how to starve cancer

Introduction
I was supposed to die. That’s what my doctors expected in
1999 when they broke the news that my cervical cancer
had spread to my lungs. It was stage IV. There is no stage V.
The statistics gave me approximately twelve weeks to live.
Few things are as motivating as the spectre of certain and
imminent death. No way was I ready to shuffle off this
planet. I was young, only thirty-five years old. I was in love.
I desperately wanted to have children. I had professional
ambitions. I could not accept that there was no treatment
other than the conventional chemotherapy and radiation. I
refused to accept that I had no future.
Determined to find a cure, I threw myself into research. I
was sure that the medical profession was missing
something. As a Chartered Physiotherapist, I had a
scientific background that enabled me to dig up and
assimilate information quickly. Cancer, I realised, behaves
just like a parasite. The cancer cells in my body were
stealing nutrients, blood and immunity from me and using
them as weapons against me. Parasites thrive and
reproduce unabated until they either exhaust their food
source or kill their host. With cancer, it’s usually the latter.
But how could I starve cancer of these nutrients without
starving myself? This was the question I set out to answer,
using myself as a guinea pig. To my knowledge, no-one had
done this before. No-one had yet come up with a
constellation of therapies, using safe old drugs and natural
compounds that would attack the abnormal cancer
metabolism as well as the genetics, i.e. attack the cells
from every direction.
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Cancer, I have learned, has several food sources: glucose,
glutamine, fatty acids and ketones. It also uses saturated
fat to travel around the body. I knew I would have to starve
my cancer cells of all of these if I were to kill them off,
especially at an advanced stage of the disease. I would
need a large arsenal of weapons. But they would have to do
minimal harm to me.
I began a cancer-starving diet, eliminating sugar and other
foods that cancer loves to feed on. When that was not
enough, I added powerful supplements. Ultimately, it was a
combination of common old drugs uncommonly used, the
diet and supplements that forced my cancer cells to melt
away. When I used all of these weapons together they
worked synergistically, their anti-cancer effects were
heightened. Boom! My cancer slunk off into remission.
Since 2004 it has not come back.
At long last the concept of ‘starving cancer’ has become the
hot new frontier of cancer research, validating my longheld theories. Several studies have demonstrated the
effectiveness of cancer-starving diets. In 2015, I was
absolutely thrilled to discover that a clinic in London had
begun studying a combination of drugs nearly identical
with the cocktail I invented. And their results are
impressive. A clinic in Istanbul is also using a combination
of methods to starve cancer, again with outstanding results.
Pharmaceutical companies are now falling over themselves
to develop metabolic drugs to attack cancer.
But solutions exist already, and cost only pennies a day. The
medications I took are widely prescribed for other medical
conditions. They include metformin, commonly prescribed
for diabetes; statins, often used to treat high cholesterol;
dipyridamole, given to stroke patients; and an antiinflammatory drug (aspirin then later etodolac). And in
2007 for three months I took a drug called cimetidine,
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available over the counter in many countries for stomach
ulcers, but I took it for its immune-enhancing effects.
Taking my drug cocktail for just a few months was enough
to halt my cancer in its attempts to take over my body.
All these medications are cheap and off-patent, which is
why they have largely been ignored by the pharmaceutical
industry, despite research supporting their effectiveness
against cancer. Pharmaceutical companies are all too often
more interested in making money than in curing people.
Remember the 1980s, when a diagnosis with HIV was a
death sentence? Now, most HIV infections can be
controlled with a cocktail of drugs. HIV-positive people can
lead healthy lives and have near-normal lifespans. This, I
believe, could also be the future of cancer.
A fundamental transformation in oncology is long overdue.
The number of people to be diagnosed with cancer is
predicted to rise 70 per cent by 2030. A new approach is
desperately needed if we are to halt this increasingly tragic
situation which is set to be a bumper time for the
pharmaceutical industry. We are mostly living longer, but
not more healthily. This has to change. Taking personal
responsibility for our own wellbeing is a necessity.
There are now several trials under way, using old forgotten
medications to treat a range of cancers. Sadly, most test
only one drug at a time alongside the orthodox treatments,
so progress is painfully slow. The elusive cancer stem cells
(the initiating cells untouched by chemotherapy and
radiotherapy) can be reached and obliterated with many of
these medications. This means that in combination with
other treatments – given at less toxic doses – they offer the
exciting possibility of turning cancer into a long-term
chronic disease or permanent remission (i.e. a cure!).
This is the story of how I beat all the odds and forged a
unique path, somewhere between complementary and
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orthodox medicine, not only ridding myself of cancer but
regaining vibrant health on the way. On my journey I
discovered some simple truths that ultimately led to my
approach to beating cancer; starve it, stop it spreading,
then snuff it out.
I stubbornly clung to life like a Yorkshire terrier refusing to
let go of an old shoe, grrrr, and I want to show you how you
can dig your teeth in too. If you have been told that nothing
more can be done, I am here to let you know that this is
almost certainly not true.
Wishing you a healthy, happy and ‘revolting’ life.
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Ten Steps to Starving Cancer First,
the background…
In 1924 Otto Warburg discovered that all cancer cells have
an altered metabolism – he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physiology for this discovery in 1931. The way cancer cells
use nutrients for energy has regressed. He noted that the
mitochondria (the powerhouses) in the malignant cells stop
functioning correctly and the energy is made in the cell
cytoplasm, reverting to how the cell worked when the
atmosphere was anaerobic or lacking in oxygen. Warburg
was in fact only partly right. The cancer cell can also
upregulate other pathways to maintain its energy needs,
including the normal oxidative phosphorylation pathway.
This abnormal metabolism needs huge amounts of glucose
and glutamine (an amino acid) and there is also an increase
in lipid (fat) metabolism. Unbelievable as it sounds, it took
until 2011 for researchers to recognise this and
acknowledge the Warburg Effect as a hallmark of cancer.
Worse still, the somatic (gene) theory is still accepted by
the medical profession as the only driver of cancer. On the
other hand, integrative doctors have never forgotten
Warburg.
In the 1950s the field of oncology emerged with the use of
chemotherapy and radiotherapy that targeted the cell’s
gene and the cell cycle. This genetic approach was further
boosted when it was discovered in the 1960s that the p53
gene was implicated in many cancers. What was not
acknowledged was the p53 affected the metabolism,
increasing glycolysis (the breakdown of sugar for energy)
and glutaminolysis (the breakdown of glutamine for
energy) as do many of the main genetic mutations (e.g.
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BRAF, c-MYC). These metabolic changes trigger further
mutagenic changes.
Cancer comprises a genetic component, a metabolic
component and abnormal cell signalling. Currently,
mainstream oncology treats only the genetic component, it
focuses merely on the abnormal cell division and mutated
genetic targets, although there have been recently
approved drugs to target the immune check points with a
small degree of short-term success.
What is less understood is that treating the metabolism
combined with these genetic approaches will enhance any
other cancer therapy, often reversing ‘drug resistance’, a
common phenomenon where the genes have mutated and
become resistant to chemotherapy or immunotherapy.
Research into the cell nucleus, the double helix of DNA
(seen as the ‘code of life’) and decoding the genome
through the Human Genome Atlas Project was meant to
reveal all the answers. Instead, what was discovered was a
random mess. There was no genetic answer to cancer. But
the altered metabolism, the increased uptake of glucose
and/or glutamine was found to be common to all cancers.
Starving cancer is now the ‘hot’ area of research and drug
discovery, even though cheap, off-patent and highly
effective solutions exist already. I discovered these on my
own between 1999 and 2003, with no assistance from the
medical field. They were simply never suggested to me.
Instead I had to persuade several medics, complementary
and orthodox, to prescribe them.
As the drugs I discovered are off-patent, there is no
financial incentive for large pharmaceutical companies to
explore them and they continue to be ignored. There is
even an attempt to suppress these old drugs because they
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represent a financial threat to these major corporations and
big cancer charities.
