The Cancer Pod: Integrative Medicine Talk
Oct 7, 2026 · 35 min · 11 segments
When treatment ends and the world moves on, cancer survivors are often left alone with a flood of unprocessed emotions. Author and survivorship mentor Kia Lee sits down with Leah to explore the hidden…
Leah ShermanHost
But one of the big topics in your book and something that you do talk about and I mentioned in the intro is that we might not necessarily want to return to our life that we had before we had cancer.
I don't know that it's possible to, you know, when you really think about it, we're not the same person physically, energetically, spiritually, emotionally, and anything that one was keeping under wraps before cancer and, you know, suppressing or ignoring physically.
Our capacity changes very much so, you know, during diagnosis, during treatment, and then after all of that, you know, things come to the surface.
And in my experience and other people, it just, come on, we're having it now, you know, we're going to have an out.
But I do believe that you're going to be a mom in a different way, a different capacity.
I think it's good because, like, for me, I was able to understand that I'd been living 99% of my life up until, you know, completing treatment in survival mode.
And the impact of that on my immune system, on holistically everything, you know, I was doing everything in survival mode.
You even talk about in the book how the person that you are as you're going through treatment isn't who you are when you're done with treatment.
And you don't want it to be because of, I'm assuming, because of that survival mode that we're in.
And it doesn't matter if you go, you know, the Western route of chemo and radiation or you choose to do a more holistic route.
You still have to follow, you know... standard of care and procedures and show up every day because there is, number one, there is no cure and there's no treatment that's just like an overnight thing.
And during treatment, we are just saying yes to whatever it is we agree to and we're showing up.
But one of the big topics in your book and something that you do talk about and I mentioned in the intro is that we might not necessarily want to return to our life that we had before we had cancer.
I don't know that it's possible to, you know, when you really think about it, we're not the same person physically, energetically, spiritually, emotionally, and anything that one was keeping under wraps before cancer and, you know, suppressing or ignoring physically.
Our capacity changes very much so, you know, during diagnosis, during treatment, and then after all of that, you know, things come to the surface.
And in my experience and other people, it just, come on, we're having it now, you know, we're going to have an out.
But I do believe that you're going to be a mom in a different way, a different capacity.
I think it's good because, like, for me, I was able to understand that I'd been living 99% of my life up until, you know, completing treatment in survival mode.
And the impact of that on my immune system, on holistically everything, you know, I was doing everything in survival mode.
You even talk about in the book how the person that you are as you're going through treatment isn't who you are when you're done with treatment.
And you don't want it to be because of, I'm assuming, because of that survival mode that we're in.
And it doesn't matter if you go, you know, the Western route of chemo and radiation or you choose to do a more holistic route.
You still have to follow, you know... standard of care and procedures and show up every day because there is, number one, there is no cure and there's no treatment that's just like an overnight thing.
And during treatment, we are just saying yes to whatever it is we agree to and we're showing up.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
