Hypnosis and cancer: How hypnotherapy helped me deal with chemo
GETTY/ Gus Campbell Ellie Holmes was diagnosed with cancer in 2006
I had been feeling a bit rundown and tired for a while and my doctor thought I might be anaemic so I was sent to hospital for blood tests. I assumed I’d be given some iron tablets and sent on my way. So when the consultant told me I had cancer – just a few days before Christmas in 2006 – I was so shocked I couldn’t take anything else in.
She explained I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that affects the lymphatic system. It mostly affects people in their early 20s or over the age of 70, although I was 39 at the time. Around 1,900 people in the UK are diagnosed with it each year. At the time I had never even heard of this disease and had to ask the doctor what it was.
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It was an astonishing experience
I rang my mum Joy to tell her what had happened and of course she was shocked and devastated. Then in a complete daze I went back to the office where I worked as a legal secretary near my home in Essex. When I was there I found a medical dictionary and looked up Hodgkin’s.
GETTY - STOCK She said hypnotherapy helped her through chemo sessions
It told me I had an 87 per cent chance of being alive after five years. Despite what I read I still thought I was going to die. I was gripped with fear that I wouldn’t make it out of my 30s. The next day, while I was still reeling from the shock of my diagnosis, my beloved father Jim died at the age of 82. He’d been in poor health for a long time and mum and I had both been his carers. She and I had made the difficult decision not to tell him about my cancer. It was a terrible time. As the hospital was trying to schedule tests I was preoccupied with organising my dad’s funeral. I had been scheduled to have one of my tests on the day of the funeral and had to put it off.
I was given six months of chemotherapy. The treatment made me incredibly sick and I lost all my hair. I felt I looked so awful that I stopped looking in mirrors. It took so much courage to walk through the doors to the hospital every two weeks when all I wanted to do was run in the opposite direction. Cancer batters you mentally, physically and emotionally. For me the worst aspect was definitely the nausea and sickness. I reacted so badly to the chemotherapy that I would start being sick the moment the drug was administered. After several sessions a nurse suggested that hypnotherapy might help. Desperate for some relief I decided to give it a go. At my first session I sat down on a comfortable chair and my therapist covered me with a blanket.
GETTY - STOCK Hodgkin’s lymphoma mostly affects people in their early 20s or over the age of 70
I told her that I was strong-minded and wasn’t sure how effective hypnotherapy would be but she laughed, saying strong-minded people were the easiest to hypnotise. I was concerned because the only experience of hypnosis was watching it on television, where people are made to do stupid things. I had visions of crawling around the floor on my hands and knees, barking like a dog but the session was nothing like that. Instead I started by doing some breathing exercises before she counted back from 10 to one. It was an astonishing experience. I never lost awareness of where I was – I could hear birdsong and the postman delivering the post during the session. The therapist talked to me in a soothing voice, taking me on a journey in my mind through visualisation. During this I went up into a tower and at the top was a casket/trunk and I had to put all my sickness and anxiety about the hospital visits into the trunk and lock it up.
Gus Campbell Ellie beat cancer and has since become a writer
At no point did I feel as if I was under someone else’s control. I could move if I wanted to but I was so utterly relaxed that I was more comfortable staying still. After 20 minutes I was gently brought back by counting from one to 10 and afterwards I felt thoroughly relaxed and calm. The hypnotherapy was transformative. At my next chemo session I felt queasy but I never vomited, not once. Two weeks before I was sick at the hospital when connected to the drip, in the car coming home and throughout the rest of the day and the evening. That did not happen again after hypnotherapy. I went every weekend before treatment on the Monday. I wish I’d known about it sooner as I was so far along in my treatment before I gave it a go. My treatment finished in the summer of 2007 and I was given a PET scan to see if it had worked.