With the advent of better detection methods (MRI, PET
scans) that showed chemotherapy and radiotherapy
shrinking tumours quickly, the mainstream continues to be
sold on the somatic theory. It’s a rash decision, fed by panic
and the hunger for quick results. In the mad dash to get rid
of a tumour, the patient is over-treated with high levels of
either chemotherapy, radiotherapy or targeted therapies.
This approach is doomed to fail – it only makes the patient
more resistant to future treatment. Focusing on the DNA
does not affect the cancer ‘stem cell’. Cancer returns
harder and more aggressively than before. The cancer
mutates and eventually becomes resistant to these
‘targeted’ treatments.
Treating the cancer metabolism, on the other hand,
alongside targeted approaches, will reach the stem cell and
offer the real opportunity for a cure. But these treatments
are much slower, taking many months. The patient and the
oncologist will both need patience.

By the 1970s two distinct camps emerged, alternative and
conventional. The war between the two has gradually
escalated, each camp saying the other is wrong. Now it’s at
fever pitch, leaving the poor patient in the middle. Who
should they listen to and what should they do? All the
patient wants is to get better. It is confusing and
frightening.
Indeed, neither approach is ideal. Patients are regularly
over-treated and poisoned with too much chemotherapy.
Furthermore, used on their own, recommended diets
seldom work unless they are very extreme and most
patients struggle to follow these.
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What I discovered was the whole is greater than a sum of
its parts. In other words, that to combine metabolic and
genetic approaches more than doubles the effectiveness of
each. They work in synergy, magnifying each other’s
effects.
So, when you or a loved one are diagnosed with cancer,
what should you do? First and foremost, arm yourself with
knowledge. Seek the community and the solidarity you
need not only to overcome the cancer but to thrive. And
remember, no matter what you’re told by conventional
medicine, there is so much more that can be done.

Join my revolution
My Facebook group ‘Jane McLelland Off Label Drugs For
Cancer’ (catchy title!) has lots of chat and discussion about
various off label drugs. I encourage scientific and peerreviewed articles and of course stories of personal
experience are always inspiring!
www.facebook.com/groups/off.label.drugsforcancer
Also visit and sign up for email updates on
www.howtostarvecancer.com . Personal data will never be
shared.
Attend the Care Oncology Clinic
This ground-breaking clinic has now treated over a
thousand patients with its off label drug combination of
metformin, atorvastatin, doxycycline and mebendazole. All
these drugs, their benefits and the ones I used are
discussed both in this book and on my web pages.
Partner with an Integrative or Functional Medicine
Practitioner You should immediately bring
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complementary therapy into your treatment. The
right practitioner can check your micro-nutrient
status, work on gut issues (leaky gut, dysbiosis),
recommend supplements and intravenous vitamin C
or other treatments if necessary.
Partner with a nutritionist
You should find a nutritionist experienced with intermittent
fasting, ketogenic, low glycaemic, macrobiotic or reducedprotein (e.g. the Paleo Diet). He or she should tailor your
nutrient intake to your personal requirements, ensuring
that the diet is neither unnecessarily complex or extreme
as the drugs help this. Although there are no trained
oncology nutritionists at the moment, your own knowledge
of what fuel your cancer prefers (the glutamine: glucose:
lipid ratio) will guide food choices and help you starve your
cancer. For instance, virtually all cancers respond to a
reduced glucose intake, glutamine-fuelled cancers require
a lower protein intake and fat-driven cancers (e.g. prostate,
melanoma) need to avoid ketogenic diets. Reducing
saturated fat is also important for every type of cancer.
Educate your oncologist
Go to www.howtostarvecancer.com or my Facebook group,
download the relevant articles and show them to your
oncologist. It is vital to keep your oncologist on side.
Emphasise that you want to combine genetic approaches
with metabolic approaches. You need a collaborator not a
dictator! Sadly most oncologists currently do not agree
with a combination approach, for a myriad of reasons. Find
one that does (see my websitewww.howtostarvecancer.com
for an up-to-date list – oncologists who initially resist may
eventually be won over).
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Exercise
Recent research by the diabetic community shows that
appropriate exercise can dramatically enhance cancer
therapy. The secret may not be how much, but when you
take your exercise. Fifteen to twenty minutes after eating,
a brisk walk pulls out glucose from the blood and redirects
it to the muscles. This effectively starves the cancer-cell
micro-environment.
Monitor your blood glucoseand
blood markers
You need to track your blood glucose to find out how well
you metabolise carbohydrates, just as diabetic patients are
told to do. Have your antigen markers taken and make sure
you track them.
Sleep and de-stress
The right amount of sleep at the right time, together with
lowering stress, will improve immunity while also reducing
cortisol and insulin resistance. Yoga, meditation, exercise,
even beta-blockers such as propranolol (which is a very
effective cancer-growth blocker) can all help improve your
chances of beating cancer.
Keep hydrated
Good hydration levels are important to lower the glucose
concentration of the blood. Raised salt levels change the
osmotic potential of your blood, encouraging the growth of
pathogens. This creates inflammation around the cancer
cell (the ‘terrain’) and inflammation drives cancer growth.
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Don’t give up Continue with a good low-glycaemic
diet, the supplements and the off label drugs
incorporating lots of olive oil (a safe fat, despite its
omega-6 content). Avoid alcohol until the cancer is
under control and markers are stable and normal;
then one unit of either wine or a spirit (not beer) may
be permitted per week with vigilance. Be strict about
avoiding smoke and carcinogens, especially those
that affect your hormonal balance. It is imperative
that you monitor your blood glucose and track your
triglyceride levels. Specific supplements, exercise
and drugs will keep insulin and glucose levels low. It
is possible to live with cancer, though you may need
to develop a long-term approach (like living with
diabetes).
The major barrier to achieving the above ten steps is that
your cancer diagnosis must come from an oncologist and
most are currently not supportive of the combined
metabolic and genetic approach. I have witnessed some
oncologists sabotaging results when the patient is showing
healthy improvement, by increasing the dose of
chemotherapy, effectively killing the patient. Some refuse
traditional treatment altogether if the patient includes off
label drugs in their treatment programme. Or the
oncologist suggests a trial where the inclusion criteria
means the patient must stop all metabolic drugs. I have
witnessed many patients with rampant disease stabilise on
the Care Oncology Clinic drugs, then be forced off them for
a trial and deteriorate rapidly. Combination treatments
work. When the data are released from the Care Oncology
Clinic, they will show success at an unprecedented level.
Until the metabolic approach is accepted as standard of
care, arm yourself with knowledge and seek the help you
need. Yes, it’s a tough road, but like me, you too can make
it.
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It is my aim to inspire you with my story and my discoveries
and to convince you that there truly is more hope than you
may think.
Take action. Do not be passive. Doing nothing is not
an option.
Starve your cancer. Stop it spreading. Snuff it out.
Hello brand-new you.
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‘It is in the nature of revolution, the overturning of an
existing order, that at its inception a very small number of
people are involved.
The process, in fact, begins with one person and an idea, an
idea that persuades a second, then a third and a fourth, and
gathers force until the idea is successfully contradicted,
absorbed into conventional wisdom, or actually turns the
world upside down.
A revolution requires not only ammunition, but also
weapons and men willing to use them and willing to be slain
in the battle.
In an intellectual revolution, there must be ideas and
advocates willing to challenge an entire profession, the
establishment itself,willing tospendtheir reputationsand
careers in spreading the idea through deeds as well as
words.’
Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works, Touchstone Books1978
Join my revolution. Spread the word.
Research articles, podcasts, interviews, blogs from
survivors will be on my website
www.howtostarvecancer.com
Lively discussions, peer-reviewed medical articles to
download, inspirational patients (my Facebook family)
www.facebook.com/groups/off.label.drugsforcancer
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Part One
The Discovery of My
Metabolic Protocol
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Chapter One:
Maracas
‘Come on, wake up!’ I heard the words faintly as I tried to
open my eyes. I had had another fractious night, taunted by
nightmares. Just as I had finally fallen into a deep sleep,
someone was nudging me awake.
