Cancer is still in my Liver and Lungs and news that treatment is possibly becoming less effective is a bitter pill to swallow (Pun intended).
My body has been ravaged with infection after infection, some more serious than others. Pneumonia, Sepsis, Acute Cholecystitis, Covid the list of bugs trying to take me down has been endless. It's been a tough year for me and my family.
I got through the infections only to be slapped in the face by my cancer! The overall prognosis didn’t look good. All the infections and complications had delayed my treatment. I had only had a few bits of chemo here and there and it wasn’t enough to control it. The cancer had shifted into high gear again and was now starting to grow like fucking bindweed. It had begun to block my bile duct within my liver again, I was going yellow and was able to do quite a good Homer Simpson impression.
Not looking good! I got myself back into hospital over in Portsmouth where the decision was made to carry out an ERCP to unblock and re- stent my bile duct open. My bile duct has already been stented 3 times, my duct is now basically a plastic pipe with a biological sleeve, all very weird! However, those stents are stopping invading cancer from ending my game.
Thankfully, the doctors were happy that another stent would help me get a bit further before I have to face the end level.
To this point I had so many setbacks I started to feel numb. It's as if I was just floating along with the decisions that the doctors were making. I wasn’t looking after myself, and I had started to feel what I can only describe as depression. I had not faced this kind of low before and I started to accept that cancer may be something that I can't get through!
It has taken a lot of talking with the missus, and I'm not ashamed to say some crying was needed to re-focus my thoughts in a positive direction.
After much yoga, incense burning, tree-hugging, daisy chains and willing god not to throw me on the scrap heap. I had started to recover, the yellowing had started to subside. My Oncologist at QA Hospital Portsmouth was not giving up and I had to find a different strategy to fight this shit. So my cancer was still inoperable, still 3 little buggers in my liver and a couple of small nodules in my right lung?
Ok, how do I fight this from a different angle? There must be a way to get back at this stuff. Then in the post arrived a book sent to me by my Mum. She informed me that she had read it and it could be of great help to me. The book is called How To Starve Cancer by Jane Mclelland. I was thinking it was one of those fady diet books that advise you to eat Atlantic seaberries or Mongolian mountain plants. Turns out some of it is a bit like that but my god what a breath of fresh air the rest of the book was. Science! At last, someone who had researched and applied genuine medical science to their treatment routine.
I love a bit of science and learning about how cancer operates at a cellular level has been morbidly fascinating. Jane’s book is all about looking into the metabolic uptake of cancer. Essentially Jane’s method was to stave the cancer of the nutrients it needs to survive while still having regular treatment. Most Oncologists just take the genetic approach to treatment with cancer. They almost believe that the metabolism is voodoo. Jane Mclelland was stage 4 and had survived to tell the tale so in my mind it makes sense.
It has given me another angle and hope that I can start to control what's going on inside my body. I'm now more determined than ever to find a cure and have put myself into research mode reading tons of medical studies and clinical trial results to help find that chink in the armour.
Cancer is a complex beast but if you can starve it of the nutrients it needs to survive, like anything that can't eat, it dies. It makes sense to me and I have since seen that many thousands of other people around the world are too adopting a multi-angled approach to curing their cancers. I Have drastically changed my diet, little to no sugar, Low sat fats and no red meats. I'm taking lots of natural supplements that have been proven to block receptors and pathways that cancer uses to feed itself.
I now have 4 rounds of chemotherapy and a rescan in September. We will find out if this combined metabolic approach works as it has for many others. My oncologist has been very open to the idea of me taking this route and we hope we can get the cancer to shrink again.
Big Love x
