Retire Early Lifestyle
Retirement; like your parents, but way cooler

In 1991 Billy and Akaisha Kaderli retired at the age of 38. Now, into their 4th decade of this financially independent lifestyle, they invite you to take advantage of their wisdom and experience.

My Intimate Journey with Cancer

How it all began

Billy and Akaisha Kaderli

In early summer of 2024, I found myself in the midst of a medical situation that took me by surprise. This, and other stories to follow, are a chronology of my emotional and psychological approach to being diagnosed with Stage 3 Breast cancer.

Our lifestyle is one of travel and we take care of our medical needs while on the road.

I want to make clear that this was our approach, and you may choose other ways to deal with an illness in your life.

It is our hope that in sharing our experience, there might be some nuggets along the way that you will find useful.

Feel free to write to us any time.

Billy and Akaisha in Osaka, Japan

I have always had fibrocystic breasts.

This is a frequent condition among women and generally causes no problems.

For me, it wasn’t uncommon to have to take each scheduled mammogram twice.

Those doing the mammogram are intent on doing it correctly. This often translated into “the more I can SMASH that breast, the better off the patient will be.”

This approach turned me off a few years ago, as I always thought the procedure shouldn’t be this painful.

No one ever found anything in either the first crushing nor in the second.

Should I have mammograms?

Note: I don’t pretend to be an expert in this matter. I am simply explaining my journey. Please do what is most helpful to you and what you feel to be the most in sync with your personal health needs.

Over the years, I did research on the benefits – or not – of having mammograms.

At my age of 72, when I was younger it was recommended to have mammograms yearly beginning in our 20’s. Other sources proposed not to worry about them until after 30… or even 40 years of age. Today it is recommended to have mammograms biennially beginning between 40-45 years of age.

I would have gone for some thermography every other year or at least to supplement the painful mammograms, but it was rarely available and was expensive.

Of course we are told the radiation of a mammogram gives more accurate results, but sometimes I thought the clinics just needed to pay for their machines. I can’t tell you how many times my girlfriends had false positives.

I don't mean to be testy here (pun intended) but if men's testicles were being battered in a similar manner, some new and more gentle technique would soon arise on the horizon, don't you think?

A lifestyle of travel

Since Billy and I do a lot of world travel, women’s health concerns would come up from time to time in various cultures and locations. I was intrigued about what women thought in other countries about what was available to them in regards to the medical approaches to women’s health.

Some women were very concerned about the radiation received in the mammogram, especially on a continuous, yearly basis – even when it was every two years. They said “No, thanks. I’m staying away from that.”

Some chose to go through menopause naturally, meaning they took no chemicals or anything else for hormone replacement. Others decided to do this same journey with natural substances, perhaps natural progesterone, or changing their diet. And again there were women who chose to do the full chemical path, but got breast cancer anyway.

There didn’t appear to be “simply one way” as a method for this area of women’s health.

Take my uterus and ovaries?

Just as an aside, I have been told by some gynecologists that since I was past childbearing age, I should – just as a precaution – have my uterus and ovaries taken out.

Need I say THAT idea had little appeal to me.

 Why take out perfectly good organs? My uterus and fallopian tubes were still generating estrogen, regardless if I were to have children or not, and that estrogen made for stronger bones.

I had the idea that money generation might have been part of the viewpoint of taking my "useless female organs", since I was speaking to a surgeon. At any rate, I have “rescued” my female parts several times from being taken from my body, and I felt proud about that.

(There couldn’t be an accepted assault on female organs, could there?) Hogwash! But I’m glad I didn’t let them have mine.

I had corrected all of my female health issues (including menopause) with natural approaches and I was comfortable with that. I always had great success doing herbs, acupuncture, homeopathic treatments, diet changes, and natural creams.

Other women friends took different paths – having hysterectomies, doing chemical hormone replacement therapy, getting mammograms that were scheduled yearly and so on.

To each their own.

A bump appears

Maybe three years ago I was having a massage, and was lying on my stomach. I noticed an area of hardness in my right breast that made lying on my belly for an extended period of time uncomfortable.

I took a mental note of it, made a passing comment to my husband, figuring it was just another one of my cysts.

Approximately 3 years later, Billy saw a “shadow” on my breast and asked me about it. I gave him the cliff note version of what I just wrote above.

We were at the beach at this time, and looking forward to our planned-and-paid-for 73-night trip to Asia. Billy and I discussed the situation, and decided we’d go to Chiang Mai Ram hospital in Thailand to have the doctors take a more thorough look. We had lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand before, and we had been patients in that hospital previously. 

We did more research and according to my symptoms and previous history, made a calculated guess that I had a fibroadenoma – which is a fancy word for “cyst.”

We were comfortable with our plans to see the docs in Thailand and continued to move forward with our trip.

Then… some pain came

We arrived in Japan when the “bump” began to cause me some pain. It was the first time I felt anything like this, and it was like a knife or an ice pick jabbing into me, and sometimes it took my breath away. It also seemed to be getting larger.

And since relief was just a few weeks away, I was looking forward to having it taken out.

From our research there were several methods used from “scooping” the cyst out, to using electricity to create heat or another method that we were familiar with that more-or-less “froze” the edges of the tumor separating it from its life-giving supply. With these last 2 methods, the body disposed of the cyst naturally over several months.

Ok.

All the methods were fairly non-invasive, and could be done on an outpatient basis.

Inside Chiang Mai Ram Hospital

Quick response from Chaing Mai Ram hospital (Chiang Mai, Thailand)

Meanwhile, while on the road in Japan, I wrote Chiang Mai Ram Hospital in Thailand via email, gave them my previous “Health ID Number” (we were previous patients in Chiang Mai Ram some years ago). I let them know I had a fibroadenoma and was looking for a procedure called Cryoablation.

But at any rate, I wanted to speak with a doctor and move forward with this situation.

In a flurry of emails over the next couple of hours the patient coordinator said they did not do cryoablation, but could set me up with a doctor nonetheless and we could go from there.

We were thrilled to have such quick responses and everything seemed to be falling into place nicely. We felt hopeful about all of this, and made an appointment for the day after we were to arrive in Chiang Mai, which was June 13th.

Continuing on with our travels

For those of you who are unfamiliar with our story, we have been world travelers all of our lives. To choose medical tourism to fulfill our medical needs has not been a problem over these many decades. 

We have had everything from colonoscopies, dental surgery, eye care, and even emergencies – like when I de-gloved my finger - taken care of outside our home country and receiving excellent care. 

So, we continued to enjoy our first visit to Japan, even though the pain subsisted. We had read that having cysts could hurt, but generally, cancerous tumors didn’t. That was somewhat of a comfort to our worried minds.

Billy and I continued to have discussions about what could be happening, and while we weren’t clear what might await us on the horizon, we flew into Thailand with confidence.

Retire Early Lifestyle appeals to a different kind of person – the person who prizes their independence, values their time, and who doesn’t want to mindlessly follow the crowd.

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