‘It’s 6 o’clock. You need to get up. We have to get down to
the coast by 8.’ My husband Andrew gave me another
affectionate prod.
‘Okay, I’m moving,’ I lied. Then I remembered why I had to
get up. I was going racing! I grinned in the dark. Excited
but still groggy, I pulled the covers off and headed to the
bathroom.
The last time I had sailed with the team – in a reckless
attempt to lead a ‘normal’ life – I hadn’t yet finished my six
months of chemotherapy. I had not been fit enough. During
the first race I had very nearly thrown up all over the
spinnaker and my arms had felt like lead while I packed it
into a sail bag down below. I hoped I would feel better this
time. I desperately needed to feel better.
Nine months earlier, in the summer of 1999, I had been
diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Nearly five years after the
primary cancer was diagnosed in my cervix, it had spread
to my lungs. My illness and the relentless rounds of
chemotherapy had led to my spending the winter
hibernating, struggling to get through each day. Now I was
emerging with the spring, making a conscious effort to
fight the exhaustion that drained my strength. I had
decided that a bit of exercise might fight the fatigue away.
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Grabbing my ziplock bags of supplements from the kitchen,
all botanical extracts apart from a low-dose aspirin, I
headed for the door, stuffing them deep into a pocket out of
sight. Andrew was waiting at the wheel of the car and I slid
gratefully into the passenger seat. It takes an hour and a
half to drive to Lymington. Perhaps I could catch a few
more zeds on the way.
Trying to swallow supplements while on chemotherapy had
been difficult. I had ignored my oncologist’s advice not to
take anything at all and had done my own research. Some
supplements, like EGCG from green tea and curcumin
found in turmeric, enhanced chemotherapy. Now that I had
finished those dreadful infusions, the number of
supplements I was taking had skyrocketed. I wanted all the
help I could get. And they might just make the difference.
When we arrived, the crew were gathered on the dock. My
friend Louay was carrying an armful of t-shirts. Everyone in
the twelve-strong team was handed one with his or her
crew nickname on the back.
My husband opened his, emblazoned with his nickname
‘SPOTTER’. With his boat-nerd ability, he can instantly tell
from a distance the make, model and engine size of any
boat, as well as who built her, when, and how well (yawn). I
giggled and wondered nervously what Louay had in store
for me.
‘Jane, this one’s for you,’ he said with a grin. As I turned
the shirt over, I saw it: ‘MARACAS’. I laughed. ‘Damn it! I
thought you hadn’t noticed all the pills!’
Louay looked at me incredulously. ‘You have to be joking.
We’ve all seen those little ziplock packets you take
everywhere. And that green muck you drink? If you were
trying to hide it, you failed miserably.’
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Bother. I hadn’t been quite as discreet as I thought. These
pills and the green drink – what I liked to call my
‘primordial soup’ – were my lifeline. I had wanted to keep
my illness a secret, a private nightmare. It was unfair to
drag anyone else into it. I was terrified about my future,
which, if I listened to the medics, would be extremely short.
But how ridiculous to think I could hide anything from
twelve crewmates on a 48-foot boat! There were no secrets,
no matter how hard I tried.
Mixing up the daily drink – spirulina, chlorella, and all
manner of pulverised shrubbery – and organising daily
sachets of supplements took some time. But it was a small
price to pay for getting out of the house and living a bit. It
was surviving. Please God, I silently prayed, don’t let this
be my life forever. It was so hard to stay upbeat and
positive with all the uncertainty.
I hated drawing attention to my problems. I couldn’t bear
the thought of my teammates treating me as an invalid, as
someone to be pitied. I wanted to continue to be Jane, their
rugged and quirky sailing buddy. I wanted them to joke
with me as they always did, not to ask anxiously how I was
feeling. I understand that some people are proud of their
chemotherapy baldness and lymphoedema stockings – their
surgery scars are badges of honour. Not me. I just couldn’t
see it that way. My mild right-leg lymphoedema, caused by
extensive surgery to remove my lymph nodes, remained
hidden under long skirts and trousers.
Fortunately, unless I pointed it out, most people didn’t even
notice. And when my hair fell out with all the chemo, I did
not wear a scarf or hat. Too obvious. I wanted to look as
normal as possible. Even though they were unbearably
itchy, I wore wigs partly because I wanted to deny even to
myself that anything was wrong and partly because even I
was shocked when I caught sight of my hair-free noggin in
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the bathroom mirror. It made me catch my breath. Even
after several months, the horror at my reflection hadn’t got
any easier.
As soon as my hair had started to drop out (in great big
handfuls), I had rushed out and bought some decent wigs in
Selfridges. I bought three at once, in three different styles.
When I wanted to feel glamorous, I could wear the long
wavy wig. Sporty? The bob. Everyday? The mid-length
straight hair. ‘Which wife would you like today?’ I would
ask Andrew as I got dressed in the morning. It certainly
confused the builders who were extending our attic at the
time when I came downstairs with short hair one day and
long hair the next.
I used the shortest wig for sailing because it was easier to
wedge on under my cap. Sailing was my passion. It was
helping me to keep my sanity when I was perilously close to
despair. Being so surrounded by a team of close buddies,
laughing at each other’s stories and competing in intense
racing was a help, even if only for the briefest time. The
activity and friendship took my mind off the pain,
disfigurement, and the loss of who I once was. And death. I
was desperate to believe that this was not my last season
racing on the boat.
While I was thoroughly exhausted by my treatments, I was
keen to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was
happening. It was business as usual. I forced myself to
carry on sailing, although on race mornings I wanted
nothing more than to dive back under the bedclothes. Once
out with the team, I insisted on throwing myself into the
action on board, despite some crewmates’ concerns that I
wasn’t up to it. With the benefit of hindsight, I realise that
this might have been selfish, slowing the team down. I was
taking much longer to get myself back up on the rail and to
keep the boat level.
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Upwind, I would be down below, packing the enormous
spinnaker, usually on my own. It can be awkward packing a
sail the size of a tennis court into a few feet of space,
especially when the boat is constantly changing direction,
keeling over at a 45-degree angle. It was exhausting even if
you weren’t poorly – particularly if it had got wet. When we
reached the top mark and turned the boat to run
downwind, I was the ‘trimmer’, constantly checking the set
of the spinnaker, ensuring that we were sailing as fast as
possible.
I loved the feeling of exertion, the wind on my face, the
ozone, and the sting of the spray as the boat cut through
the water in a gentle sway. It soothed my worries, this
game of chess on the water, working out the shifting wind
directions and the tides. Tactics and strategy were more
Andrew’s field, but all of us on board needed to be aware of
where we were and what we needed to do to get ahead and
stay there – and to prepare for sudden manoeuvres.
Sailing has been in my blood for generations. My father
owned a succession of boats in Guernsey, where I grew up.
Sailing on a little 26-foot yacht with my elder sister Suzie
was one of my earliest memories. We mostly cruised around
the other Channel Islands, especially Herm and Sark, but
some summers we nipped over to Saint-Malo in Brittany, on
the north-western coastline of France. It was a heavenly
childhood, one I associated with sparkling seas and
stunning island beaches.
Even amidst the frantic activity during a race, there would
be moments of quiet and calm, with just the soothing sound
of the waves as a backdrop. I would often become lost in
thought, trying to recapture that long-lost stress-free
feeling of pure bliss from my youth. It was gratitude tinged
with sadness that my love of sailing, the sea and of life
itself might soon come to an untimely end.
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In my teens I had been desperate to take a more active part
in yacht racing. Sailing with my father was immensely
frustrating because he was very old-fashioned and never let
me touch any winches or ropes (I was a girl, after all).
Eventually I gave up, worked during the holidays, saved up
and bought myself a windsurfer instead. I loved the
challenge of learning this new skill and I became a total
surfing bum, never off the beach in the summer. But the
competitive spirit inside me still wanted to race boats.
