By Gila Pfeffer
I was eighteen when my 40-year-old mother found the lump. The tumor was 8 cm, a size that made me wonder how she hadn’t caught it sooner, given that her own mother had died of the disease at forty-nine. She reluctantly underwent chemotherapy, which shrank the tumor, and her medical team urged her to have a mastectomy. She refused. They warned her that she had a small window of time before the cancer inevitably returned. My mother, even in a pre-internet era, managed to track down all manner of dubious detoxifiers and remedies that she chose over her doctor’s orders. I was horrified.
As the pragmatic oldest child of five — my youngest sister only two years old — I knew it would fall on me to talk her off this deadly path. My father, drowning in work and medical bills, was too exhausted to fight with her.
“Mom!,” I begged, “I know surgery is scary, but please do it anyway. You can’t seriously believe those lotions and potions will help you; listen to your doctors!”
“Sweetheart, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been reading up on this,” she answered, her bony hand gesturing to a pile of brightly colored pamphlets on our kitchen table.
She was fully committed to an alternative cure. Here’s a partial list of what she prescribed herself:
- A detox foot soak, which required her to sit on an upturned bucket with her feet in some purple dye.
- Homeopathic pellets with names like Nux Vomica and Pulsatilla, which she placed under her tongue to dissolve.
- Shark cartilage in capsule form — based on the long-debunked myth that because sharks don’t get cancer, consuming their cartilage would prevent it in humans.
None of it worked. Her cancer returned with a vengeance, metastasizing via her lymph nodes. Eight months later, she finally underwent a mastectomy. It was eight months too late.
A recent watch of Netflix’s limited series Apple Cider Vinegar yanked me back to that terrible period in my life more than three decades ago. The series focuses on wellness influencers who peddle the dangerous idea that the body can heal itself without traditional medicine and that late-stage cancer can be cured through natural remedies. Based on real-life events, it critiques the profitable, largely unregulated wellness industry and the damage it can cause. But for me, the most heartbreaking storyline wasn’t about con artists — it was about the irrational hope and magical thinking of the terminally ill. It reminded me of my mom.
When Milla, a bright, talented 22-year-old, is told that the only way to prevent her epithelioid carcinoma from killing her is to amputate her arm, she refuses, much to her father’s horror. Desperate to avoid disfigurement, she buys into a rigorous holistic treatment plan of daily coffee enemas and hourly ‘juicing.’ For a while, she looks and feels healthy. She becomes a wellness guru, offering hope to hordes of terminally ill people who follow her blog and attend her group meditation exercises. Ignoring clear signs of her disease’s return, Milla convinces her mother to follow the same regimen when she is diagnosed with late-stage bowel cancer. It doesn’t end well for either of them.
Despite the show’s themes and the subtle clues that Milla is living on borrowed time, I found myself irrationally hopeful, willing those green juices and godawful enemas to work. At a young age, I had seen through the false promises of the snake oils and tinctures my mother turned to, yet here I was, praying for a miracle on my TV screen.
It was even more confusing given my own path. Fifteen years after my mother died, I elected to have a risk-reducing double mastectomy. Losing her at twenty left me hypervigilant. With a strong family history and a BRCA1 mutation, I had taken the opposite approach to protecting myself. When my surgery revealed two early but aggressive tumors already growing, everyone agreed I’d saved my own life. My doctors advised preventative chemo, but I asked if I could skip it. The tumors were gone, after all.
“You could opt out and probably be fine,” my oncologist said. “But given your age, family history, and genetic predisposition, why take chances?”
For a fleeting moment, I indulged in the fantasy of walking out of her office and saying so long forever. But I couldn’t fantasize my cancer risk away. I was a wife and a mom of four little kids. My husband and I agreed that probably wasn’t good enough. Weeks later, I was in that chemo chair for the first of eight rounds.
So, believe me when I say I could genuinely relate to the sick in Apple Cider Vinegar who imagined they could be spared the harshness of chemical cancer treatment.
The show’s central character, Belle Gibson, is based on the real-life Australian woman who faked terminal brain cancer to sell a wellness app and cookbook. Belle, a young, shrewd grifter from a broken home, is desperate for attention and financial success. I might have felt sorry for her, even respected her hustle as a struggling single mom. But her influence over truly sick, desperate people enraged me. It also broke my heart.
Belle’s vibrant images of healthful food captivate Lucy Guthrie, a woman with stage 3B breast cancer, who follows her every move on social media while enduring grueling chemotherapy. Lucy takes a risky break from her treatment, believing Belle’s claims that clean eating and exercise alone can cure her. She represents what so many cancer patients experience: the loss of control, the terrifying initiation into the realm of the sick. It’s no wonder she, like my mother, like so many others, desperately wants to believe that there’s a way to treat cancer without nausea, hair loss, and pain. Hope, even when misguided, is evidence of the will to live.
One moment from my mother’s ordeal lives clear and sharp in my memory. In her final months, when chemo and disease had rendered her unrecognizable, she found one more miracle cure, daring my father and me to be disbelievers after watching a videotape she’d acquired. We sat on our sagging den couch, watching grainy footage of a sickly man hooked up to an HVAC duct attached to a sci-fi metal contraption. His torso jerked in and out as the machine made loud suction noises. Finally, beige, fatty blobs plopped into a bucket while a voiceover explained that this was the cancer being sucked out of the patient’s body. I glanced at my mother and saw her sunken, rheumy eyes fixed on the screen and knew she was picturing herself being saved by that machine. It was painful to watch.
Even if she’d been well enough to travel, which she wasn’t, we couldn’t afford the airfare to Russia where the ‘miracle’ device supposedly lived.
Thirty years ago, I couldn’t understand how my mother, a woman who was smart and loving, could be so reckless and naive. Watching Apple Cider Vinegar, I finally saw what I’d missed back then. My mother’s magical thinking wasn’t just desperation — it was hope. Hope that she could escape the fate that took her mother. Hope that she could continue to be our mother. Hope that she could survive without pain and suffering. Her hope proved deadly, but it was remarkable nonetheless.
Gila Pfeffer is a humorist, breast cancer prevention advocate, and public speaker. Her recent memoir NEARLY DEPARTED: Adventures in Loss, Cancer and Other Inconveniences has been described as heartbreakingly hilarious and lifesaving. You can follow her monthly FEEL IT ON THE FIRST campaign on Instagram.