Photo credit Chip Scheuer
Less than three years ago, Jennifer Heskett Yamaguchi laid on an examination table in Tucson and watched the monitor as a urologist sent a camera into her bladder. What she saw turned her world upside down: more than 20 cancerous tumors—too many to even count—taking over the right side of her bladder.
“I remember it clearly. I just couldn’t believe it,” says Yamaguchi, sitting in a crowded coffee shop one foggy morning in Aptos. The 33-year-old mother of two has long hair and glowing skin. She wears a leather jacket over her dress and rocks the lean, fit body shape you would never guess in a million years to be diagnosed with a disease most common in people in their sixties and seventies.
The two weeks that followed her diagnosis are a blur in Yamaguchi’s memory.
“I couldn’t talk to anyone. I was terrified. I thought that I was going to die, and that I was going to leave my kids and that my husband was going to have to marry someone else,” says Yamaguchi.
But that state she describes as “so much sorrow and pain” couldn’t last forever. “I just started, you know, pulling myself out of it, and getting that gumption to fight.”
Undergoing surgery and chemo every three months, the always-athletic Yamaguchi began exercising more. But still, the cancer kept coming back, while a certain pull towards Santa Cruz kept growing stronger. “I needed to be near the ocean and redwoods. I needed to be around healthy food, a more alternative lifestyle,” she says.
“So we just decided to come home. And it’s changed my life. Cancer’s changed my life. It’s made it better,” she says. From the look on my face, she knows what she’s just said, and she couldn’t be any more sure.
“I feel limitless. I really understand that I’m the only person that can hold myself back in this world,” says Yamaguchi. “It’s almost like I shed an old skin, sort of had a rebirth.”
After her diagnosis, Yamaguchi began drinking water all of the time. She cut out most animal proteins, though she occasionally eats buffalo and other free-range meats. She also started staying away from anything containing chemicals. “I don’t swim in pools that have chlorine. I’m very, very conscientious about what I put in my body,” says Yamaguchi.
I ask her what new activities she’s been immersing herself in. The answer comes: Surfing, tai chi, running in the forest, acupuncture, playing the guitar. Her eyes are wide with passion.
In Santa Cruz, Yamaguchi says she also found the Western doctor she’d been looking for. “He is incredible. He’s kind, and he spends time with me and he looks at me in my face, and you can tell he wants me to get better. I’m not just another patient that’s come in the door.”
On a spiritual level, Yamaguchi says she’s a different person entirely. Where before she was more apt to wait for life to come to her, now she’s more apt to grab life by the reins and dig a spur in.
“A lot of times I think we just get stuck, just fall off the wave and keep crashing, and we can’t get ourselves back up because we’re not living in the moment and we don’t let all those good things roll in. And it’s easier to do that now,” says Yamaguchi.
This past January, after eight surgeries (including one at Stanford that accidentally punctured her bladder,) Yamaguchi got a call from her doctor on a Saturday that she no longer had any cancer cells in her bladder. She had been in Santa Cruz for seven months. “I never felt more at home in my life,” says Yamaguchi.