The opportunity came in the form of a lovely sailing boat
called Assuage (affectionately known as Sausage by our
opposition). Assuage was a 42-foot Swan, a boat known for
its solid yet streamlined design, the perfect marriage of
safe cruising and speed. She had come over to Guernsey to
compete in the Swan European Sailing Championships in
the early 1990s and she needed one more crew member. I
leapt at the opportunity. Once I was on board, they weren’t
getting rid of me!
Sailing on Assuage was brilliant fun. For years, my
weekends and holidays were taken up racing around the
south coast of England. I was also lucky enough to sail in
Antigua, Majorca and Sardinia and to compete in many
offshore races to France – even in the notorious Fastnet
Race. My uncle had drowned during that race in the great
storm of 1979, so I had always been reluctant to enter. By
the time I talked myself into it, our team had racked up an
impressive list of trophies. It was still a hobby, but a
complete contrast to my day job as a Chartered
Physiotherapist with the seriously ill.
I had initially worked in neurology. Much of my time was
spent rehabilitating people who had suffered head injuries
and strokes. I helped them relearn how to use their bodies,
to move their hands and legs. It had been physically
demanding. Later, I specialised in orthopaedics and sports
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injuries. Many high-level athletes became dependent on my
expertise.
Despite sailingwith Andrew for many years onAssuage , it
had taken us ages to get together. He hadn’t liked my
formerboyfriendandIhadn’tlikedhis former girlfriend, so
we had rarely socialised. We’d made some poor choices,
but eventually we both ditched our partners. A year later
we found ourselves snogging outside the Cherbourg Yacht
Club after a boozy day, celebrating a win after a rough
offshore race.
You might expect sailing to be a supremely healthy hobby,
but this is far from the whole truth. Sure, we got exercise
and fresh air. But we were also consuming copious
quantities of chocolate bars and quick carbs during the
races, then downing serious amounts of rum and Coke in
the evenings. The good was very much outweighed by the
bad. Our crew mantra was, ‘Eating is cheating’. Leaving
the bar to eat a proper meal was frowned upon. It now
makes me wince to even think about that. Clearly there
were more than a few significant errors in my lifestyle
choices. Looking back to my days as a physiotherapy
student, when I believe the cancer may have begun, I can
see that my diet was terrible. A good meal involved a pile of
mashed potato, melted cheese and bacon. Green
vegetables? What green vegetables? Idiot.
Now that I had terminal cancer, the fear of death that
haunted my every breath could be shaken off briefly in the
heat of the action. But then, with regular and hideous
force, the reality of my diagnosis came back and smacked
me full in the face. It was as if the Grim Reaper were
standing right behind me all the time, an ever-present
spectre, breathing down my neck, waiting for the right
moment to strike.
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When the team started to plan sailing events for the next
season, my first thought was, will I still be here then? It
made me immensely sad to think about the future, a future
in which the world would go on as before without me.
I now took my diet seriously. Gone were the so-called
‘energy snacks’ and the sugar-fuelled drinks. The crew got
used to my bringing odd snacks on board and never
questioned my low-carb choices. Sailing was more to me
than just a frivolous bit of fun. I could forgo all those
sugary foods easily. All I craved was just a little return to
my old life, and if that meant a complete change of diet and
knocking back a handful of supplements, that would be a
small price to pay.
So there I was, on that bright April day in 2000, less than a
year after my diagnosis of a secondary – and terminal –
cancer. Despite recently finishing chemotherapy, I still had
a PICC line in my arm that led all the way up a vein into my
chest. I had kept it in place for intravenous vitamin C
infusions. It was fully bandaged to avoid being damaged,
even so, this was not the best attire for a race! Wearing my
Maracas tee-shirt under layers of waterproofs, I left the
dock with my crewmates and headed out to the start line.
The sun was shining and the wind was a steady 15 to 18
knots. Breezy. Perfect.
On the first beat, we found ourselves pounding upwind in a
close tacking duel with another boat. A quick tack led to a
scramble from one side of the boat to the other. During a
tacking manoeuvre the crew has to get across the boat, in
windy conditions, as quickly as possible. This meant
ducking my head under the guardrails before rushing
across the deck to sit out over the rail on other side.
Squashed together, it was hard to get out from my position.
In my hurry, I misjudged the distance and felt the guardrail
scrape off my sailing cap. As if in slow motion, my hands
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reached out to grab it – but it was already swept away by
the wind, over the side of the boat, still attached to my wig.
‘Nooooo…,’ I cried, watching in dismay as they floated off
together down the Solent. ‘Bugger,’ I said, watching my
lovely locks disappearing like a drowning rat under the
waves.
Andrew was looking at me with an expression that implied
asking whether we should go back. Well, only for a
millisecond. We all wanted to win, and turning back would
have been disastrous. It was never an option. ‘Leave it!’ I
yelled.
Everyone else was staring at me, stunned. It was the first
time that anyone had seen me bald. The cold wind whipped
past my ears. Suddenly I felt vulnerable, exposed. I put my
hands to my scalp, trying to cover up its nakedness. I was
mortified. A crewmate saw my look of horror, took off his
own cap, and gave it to me without a second thought.
‘Well, get back on the rail! We have a race to win!’ he
shouted with a grin. How I loved him – and the whole team.
They didn’t care about my baldness or my illness. They
were still going to treat me as me. Indeed, we did have a
race to win. This wasn’t a jolly on the river with gin and
tonics! Moments later we were all back on the other rail,
roaring with laughter.
I have been called many things, but ‘Maracas’ was the
nickname that stuck during my many years of racingwith
Assuage . I rattled with pills as I took them several times a
day.It meantlots of complicated planning (and I am firstto
admit being organised is not my strongest suit!), but I
managed.
Looking back now at that long list of supplements, I can see
that it contained several mistakes; doublings up,
unnecessary items, and at times even cancer-promoting
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ones. I had started to fight back, but I had a great deal
more to learn. Rough winds and rocky waves were nothing
compared with the turbulent journey that lay ahead of me.
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Chapter Two:
A Spot of Bother
I was first struck with cancer in 1994. That makes it sound
like a sudden event, but it wasn’t. No cancer happens
overnight. For years I had been seeing a consultant for
abnormal cervical changes.
Cervical cancer is totally preventable and treatable if
caught early and given proper attention. I had trusted the
gynaecologist to do his job and I had naturally assumed
that he was treating me correctly. I had been given a
colposcopy a few years earlier in 1989 when a few mildly
abnormal cells had been found. After several return visits
to the hospital and years of repeatedly being told that there
were no more abnormalities to be seen, I thought my
worries were over and I assumed the problem had been
eradicated for good.
But I was wrong. A repeat smear performed at my local
doctor’s surgery had shown the problem had returned as
‘severe dyskariosis’, a sign that further treatment was
warranted.
However, the gynaecologist at the hospital had told me that
my biopsy, within the same four weeks, had shown no such
abnormalities. Surprised by this contradiction, I wondered
who I should trust, the GP’s results or the hospital’s? My
instinct was to trust the hospital and the specialist as a
biopsy was surely more reliable than a smear?
My GP told me that there were a few cases where abnormal
tissue reverts back to normal. ‘You might be one of the
lucky ones,’ he said. Perhaps I was. He asked if I wanted to
be referred to another hospital. But this South London
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hospital was a main teaching hospital. A relative had
trained as a doctor there. Surely it was one of the best? I
stayed put, little guessing the fate to which I was
consigning myself.
Like anyone diagnosed with a potentially serious illness, I
was desperate to believe that my body was capable of
healing itself. Was it possible that I had reversed the
abnormal changes on my own without any surgical
intervention?
