Everyone Told Her to Rest. She Drove to Zion Instead.
Episode #49
Larissa Noto was in a glass elevator in Las Vegas when her oncologist called. He wanted her in for a scan the next week. She told him no problem, she was already in Vegas. His whole voice changed.
Two weeks earlier she had finished chemo for HER2-positive breast cancer. The next morning she hiked Zion National Park. Then she hiked four more trails in Oregon, because resting was never the plan. As she put it, she had been resting through the entire stretch of treatment. By the end she was ready to go.
I did not flinch when she told me because I had done the same thing. E-bike six weeks after my mastectomy. Wakeboarding at three months. Weights all the way through chemo. The people who love us tell us to slow down, and they mean it kindly, and they are usually the reason we hesitate.
The instinct to move is more medical than the instinct to rest.
I never had the science to prove that. I just moved and trusted it. It turns out the research has been sitting there for decades, in journals oncologists were not reading.
In Episode 7, I sat down with Dr. Jay Harness, who spent his whole career cutting out breast cancer before he found it. What he discovered changed how I hear every “take it easy” a patient gets handed.
Behind the Paywall
In the full piece for subscribers, I get into what that research actually says, including:
The trial that earned a standing ovation at the world’s biggest oncology conference last year.
The line between brave and reckless that most people put in the wrong place.
Larissa did not ignore her doctor. She did something harder and smarter than that.
If you are in treatment, just out of it, or loving someone who is, this conversation is worth thirty minutes. Larissa is a yoga and mindfulness teacher who walked away from corporate law, and she talks about anger, fear, and the wall of wigs her three sons named like a woman who has decided exactly how to tell her story.
🎧 [Listen to the full episode here.]
Subscribers get the research, the citations, and the one question I think every patient should ask their oncologist.