinesiologycollege.com

Time for Change

She’s an incredible little girl and she came into the world despite a few obstacles. And we were just kind of plugging along as grandparents learning the ropes. She was a big part of our lives right away, she would come and stay overnight, right from a baby once a week and we really bonded with her.

Fast forward to the end of 2019, we were going through a lot of stuff with the family, my father was really sick. He passed away, and I remember thinking that it had been a struggle for the past year, that maybe it was time now to decompress.

I helped my mom move into my brother’s house, and we were just taking some time, so we had

Elara a lot. One day we took her out for a walk around the block in the snow and we got home, and she just wasn’t acting right. I muscle test her all the time, I knew intuitively that something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I put her in the bathtub and noticed there was this small lump on her lower back. We get those feelings sometimes, and I always say to people to act on those when we get them. We have this incredible innate gift in all of us of intuition. I found the lump on December 21st, we went down to Emergency to get it checked out. On the 23 rd we were in for a CAT scan, on the 24th for an MRI, they discovered a tumour and we were at Children’s Hospital (in Vancouver) by Boxing Day. It was so fast – I don’t think I even breathed for about four days. They determined she had what’s called a yokesack tumour and she went into surgery on New Year’s Eve. It was about the size of my fist and sitting on her tailbone. They were able to get about 98% of the tumour, but then they sat us down on January 5th and said that they believed it was malignant and they wanted to start treatment. When we went down to Vancouver, we thought we were going for a couple weeks. I had been in touch with you and with my sister, and I’m so grateful for the strength of my community. That feeling of, ‘it will be ok, we’ll get through this.’ But we ended up staying for 5 months to support our kids. (Click here to see their video)

That’s really what inspired us to write. It wasn’t so much the journey of the cancer to be honest; many people go through that journey. It was the journey of something so life-changing for us and how we were able to navigate it and take the time to see and receive the blessing. The lessons that came from that were so phenomenal that I couldn’t help but put them into print. For myself, and for a love-letter to Elara. And then I thought, for someone going through any ordeal, not just cancer, but Covid, divorce, death… this is about recognizing that things happen and what blessings we can take from that.

A: Can we talk a little bit about your background in the holistic health world and how you we able to use that in an integrated way with the allopathic treatment in order to support Elara, exactly the way that she needed?

C: My mom was fortunate enough years and years ago to work with a chiropractor who had started down the path of Touch for Health. So I grew up with this; I think I was 5 or 6 years old when she started muscle testing. When I got married and had kids of my own, I remember thinking that I wanted to explore this more, even just for my own family (like I should stop having my mom take care of me!) In the late 90’s I took my TFH training, and it ended up just morphing into a practice for me because I love and believe in it so much. And I have seen so much evidence of how this work can enhance quality of life for the people I love.

(Here we discuss my grandfather, her dad, and the way we all as a family kept him going for years after 9 heart attacks, 2 strokes, a quadruple bypass and being septic, to the amazement of the hospital staff and doctors! Right up until the last year he was extremely efficient and had good quality of life.) Partial proceeds from the sale of She Changed Me will go to the Michael Cuccione Foundation, an amazing organization that touched the lives of Mike and Candace during their ordeal, and has saved countless lives through their research and collaborations over the last 25 years.

You can order your copy here, or in Indigo stores in Canada, Barnes and Noble in the USA.

This is the love that has been the foundation of my practice for 23 years. The path that I have always taken has focused on nutrition, I love food as medicine – I think there’s just so much to learn when it comes to food. How and when we eat is important when it comes to healing certain parts of us. Elara has grown up with this too, so she is used to certain things, and I give credit to her mom Jessica, because, from early on, she was really open to us taking Elara on this path of natural health. She would give her buckwheat water or tea in a little syringe (into her mouth) right from when she was little in order to get the right nutrition into her. So Elara already knew that this made her feel better. And this saved us because she didn’t have many teeth at 18 months; it’s not like we could get her to eat brasil nuts! When we were in the hospital that was my job; for 4.5 months, I would muscle test her, do whatever I could to balance her, and then would start the process of making teas or concoctions so that we could get the right nutrition into her.

A lot of what we were doing centered around building blood because, as you know, chemo destroys it and brings your hemoglobin levels down to practically nothing, so that’s what we were focusing on all the time. Eventually I figured we could make a business out of selling these little shots of veggies and herbs and call it “Finding Hemo!” The greatest thing about that was we were working with Western medicine and doing it sideby-side - there is nothing more satisfying than watching the change in their numbers in real-time, and that’s what I got to see. I can’t even tell you the blessing and the confidence you get from that. Because I went to her oncologist, who was an incredible woman (I don’t get intimidated often, but she was just amazing!) and I sat down with her and said, ‘look, this is what I do for a living,’ and she said, ‘ok, we’ll do this together; you don’t keep anything from me, and I won’t keep anything from you.’ And so I told her every time, what we were working on, and what she kept saying to me was, ‘it’s working, keep going; it’s working, keep going.’ We did bone broths and marine phytoplankton and everything. And Elara’s numbers were extraordinary, especially in comparison with some of the other kids that had similar cancers. There were some kids there that had to have 30 blood transfusions in the same time that Elara had none. That was one of those moments when I could see it in real time. And there was nothing that felt better.

“And so I told her every time, what we were working on, and what she kept saying to me was, ‘it’s working, keep going; it’s working, keep going.’