I shudder when I think back to those visits to that South
London hospital. It was during my last visit that I became
suspicious of the specialist’s behaviour and his overly
casual, indifferent demeanour. Every time I saw him he
prescribed a progestin tablet for the symptoms of
‘spotting’, but I had no idea that this is a synthetic form of
progesterone which raised my risk of breast cancer, and
may have made the cervical cancer worse too. 1 Not only
that, it raised my risk of blood clots and cardiovascular
disease, so progestin may have poured fuel on the fire. The
specialist dished them out like candy.
Put simply, he wasn’t doing his job correctly, a fact that
would be confirmed four years later in 1998, when there
was a national recall of over a thousand of his patients. All
the women recalled already had moderate or severe
abnormalities detected by a standard smear test. They
were each sent a letter stating that there were ‘grave
concerns’ about the screening. Women given the ‘all clear’
were going on to develop cancer. I knew nothing of this at
the time but became increasingly concerned when repeated
visits over a year revealed worsening symptoms.
On my last visit I was begging him for a hysteroscopy, an
examination of the uterus that might tell me why I was
continuing to have spotting. He replied without even
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looking at me: ‘I’m booked up. You’ll have to wait until after
Christmas for that.’
Wow. Really? It was only September. I somehow doubted he
couldn’t fit me in between September and January. This
didn’t sound right.
‘But I’m losing weight. Believe me, it’s most welcome, but
it’s going from places I have never lost it before. I am
extremely worried. I simply must get this sorted out. It
hasn’t got any better.’
Because I had just started seeing Andrew, I had initially
convinced myself that it was the first flush of love causing
me to shed the pounds. But the pattern of weight loss was
different. I never lost weight from my inner thighs. The
supermodel ‘thigh-gap’ eluded me no matter how many
inner-thigh exercises I performed. And yet this normally
stubborn fat was disappearing before my eyes.
Without looking up, he went on, ‘You really are worrying
over nothing. I’m sure we can sort this out with more
progestin.’
‘But it isn’t helping!’ I protested.
Was the NHS in such a bad state that I had to wait until
next year? What if I did have cancer? I had already had
treatment for early cancerous cell changes and now I had
other classic symptoms, not only the unusual spotting that
was getting worse, but the weight loss. Surely this was
urgent?
He gave me a thin smile devoid of any hint of compassion.
‘Extra bleeding between periods is very common. But I will
make another outpatient appointment for you in two
months’ time.’
Two months’ time? For just another chat? This was totally
unacceptable.
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Years later, following the recall of his patients and an
ensuing enquiry, I was to learn that this doctor typically
biopsied only 64 per cent of his patients with cervical
changes, against a national minimum guideline of 90 per
cent. These women had come to his clinic with
abnormalities, all needing further investigations to rule out
cancer. A review of his colposcopies also found those to be
inadequate. Of the 64 per cent he did biopsy, far too little
tissue was excised to make a valid diagnosis. No wonder
my problem had returned. The enquiry was to find that as
many as nineteen women with advanced cancer were
misdiagnosed or incorrectly treated. And the rate of cancer
in his patients was 34 per cent above the average.
I knew nothing of this at the time, but a nasty thought
occurred to me. I wondered if there were doctors who
allowed cancer to progress on purpose. I blotted it out.
Surely not. Weren’t all doctors interested in getting
patients well? Didn’t they take the Hippocratic Oath? But
what if a doctor had made a serious mistake when treating
a patient, and instead of owning up to it and risk being
sued and losing their licence, they stuck their head in the
sand by persisting with inadequate treatment? Dead
patients don’t sue. Might there be doctors out there who
weren’t giving their patients the medical attention they
needed, knowing they had a life-limiting disease? I
dismissed the thought. I was being ridiculous.
But his apparent indifference to my pleas was enough for
me to decide to go private. I’d had enough. I knew there
was a problem and he was not taking it seriously enough.
My health was at stake.
I flew back to Guernsey with these grim thoughts and
worries nagging away at me, but I convinced myself he was
probably right. I was by nature a worrier and I was
panicking over nothing. The tests at the hospital so far had
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been clear, hadn’t they? But why had he not done any more
biopsies? What if he had biopsied the wrong area?
Incompetence would be easy for any gynaecologist to cover
up. Who would ever know? It was his word against the
patient’s. The courts always took the side of the expert.
I busied myself back at work in my clinic and made an
appointment with a private gynaecologist locally. This
problem needed to be sorted even though the gynaecologist
at the hospital had suggested it wasn’t anything to worry
about. Apart from anything else, I had a new boyfriend,
with whom the spotting was a bit of a passion killer to say
the least. It was embarrassing and inconvenient.
When the specialist in London learned that I had arranged
a private referral in Guernsey, he totally changed his tune.
In his referral letter, he insisted that treatment was urgent
and that a hysteroscopy should be performed immediately.
It was as if it had been written by a different person. He
had never said anything like that to me. He hadn’t even
given me a biopsy for nearly a year.
Why this sudden change? Although it was all highly
suspicious, I had little choice but to put my faith in the
system. What else could I do?
The hysteroscopy took place on a Thursday afternoon and I
remember waking up to find lots of medics peering over
me, looking concerned. I told myself that was probably
normal after anaesthetic.
The following day, Andrew flew over to visit me. I had the
weekend to forget all about it. I was sure by Monday the
results of the operation would reveal little more than minor
changes that might at the most need another colposcopy. I
had no reason to believe otherwise.
It was a beautiful crisp autumn evening as I waited in the
Arrivals hall for Andrew, an irrepressible grin on my face. I
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was sure he was the one for me. I was so looking forward
to spending the weekend with him, walking on the cliffs,
sailing on my Dad’s boat, going out and visiting friends.
The flights and phone bills between Guernsey and London
were costing us both a small fortune, but we didn’t care. It
was money well spent.
One of my former boyfriends had initially been charismatic
and charming. I had thought he was a keeper. But then he
began going out every evening and what started out as
verbal threats gradually became physical. He was always
very remorseful the next day and he would promise to
make it up. But things got worse.
I hate confrontation but I was not willing to let myself be
abused. I argued back, which only exacerbated the
situation. One evening, he told me never to leave, grabbed
me around the throat, and what happened next I will
describe as a ‘window incident’. Fortunately I was
unharmed, but shocked to the core. Never leave? I was
done . I packed my bags the next day and ran back to the
safety of my island home. I didn’t think my ex would dare
come and threaten me surrounded by my family.
Andrew, his polar opposite, was exactly what I needed. He
was calm and dependable, kind and thoughtful, not too badlooking and a top sailor to boot. It was an irresistible
combination. He had already talked about the longer term
and was making it clear he was keen. No arguments, no
violence – things were looking up.
After settling back in Guernsey, I had found myself a great
job in a private physiotherapy practice. It was a busy clinic
and I was earning good money. And Guernsey was
beautiful. A ten-minute drive after work would take me to
the marina, where I could leap into a boat and go out
sailing for the evening.
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But where would my relationship with Andrew lead me?
Would I have to give up my Guernsey paradise to live in
London? If we had kids, would I have to bring them up in
England or would he be prepared to live in Guernsey? I
turned it over in my mind as I paced around Arrivals. My
hopes and dreams, the two of us, building a future together.
And then there he was, running to give me a big warm hug.
‘Hi, darling,’ he said as I took his hand and led him to the
car. It was a short journey back to the rented house I
shared with another girl. On the way he tentatively asked
about my operation the day before.
‘I really don’t want to talk about it. Can we just forget
about it and go out for supper? There’s nothing I can do
about the result so let’s not give it a moment’s thought.’
But that was not to be. We pulled into the drive and as I
looked up at the house I saw my flatmate Carol-Ann
hurtling down the steps to meet me. Before I had even
stepped out of the car she blurted out, ‘Jane, your GP has
been looking for you! He was here half an hour ago.’
What? At 7 o’clock in the evening on a Friday? I looked at
Andrew with horror. We both knew that this was not a good
sign.
‘I have to phone him,’ I said, my voice trembling. I ran
upstairs, shut my bedroom door and dialled. My doctor was
insistent he had to come and see me. ‘No, please just tell
me now,’ I begged. ‘I know it’s bad news, otherwise you
wouldn’t have driven over. I can’t wait, I need to hear it.’
