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When diagnosed with Lymphoma and fatty liver ten years ago, I was in a panic because I believed what traditional medical doctors do about cancer that it is a death sentence. Once I found out it didn’t have to be I had hope. So I took my health out of the Doctors hands and into my own. And it was very empowering. A neighbor of mine brought me a book “Gods Way to Ultimate Health” written by Pastor George Malkmus who was diagnosed with colon cancer. He watched his mother go through traditional cancer treatment for the same disease years earlier, and he saw her suffer while she did everything her doctors told her to do, surgery, chemo, and radiation and she died anyway. He thought there has to be a better way so as a Pastor he turned to the source he knew best the Bible. “And God said, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed: to you, it shall be for meat”. Genesis 1:29  Rev. George Malkmus also noticed that his grandparents who were in their 90’s were healthy, active, and still working on their farm while eating an unprocessed plant-based diet. His mother was a nurse and moved to the city and ate a highly processed diet and was riddled with disease. So he changed his lifestyle and turned to eating a mostly raw plant-based diet, along with juicing and cured himself of cancer. He went on to start Hallelujah Acres and wrote the books the Hallelujah Diet and Why Christians Get Sick. On the first visit to the Hematologist/ Oncologist, I was told the lymphoma was in my spleen and we went over my scans and reports. I told him I had changed my diet and lifestyle and was juicing a raw vegan diet with more organic fruits and vegetables and was feeling better. He told me it was too late for that. I told them that would not let them take out my spleen or do radiation or chemo. Roundup and exposer to glyphosate has been linked to Lymphoma and a national brand of oatmeal I was eating daily was one of the products on the list as well as much of the food we eat on a daily basis along with fruits and vegetables. We used Roundup for years for weed control and now I have an organic garden and I switched to an organic brand of oatmeal and most of the fruit and vegetables I now buy are organic. I agreed to scans of the spleen to be sure it was not growing (It was not) and continued my diet and juicing. I also bought a rebounder which has been shown to be good for the lymph system, plus it is a fun low impact way to exercise.  After a year of going from one Doctor to another with no help, I ended up at an alternative medicine doctor that specialized in nutrition and bioidentical hormone replacement. She said I could have lived with the lymphoma for years before I had symptoms and that my symptoms were not from the lymphoma. What she told me was that my adrenal gland was not producing enough cortisol (the cause of my symptoms). And after being placed on bioidentical hormones and vitamin supplements I began to feel better, and have more energy. Since the Adrenal gland is affected by stress, the alternative medical Doctor recommended I make changes to reduce stress and handle stress better. I left my stressful job and opened my own business where I had less stress and worked fewer hours and had more time for family, friends, and fun. More time for exercise, church and prayer, and meditation. I created a garden as part of my healing environment. I did liver cleanses, took milk thistle for my liver and juiced fruits and vegetables, and removed processed foods and sugars from my diet. I have stuck to this lifestyle change except to add ocean caught fish to my diet. And years later my final scan of my spleen and my liver it showed it was clear of the nodules. I was fortunate that symptoms from an unrelated illness adrenal fatigue brought me into the doctor for tests where they discovered the lymphoma and non- alcoholic fatty liver in the very early stages so I was able to do something about it before it was advanced. All my research on nutrition and healing foods a couple years later would become vital to helping my daughter Joran heal after a traumatic brain injury when she was battling one life threating infection after another. About the same time that I had the lymphoma diagnosis I was also diagnosed with skin cancer on my calf on my leg and had it removed. I had thought skin cancer was because of excessive sun exposure and yet I tried to stay out of the sun and limit my exposure by wearing sunscreen on my legs, a long-sleeved rash guard shirt and a hat while in the sun, so why did I get skin cancer if that was true. I began researching skin cancer and found many doctors and researchers that said that avoiding the sun and slathering on sunscreen was not the answer to preventing skin cancer, it hadn’t worked for me. They actually recommended limited sun exposure 10-15 minutes daily to optimize vitamin D levels and to fortify your diet with antioxidants and other nutrients. And when I researched whether sunscreens were safe I was surprised to find out that the ingredients in most sunscreens were killing the coral reefs. Oxybenzone one ingredient caused endocrine disruption, DNA damage and the death of the coral reefs. Titanium dioxide and zinc oxide natural mineral ingredients have not been shown to be harmful to the reefs. To read more go to www.Cdhc.noaa.gov So it made me wonder, how bad was sunscreen was for our skin. What I found was that the same thing that it was doing to the coral reefs it was also doing to us. The endocrine disruptors can lead to infertility, endometriosis in a woman and low sperm count in men, breast and ovarian cancer in women and prostate cancer in men. And in 2021 there were reports that made the news about benzenes link to cancer and that is in some popular sunscreen had as much as three times the amount that the FDA showed was safe, many say that no amount of benzene in sunscreen products is safe. I now use a chemical free sunscreen that is a physical broad based SPF made with mineral zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. I extended my healing diet to my skin as well and began to make my own skin care products out of healthy plant-based ingredients. I also made sure I got a healthy dose of vitamin D just 10 to 15 minutes a day if I would be out for longer period I would coverup. The Skin is the body’s largest external organ so why would we not feed it the same healthy ingredients that we feed our internal organs? I use vegetable oils like olive, coconut, avocado oils, and vegetable glycerin and raw or Manuka honey and essential oils in my skin care products.  