A: I really wanted to be able to share this bit with people because I think that sometimes, both in the allopathic and the alternative medicine systems, we kind of get stuck in this idea that we are enemies. Like, if you are into alternative health, you wouldn’t touch conventional medicine with a 10-foot pole; and if you’re over here with the doctors, you aren’t interested in the quacks on the other side! And to have such a gorgeous example of you and this other woman with all of her training being able to work together for the best interests of this little girl, is really amazing.

C: I think that’s the key point – it was for the best interests of this baby. I’m a huge fan of collaboration, I think that it takes all hands-on

deck! It’s not just one modality, one therapy one medicine, we are complicated machines, so in my opinion, why not throw everything you can at it? We can’t survive without conventional medicine – it’s emergency medicine. If you break your bone, you need to have that bone set. But the prevention side… our healthcare systems has shown the fissures and strain and stress more than ever before in the past two years. People are starting to think, wait, we can’t just park our boat over here in this dock, we need to look at the whole marina now.

So the oncologist was open to collaboration and I am grateful for that. And we joked about it; I said, ‘when come back with this baby in a year for you to check on her, I want to see buckwheat hanging in all of the IV bags on these poles!’ And she said, ‘Maybe that’ll happen.’ The kids were staying at Ronald McDonald House, and a lot of the time I would make the bone broth or the tea there and we were able to help educate people there too, because you find out really fast that there’s a massive lack of education when it comes to nutrition. When we sat down and talked to Elara’s team, one of my first questions was, ‘what shouldn’t she eat?’ And they said, ‘Nothing, she can eat everything,’ and I was like, ‘No she can’t! She can’t have sugar, are you crazy?!’

A: I’ve spoken with parents before when they have been through this, and they have been told that their child is probably going to lose weight with the treatment, so to fill them up with all of the carbs / ice cream / sugar they want in order to keep their weight up, without acknowledging that those are immunosuppressants.

C: It was shocking to see it because again, growing up in this world we’re not really used to that… There were a couple of times when my husband Mike was like, ‘You should take a walk,’ as I freaked out that the kids were being fed Wheaties and Kraft Dinner – I just wanted to help so bad! A woman told me that one day her daughter had 17 chocolate bars because that’s all she would eat. And that’s not their fault – that’s the system’s fault.

It’s disheartening, but also, we know that we can flip the script. Elara had no sugar, but she never lost an ounce; in fact by her third chemotherapy treatment, she was gaining weight. She had her IV with four different medications going into her arm and she

would be asking to go for a walk. One day we did 1800 steps with her pole. She was a machine! And she would follow her own intuition of what her body needed. It was fascinating to watch.

A: What change are you hoping to inspire with your words?

C: Change is inevitable. My hope is that people realize that even though change feels scary there can be a reason for it. I started in 2018 to go down a path to incite change (I really love change to be honest!). I started a company called He Changed It, followed by, She Changed It, and I built a mobile app for men’s mental health and wellness, and we are releasing the women’s one in the spring (because the perspectives are so different). And start-up technology, as this is not my background… was not the easiest path! But I feel like I have so much to share when it comes to health, and we started with men because men’s mental health and wellness are so under resourced as we have generations of imprinting: ‘just suck it up.’ We wrote this book as I was right in the middle of creating this start up and there were days that I though, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ And then I look at this baby who is literally fighting for her life and what she taught me was that there is no other moment then right here, right now. She had zero baggage. We came with baggage and attachments and what ifs? And that’s what I want to change. It is so easy for us to get caught up in the future

and let go of stories that keep circulating and coming back. And it’s like the trail – I’m not looking for a finish line. This process really opened my heart and opened me up to receive. It’s funny, but I sometimes see people as trees. Going through life, humans can trigger you, it’s hard to live in society sometimes! And we can judge people a lot and we judge ourselves and it can turn into this terrible spiral. When I’m out there in nature, I can let go of these stories and reexperience life for what it is right now. It lets me love the parts of myself that are harder to love and that I want to hide. There are dark moments and shadows that you have to work through. Your mind telling you that you’re worthy and not good enough (at least for me,

or stuck in the past and that doesn’t serve us. Elara just stayed in the moment and was happy in the moment and that’s how she healed. When you are going through something like this, can you be kind to yourself and honest with yourself and stay in this moment? For the rest of our conversation from here, (including an acknowledgement of the guilt we can feel as practitioners when we don’t see something sooner), visit the interview on YouTube and watch the last 14 minutes.

Candace has long worked in the health and wellness industry by way of a business in coaching through physical and mental wellbeing with a primary focus in muscle testing and biofeedback. Starting in 1999, before the onslaught of the internet, she saw a definite need to take a proactive approach to mental health, feeling like the burden on the health industry would only get greater. In 2014, the opportunity presented itself to further fulfill the desire to help, change and develop people, by way of a brand new grassroots NGO. This organization focused on the mental and physical health of mothers, thus creating systematic programs to help shift mindsets, thereby shifting futures for those otherwise disenfranchised. After helping to grow the charity to 55,000 members nationwide, she exited in 2018, and immediately used that startup mentality to create He Changed It and She Changed It, niche market mobile health apps that use technology to further mental health and wellness education and have it reach the masses as a tool for the betterment of humans. To find the book: shechangedme.com, Amazon and in Indigo stores in Canada, Barnes and Noble in the US. Hechangedit.com