So reluctantly he told me. He had talked to the
gynaecologist who had just operated on me. I would need a
hysterectomy. It was cancer.
He said that they had already arranged an operation the
following Tuesday at Hammersmith Hospital. The surgeon
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had called in a favour with one of his friends in London to
get it done quickly. I wondered if they thought it must be
quite aggressive to have progressed so fast without anyone
noticing. Or had it been ignored? I was too overwhelmed by
the diagnosis to ask.
My head was spinning. I tried to compute his words, but it
felt as if I were overhearing a conversation with someone
else. This couldn’t be happening.
I put the phone down, stared at it for a minute and then I
began to sob uncontrollably. My world had imploded. I was
thirty. I had cancer. I hadn’t had children and now it
seemed I never would.
I must have stayed in my bedroom for over an hour. When I
finally came downstairs, I managed to stammer the one
word: ‘cancer’. They had already worked that one out. My
smeared make-up and puffy red eyes told the story. Andrew
hugged me and suggested we get some fresh air.
Wrapped in warm clothes, we drove to a coastal path and
sat in the moonlight on a bench overlooking the cliffs and
the sea. I was in shock. So was Andrew. This shiny, happy
new relationship was suddenly not so shiny. We had been
together for only two months. Would our fledgling
relationship survive this unexpected challenge? I was
deeply distressed by the diagnosis and what it meant to
both of us.
I was young. I would survive. I felt certain of it. Cervical
cancer if caught early was perfectly curable, I had been
told. Well, I could only hope it was still at that stage.
But I would never carry my own children. Perhapssomeone
could carry them for me? I had heard of surrogacy
arrangements. I would still have my ovaries. The subject of
death only briefly occurred to me. I had so many other
worries. How badly would the operation affect my sex life?
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Would I still be able to have my own biological children
using my eggs? I didn’t even want to discuss these things
with Andrew. I was too terrified that he would now turn his
back on the relationship. Already it felt like an invisible
curtain had come down between us. This diagnosis was
going to change everything.
Andrew was saying very little. I was unable to guess his
thoughts, too consumed with my own. He had not seen this
coming. He had no experience of dealing with such a
situation and felt completely out of his depth. If we had
been sailing and the mast had come down or the rudder
had fallen off, he would have been the first to know what to
do. But dealing with a distraught thirty-year-old about to
lose her womb to cancer?
While I was obsessing about my infertility, he was worrying
about how serious it might be. It was comforting that he
didn’t want to lose me. But I wondered if a self-protective
instinct was kicking in, keeping him from growing closer to
me. If he were shutting me out, my situation would be far
worse. A depressing sense of isolation began to descend on
me.
Only hours into my diagnosis, I was realising that cancer’s
effects extend far beyond physical illness. I tried reassuring
him that I didn’t feel as if I were dying, but I could see that
he was not convinced. A diagnosis of cancer means
different things to different people. Some take it far better
than others, but this diagnosis had implications for both of
us. It would ruin our sexual relationship, certainly in the
short term, and I had no idea about the long term.
The gynaecologist at the South London hospital had told
me only a few weeks earlier that there was nothing to
worry about. He had always reassured me that cervical
cancer grew very slowly. I had been proactive, having a
colposcopy and going for check-ups. So surely I must have
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caught it early enough? I ignored the niggling doubt in the
back of my mind that it might have been growing for years
and that perhaps he had failed to do his job properly all this
time.
As we sat there looking out to sea, I convinced myself
everything would somehow work out, that I would
eventually land on my feet, even if my plans had to be
altered. I could save my ovaries, perhaps have them frozen.
Then perhaps find a surrogate to carry my child. I had to
get through an enormous operation the following week, but
I was young. I would cope with this.
Death was not my immediate concern. It was having
children that mattered to me. A happy home filled with
kids’ laughter was what I had always dreamt of. Somehow,
no matter how difficult, I had to find a way to make that
dream come true.
The rest of the weekend passed in a different mood. We
cancelled plans to meet friends, but still went sailing.
Andrew and I made practical arrangements, but the
passion in our relationship had vanished. In its place was
fear and worry. My feelings ranged from disbelief and
anger to intense sadness and beyond. It all seemed so
unfair. Just when I thought I had found my ‘happily ever
after’.
I knew I had to break the news to my parents. They’d be
devastated, especially as they’d been concerned about the
way I had been treated at that South London hospital. I
couldn’t face telling them in person, so in the end I chose
to do it over the phone. I could tell that Mum was very
distressed, but she immediately offered to travel to London
with me on the Monday, to help me prepare for the
operation on Tuesday. Our relationship had at times been
difficult, as mother-daughter relationships can be, but I
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welcomed her support. I didn’t want to refuse her company
even though I knew it would be extremely hard for her.
Mum had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer a
couple of years earlier, but she had kept her treatment to
herself, telling us all it was just a ‘spot of bother’. We
weren’t very good at sharing our feelings, but I knew she
would be deeply traumatised by my diagnosis and my loss
of fertility. She was really hoping to become a granny and
was disappointed that I had kept on calling off
engagements (two to be precise). I never told her about the
‘window’ incident.
I had very basic knowledge about cancer, just what I’d been
taught as a physiotherapy student, but it seemed obvious
that the early decisions were crucial. Some doctors and
surgeons were better than others, too. I had already
learned this, at great cost. I worried that my choice could
determine whether or not I survived.
I was being pushed into surgery without any time to think
or to check my surgeon’s background. If you are diagnosed
with an aggressive and fast – growing cancer, it is
important to be able to make educated decisions fast, but I
was given no opportunity for spending time on research.
Was it so aggressive that I couldn’t wait a week? All the
urgency made me wonder just how bad it could be. All I
had was a basic computer but no Internet access in 1994. It
was impossible to explore ways of saving my ovaries or to
prepare for the extensive surgery.
When I arrived at the hospital on the following Monday, the
surgeon seemed nice enough. I had a long list of questions
for him, not least the subject of saving my ovaries. I was
desperate that they should be spared. I wanted to know
what would happen if the cancer was worse than everyone
thought.
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He told me that if the cancer had progressed to any lymph
nodes, I would need chemotherapy and radiotherapy. He
didn’t offer suggestions about saving my ovaries, but I
knew that those treatments, especially radiotherapy to the
pelvis, would put them at risk of shutting down. I asked if
he could perhaps freeze one of the ovaries if, when he
opened me up, he thought I might need further treatments.
He looked at me and nodded sagely. Was that a yes? I
assumed it was. He quickly moved on to the operation and
the risks.
The next day I woke up groggily after the seven-hour
operation. As soon as I saw the surgeon, I needed to find
out exactly what he had done. ‘Did you freeze my ovaries?’
was my first question. I was desperate for reassurance. It
was a shock to learn that no, he hadn’t. Perhaps he thought
the cancer wasn’t too bad. But when the histology results
came back, they showed that the cancer had spread to a
great many of my lymph nodes.
As he told me this, I was shaking with a mixture of fear,
fury and disappointment. There was no question that
chemotherapy and radiotherapy would follow, and these
would switch off my ovary function for ever. Why hadn’t he
frozen one of them as I’d requested? How could he have
just brushed this request aside?
As I lay there, I realised that all was not completely lost. I
had a window of a few weeks before the chemotherapy
started. I would see if I could still find a fertility specialist,
anyone to help me save my chance to become a mother.
Time was of the essence and it was ebbing away fast.
The operation had been huge, and two weeks went by
before I could even get myself discharged. While still an inpatient, my surgeon recommended that I see a well-known
fertility specialist on the ground floor of the Hammersmith
Hospital.
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My hopes were instantly dashed. He didn’t think anyone
would be able to find my ovaries and, in any case, he felt
surrogacy was too cruel and emotionally challenging for
the surrogate mother. I had taken my sister Suzie along,
and despite her noble offer of her own womb, the fertility
specialist told me quite bluntly that nothing could be done.