If you only use the traditional medicine approach to overcoming disease within the body, you may never get to the underlining cause of the disease and it may come back. Some want that one pill that will fix a lifetime of poor eating and lifestyle habits. Instead look to food as medicine to heal the body, a healthy plant-based diet and exercise will boost the immune system to help fight off disease. You may also need to remove unhealthy environmental toxins in products may of us use and eat everyday as well as smoking, alcohol, drugs and processed foods that are causing disease.  I have heard people say that they were thankful for their cancer diagnosis as it changed their life for the better and appreciate life more and they don't take their heath for granted. I am thankful for mine as I finally got healthy and I had the energy to be able to care for my daughter Joran after her TBI which required 24 hour care seven days a week and many sleepless nights. I also had the knowledge from learning how to make healing juices and smoothies recipes to start making Joran the healing tube feeding recipes that I fed to her through her feeding tube.
I’m not a healthcare professional I can only tell you what I researched and what worked for me. If you are here reading this and you are looking for answers to your health and healing, I hope and pray you will find what treatment works best for you. As described in the Holy Scriptures: “Take also unto thee WHEAT and BARLEY and BEANS, and LENTILS, and MILLET, and SPELT, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it…. Ezekiel 4:9 Katheryn De Wolfe is an interior designer and specializes in healing and eco-friendly environments, ADA handicap barrier-free design, photography, and art. She wrote the book Better Brain Healing - Nutritional and Spiritual Healing for the Brain to help families and caregivers to care for loved ones diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. She lives in Boynton Beach, Florida and can be reached at 561-364-0074. Healing Cancer Resources Documentaries; Forks over Knives, YouTube The Truth About Cancer, watch free on-demand What The Health, available on Netflix or YouTube The Annie Appleseed Project, Natural cancer therapy for a patients perspective. To contact –annieappleseedpr@aol.com- or call 561-749-0084 http://www.annieappleseedproject.org Books: Book; Gods Way to Ultimate Health by George H. Malkmus and Micheal Dye - Healing colon cancer through diet. Halleluiah Acres, http://www.dietministry.com Book; Crazy Sexy Cancer – By Kris Carr- http://www.kriscarr.com Jordan Rubin- The Makers Diet- http://www.makers-diet.net Skin Cancer Treatments: Stand up & Beat Skin Cancer- 10 Powerful Natural Treatments- Think outside the book http://www.thinkoutsidethebook.com Top 5 Skin Cancer Symptom & 4 Natural Treatments- Dr. Axe- http://www.draxe.com Alternative Doctors; Advanced Medical Therapeutics, Dr. Rosenberg -561-886-0976 http://amtcare.com Dr. Andrew Weil- The Anti-Inflammatory Diet Pyramid http://www.dmrandrewweil.com Dr. Joseph Mercola- http://www.mercola.com Dr. Josh Axe- Food as medicine- http://www.draxe.com
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 Great communication between the client and the designer is important to a successful design project; it saves both time and money for both the designer and the client. Give as much thought and research to what you want and like as you can, before your first meeting with the designer. Communicate what you like and want in your project; spend time collecting photographs, clippings and color chips, and samples that explain your taste and sum up how you would like your home to look and feel. Do you like plaids, floral, stripes or solids, bold bright colors or neutrals? Clean lines or lots of detail? Are there special needs or time restraints? Maybe you not sure what you do like but know what you don’t like, this is all important information to communicate to your designer. Be involved with the design process; work with the designer to define your requirements, needs and life style. What is most important to you and how do you want the designer’s time spent? Is a space plan and paint colors your most important priority? Or do you want your whole home to be completely designed down to the last perfectly placed accessory? Who will be involved in the decision making process? If there is only one client involved the decision making and communication process it is much easier. But if there are spouses or children or others living in the space to be designed everyone needs to be involved so that their needs are met. Is there anyone in the home with special needs or physical limitation? These things need to be discussed and a design plan should address these issues, so that if there is someone who has visual limitations, uses a wheelchair or walker that they will be able to have access and move about the space freely.   Spouses should always be together on the meetings about budget and design with the designer. I have had wife’s tell me their husbands don’t really care and he may not but if he is not included in the beginning conversations about the project you won’t know for sure. Both husband and Wife should sign all orders and documents. The husband may not care about the design as long as you stay in his budget and the wife may not care so much about the budget as long as she gets what she wants. Also the husband may say he is not interested in the design process but I guarantee that if there is not a comfortable chair for him to relax in at the end of the day you will have one unhappy client.