It was the harshness of his tone that was so shocking. I was
so distraught I could hardly walk out of his clinic. I
staggered back up to the ward, held up by Andrew and
Suzie, wracked with grief. My children were gone for ever
and I was powerless to get them back.
Infertility tortured me. Everywhere I looked, on the street
or on TV, I saw babies, children and happy families. Every
advert seemed to be about nappies or infant milk formula.
Unless I shut myself away from civilisation, I was
constantly confronted with my loss. There was no escape.
The pain of infertility hurt like a knife plunged into my
chest. Every day when Andrew went to work I lay on the
bed and sobbed with despair and grief for the children I
was never going to have. My hopes and dreams for the
future lay in tatters. I felt empty. Shattered. I felt I had died
already.
Anger built up inside me. I felt violated by the first
gynaecologist, further admonished by the specialist at
Hammersmith, robbed of my femininity, my womanhood, as
well as the family I had always wanted. I wanted to sue, but
this would be impossible if I wanted to get well. That task
alone would take everything I had. Allowing emotions to
surface, the anger and my deep sadness would not be
helpful. Stress I knew would potentially make things worse.
‘Chemotherapy is only for a couple of months, to sensitise
your cancer cells to radiotherapy,’ my oncologist had said.
‘So if it sensitises the radiotherapy treatment, why is there
a gap of a month between the two treatments? Why don’t
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you give the treatments closer together?’ I asked, confused.
It made no sense to me.
‘Well, you might be right, but for now we don’t have the
evidence. There have been no trials on using them
together.’ Surely it would be better to combine them? It
seemed illogical.
Even though it was a short course of chemotherapy, I lost
most of my hair and was violently sick. I couldn’t be sure it
had shut down my ovaries, but I knew without any doubt
that the intense radiotherapy that followed would.
When the first rays of radiotherapy had passed through me,
effectively wiping out any chance that my ovaries would
work again, I had wept on the radiotherapy table. The
radiotherapists milled about, unsure what to say to help,
offering tissues. ‘Are you OK?’ they had asked. Of course I
bloody wasn’t. I wanted to rage, to shout and scream. ‘Do
you know what you’ve done? Murderers! You have killed
my future children!’ They were only doing their job, of
course. It wasn’t their fault. Instead I lay there in silence,
tears rolling down my cheeks.
My hormones plummeted to zero. I hadn’t been warned
about that. I plunged from being a hot-headed, hormonal
thirty-year-old into instant menopause. Few will understand
what that’s like. It’s bad enough for many women when
their levels of oestrogen dwindle naturally with age, but for
a flirty spirited young female to be stripped of her
hormones overnight was nothing short of traumatic.
Without any warning the flashes would set my body on fire
at the most embarrassing moments. Every night I was so
drenched with sweat that I’d have to rip off the covers and
dash to the shower.
Ovaries produce not only female hormones, but a small
amount of testosterone as well. Because I was such a
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sporty character, I think I had more than my share. Without
my normal mix, my mood was low, my sex drive was
understandably zero and my skin was pallid and dry. In the
longer term, my hair might become thin and I ran the risk
of osteoporosis and heart disease. Gloomily, I assumed that
as no-one had offered me hormone therapy, it meant that I
should avoid it. Perhaps the hormones were implicated in
driving the cancer. My mother’s breast cancer had been
oestrogen-driven.
At least I no longer had periods, but this was no
compensation for all I’d lost. My mood was now
permanently low. I no longer had any zest for life. No mojo.
Nothing. Hormones play a huge part in defining who you
are as a person. Without them there was little left of ‘me’.
When I looked in the mirror, I no longer recognised myself.
I vaguely resembled the old Jane, but the person staring
back looked different. And I felt different. I was nearly bald
and had gained a stone and a half thanks to steroids,
several courses of antibiotics, and comfort eating. Where
was the upbeat, carefree sailing and surfing chick? Had she
gone forever?
My relationship with Andrew was thrown into turmoil. We
found ourselves in a completely unexpected situation
neither of us had prepared for. I knew he was finding it
hard to allow himself to get close to me. While I
understood, it was incredibly painful to accept. He would
say things I found unsympathetic and hurtful, like ‘Will you
always be resentful and angry?’ Well, yes, if you put it like
that, I will be. I was upset that he seemed unable to
understand or empathise, or to give me the time I needed
to overcome the devastating diagnosis. Looking back, I
realise that I must have been suffering from a form of posttraumatic stress disorder.
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I didn’t feel that my low mood was in any way unjustified. I
had every right to be upset, furious, eaten up with grief. It
had a disastrous effect on us as a couple. We couldn’t talk
about the future, we couldn’t make plans. We had no idea
what lay ahead. Conversations were stilted and superficial.
After a few months our relationship began to cool and
slowly break down. We were having real difficulties. For
Andrew the concept of fatherhood was not paramount. It
wasn’t woven into his being, as motherhood was for me.
Thanks to the surgery, sex was not what it had been.
Necessarily there were a few months of abstinence and
when action eventually resumed it was agony. It was
incredibly depressing, but I tried to put on a brave face. I
didn’t want him to know just how painful it really was.
Thankfully he was a kind and considerate lover, but I had
no idea whether it would ever be ‘normal’, pain-free and
pleasurable again. The doctors assured me that things
would improve slowly, but this aspect of our relationship
made me incredibly insecure. Why would anyone want to
stay with me?
In the past, I had never had any trouble getting and
keeping boyfriends. I’d been engaged twice. I had never
been desperate to be loved and needed. Relationships had
been on my terms. But now, all that, it seemed, had
changed. I was no longer a ‘catch’. Instead, I was on the
scrap heap, spurned by the opposite sex. I felt despair at
how much cancer imposed itself on every facet of my life. It
was overwhelming having to deal not just with the illness
but with the emotional and financial complications that
came with it. I lied about how I was feeling to keep friends
and relatives happy; I listened and allowed others to have a
say in my treatments. I constantly worried about keeping it
all together in front of everyone, putting on that mask,
pretending I was fine when all I wanted to do was just to
cry. And turn back the clock.
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My relationship with Andrew became so difficult that, with
huge reluctance and a heavy heart, I decided we needed
some time apart. I was aware that I was becoming too
needy and suffocating with talk of children and a future. He
could not see how much I was striving for hope and he
wasn’t ready for these discussions.
Despite my instinct to stay, I knew I had to find my feet, to
find a way to be strong and show I could manage on my
own. I was too reliant on him. He had to conclude that he
still wanted me in his own time. It hurt me deeply, but once
again I found myself leaving a relationship, running away,
booking myself on a flight back to Guernsey, back to my
island sanctuary. I told him I was going home to my parents
and back to work.
But I didn’t want my parents to see the depths of my grief
and despair either. I rented a cottage on my own, resisting
their help even though the treatments had made me weak
and tired.
Being alone did nothing but make my mood sink further. I
felt so isolated, so misunderstood. Magnifying my misery,
my knee, damaged from a ski accident, now became so
painful that I could hardly walk. And the other leg was
showing signs of early lymphoedema, because of all the
lymph nodes removed during surgery, a chronic condition
that causes swelling in bodily tissues. I was an
inflammatory mess, a hormonal mess, my body little more
than a scarred piece of wreckage.
My whole world had fallen apart. I knew I would never be
completely fixed again. I felt lost, in a body I no longer
recognised, thinking thoughts that had never been there
before. I was consumed with grief, not just for the
devastating loss of my future babies but also the loss of
myself. I just wanted to die.
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At my lowest point, I found myself on the phone to the
Samaritans. Once I put the phone down, I felt ashamed.
How had it come to this? Was I truly suicidal? I could never
subject my family and friends to that kind of pain.
No. I gave myself a stern talking to. Self-pity was no way to
get better. Where was Jane the Fighter? The woman I had
been before cancer? Was I really going to let this kill me?