Budget; letting the designer know what your budget is at the beginning will save time and money, so the designer will not spend her time looking for and recommending furniture, products and fabrics that would put you over your budget. Good communication about budget between all parties; husband, wife, partners and designer will help to keep the love in the relationships. Sometimes a client has no idea how to come up with a budget, there are some guidelines to help; if you are furnishing a new home and have nothing to start with you can use the square foot method to help come up with a budget. Let say you bought a 3000 square foot house for $500,000.00, take 3000 sq. ft. x $20.00 = a $60,000.00 budget. But if you wanted your budget to cover custom widow treatments and some custom faux finishes, flooring, new kitchen and better furniture and fabrics 3000 x $40.00 = a $120,000.00 budget would allow you to get the look you want. Also someone in the million dollars and up home is going to spend a lot more on investment art, faux finishes and marble floors than the average homeowner would. If you use the purchase price of the house to calculate a budget were to take the purchase price of the house at $300,000.00 x 20% = $60,000.00 budget. But someone else with a 3000 square foot house that cost $500,000.00 could be in an area that would call for a higher budget, so 20% of their purchase price would be $100,000.00. Prices will depend on how much work needs to be done if there is flooring, construction, new kitchen and baths to be designed or will it be just furnishings and window treatments and accessories? You should always leave a little wiggle room in your budget for things that are out of your designers or your control. Such as price increases or unforeseen unexpected things that happen during construction or that one of a kind antique you just have to have but is not covered in the original budget. If you have a smaller project, or doing the whole house at once is not an option you can do a room at a time, keep in mind you could spend $55.00 and up a square foot in a living room or dining room where you want it to look richer and more elegant but only $20.00 a square foot in a small bedroom, hallway or bath. Also remember even if your redesigning one room at a time, building a design plan for the whole house with your designer helps to insure that the project will look like it was done all at once when completed. And don’t forget window treatments and accessories are a big part of the budget and are what will make your home look well pulled together so make sure you leave enough money in you budget for the final touches. Also read my post on Four R’s of Green Design; renew, reuse, recover and recycle. This is a good option for decorating on a tight budget. Will you want the designer the designer to supervise contractors on the job or will you be doing it yourself? I had clients who hired me for the design and finish selections but decided to hire their own GC do the construction themselves, they said afterwards that they wished they had hired me to handle supervising the construction, that it was very stressful and interfered with their work schedule. If you work you will need to weigh the cost of taking time off work if it’s a large project or hiring the designer to do it. Find out what is the best way for you and the designer to keep in touch and communicate throughout the job; is it by phone, email or text messages? If he or she only likes to text messages during the work day and you can only communicate by phone at night after hours, you’ll have to work out what will work best for everyone. How will job changes be communicated? They should always be in writing, as a change order document or email document where the client signs for the changes in either price or product so there is no mix ups and confusion. In the end good client/designer communication is a two way street and paramount to having a happy and satisfied client at the end of the design and installation of your project. I appreciate all feedback so to leave a comment click on the Facebook link below: https://www.facebook.com/dewolfeinteriors/ Katheryn de Wolfe- Interior designer ID#320 561-364-0074 Fax 561-469-7536 www.dewolfeinteriors.com dewolfeinteriors@comcast.net Follow us on Instagram, like us on Facebook, Houzz, and Pinterest Sometimes there is the client that just needs a little help with their home and they don’t have a large budget. These can be very rewarding and appreciating clients because they have already tried to do their home design on their own and know that they have failed. They really appreciate a designer’s knowledge and expertise. This client had already attempted the design of their new home on their own and they were very unhappy with the results and called me to help them. Living Room Before:  Living Room After:  They were trying to go for a French Country style but they ended up with a living room was overcrowded and didn’t have the proper scale and balance, one of the main reasons someone may be unhappy with the design of a home and not know why after they have spent a lot of money buying furniture they love.
We got rid of one sofa and repurposed it in another room and added two comfy chairs. I also designed new window treatments to hang over the transom window, which I do in the majority of cases adding height to the room. |
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