Would that incompetent specialist win? I needed to find
something in my life that gave me joy. I needed meaning
and fulfilment.
I tried briefly to go back to work as a physiotherapist, a job
I used to love. But now patients whinging over the most
trivial problems just irritated me. My compassion had
vanished. I had stupidly thought the job might help distract
me, but how could I be sympathetic about a sprained ankle
when I was dealing with cancer? It was hopeless.
I quit and instead focused on selling BATHrobics , a fun
bathtime exercise book I’d created before becoming ill,
which so far had been selling well through bookshops and
the Innovations Catalogue.
The book turned into a flip chart that stuck over the side of
the bath with a rubber sucker. This novel and practical
design proved very popular. I turned my energies to
promoting it and driving up sales. Ironically, I had just
started writing a new exercise ritual for pregnant mothers
when I’d become ill. I made the decision to finish it and
publish it before the end of the year, torture though it was.
I was determined to find a way to be a mum and vowed that
one day I would give BATHrobics for Pregnancy to a
surrogate carrying my baby. I would make it happen. It was
the only way I could handle the pain.
There was still little joy in my life. Fortunately, my passion
for sailing and the sea came to the rescue. I went out
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sailing in the evenings in Guernsey and travelled back to
the UK at weekends to race with Assuage . Gradually I felt
my inner strength returning. I was getting fitter. At long
last a doctor prescribed some hormones to replace those I
had lost. I began feeling more like the old me.
Andrew started to see that I was still the same person
underneath the misery and that the grief-stricken creature
before him was, deep down, still the woman he loved. After
sailing one day, he took me out for supper.
‘It’s going to take a while to get you back up, with all
engines firing,’ he said. ‘But I’m here, right by your side, to
help you through all this. I believe in you and I love you. I
really want you to come back to London and live with me.’
I cried with relief. Thank God! I wanted to forget about the
cancer so badly, to move on with my life, to patch up my
broken body and fix what I had lost. But losing my fertility
was beyond my ability to fix and the subject of children was
still hanging between us.
I continued to cry every single day, on my own, when noone was looking. When I went for check-ups, it was hard to
hide my feelings and my grief. The medics were
understandably concerned for my mental health. They
offered me Prozac but I refused. No antidepressant was
going to hand me back my fertility or cure my
lymphoedema. So instead they sent me to counselling. I
was doubtful that this would help but willing to give it a try.
The therapist listened to my problems, occasionallyoffering
the odd platitude, but her main job during these sessions
was to supply endless tissues as my grief came out in
torrents. She was very nice but she offered no practical
solutions. Andrew, who accompanied me a couple of times,
was a large part of the solution. Ultimately, therapy just
compounded my issues, particularly as Andrew was
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immoveable about children. I knew he was worried about
the prospect of ending up a single parent. Even so, I knew
he was by my side, solid as a rock.
Surrogacy required us to be married and he seemed averse
to this subject too. His lack of commitment was killing me.
Was he deep down a romantic who just needed to do things
in his own time? My situation demanded the comfort of
knowing. I wrestled with my inner voice, which was telling
me at times to walk away. My former self would have had
no problem with this, but infertility and cancer made
decisions far more complicated. I wanted to see this
through, to keep going and get back to where we were at
the beginning, if that was possible.
What I hadn’t realised was that the doctors had been far
more honest with him than with me. They’d been upbeat
and positive to my face, giving me the impression I would
survive, while telling Andrew and my family a different
story. This, it turns out, is not uncommon for cancer
patients. They are often the last to know of the seriousness
of their situation.
A turning point came one evening when Andrew and I were
at home. We had just watched a movie, I was tired and was
just about to get off the sofa and head to bed when he
turned to me and held me back.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about kids. I’m sorry I found it so
hard to discuss before, but I’ve decided I’m ready,’ he said.
‘What! Really? You really want children? You’re not just
saying that to cheer me up?’
‘Believe me, I’ve thought about it non-stop! I have always
wanted children. I know you’ve not been given the all-clear
yet and I’m still worried about you. I’ve had to think about
the worst-case scenario. But I think I can handle being a
dad on my own if it happened again.’
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I threw my arms around him and vowed I was not going to
die. No way. This was what I had been hoping for. We were
planning a future! The relief was immense. We stayed up
late discussing the options. Andrew thought that adoption
would be the best route, although I strongly favoured
surrogacy. In his eyes, we would be coming at the problem
together, that somehow having his genes and not mine in
our child would be selfish if we pursued the surrogacy
route.
What he didn’t realise was that choosing him included
choosing his genes, that what made Andrew Andrew was
part of the equation. If I were to select a biological mother
then wasn’t I, in effect, selecting both sets of the baby’s
genes? The child would still be my creation.
Still, I knew the process of surrogacy would not be easy.
Would anyone take on a woman who’d been through
cancer?
I didn’t want to rule out any options, limited as they were,
so I wrote letters and waited. I contacted the adoption
agencies and despite Andrew’s concerns, I wrote to COTS
(Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy), the
surrogacy organisation founded by Kim Cotton in 1988. I
expected to have a battle with the agencies, guessing that
they would probably refuse me on health grounds.
I wasn’t wrong. A refusal from an adoption agency soon
arrived, stating that I needed to be clear of cancer for at
least five years before I could even be considered. This was
exactly the response I’d been expecting.
In five years I would turn thirty-five, too old for the
agencies’ strict criteria to be considered anyway. Yet again
time was not on my side. It seemed too young to me – lots
of women were becoming mums at forty – but there it was.
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In fact, Andrew had a much better chance of adopting as a
single male than we had as a married couple.
While apologetic, the letter went on to argue that the child
might suffer further emotional loss on top of what he or she
had already gone through if I were to die. I understood this
view and realised there was little point in contesting this
decision. Even so, I couldn’t help looking through the
pictures of the children again, their little faces staring up
into the camera, so desperate to be loved. My heart bled. I
could have offered them a stable, safe and loving home. I
would never get anywhere with their rigid rules and
blinkered attitudes. Angry, I threw the letter in the bin.
With adoption out of the equation, I persuaded Andrew to
focus his energies on surrogacy. He still worried that it was
an inequitable arrangement, but with no other available
options he was on board. Surrogacy, I hoped, would
eventually provide the missing pieces in my life.
And so began the task of finding a suitable surrogate and
perhaps an egg donor too. COTS was a young agency and
getting ourselves onto their books took ages.
The public largely viewed these arrangements as not only
bizarre but risky. Biased and sensationalist press articles
didn’t help. One story I read was about a surrogate who
had kept the baby. This was something that worried us too.
How far could you trust anyone in these circumstances?
The article suggested that the problem stemmed from
ignoring the pregnant surrogate, leading her to think the
baby wasn’t wanted enough. It didn’t seem to have
anything to do with an emotional bond between the mother
and the baby.
Since that report, more background checks on surrogates
had been put in place, so finding women prepared to take
on such an extraordinary act of selflessness, having them
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properly assessed to verify their good intentions, all took
time. I would spoil my surrogate rotten if I ever found one.
I knew I should be waiting until the magical five-year ‘allclear’ mark before we started this process but there was no
harm in exploring how to go about it in the meantime. I had
already quietly gathered information without telling
Andrew. I desperately needed this scrap of hope.
COTS finally sent through a list of possible surrogates with
their profiles: where they lived, their age, weight,
education, work, hobbies, etc. One Thursday evening I was
busy leafing through some of the profiles and reading the
COTS newsletter, when my phone rang.
It was my dad. He never called, it was always Mum. I knew
something serious must have happened.
In a broken voice, he told me that my mother’s breast
cancer had spread and was now in her liver. I nearly
dropped the phone. I knew that once the disease reached
the liver, lungs or brain this meant only one thing. She was
stage IV, terminal, and only sixty. She was far too young to
die.
1Fournier A, Berrino F, Clavel-Chapelon F. Unequal risks for breast cancer
associated with different hormone replacement therapies: results from the E3N
cohort study. Breast Cancer Research and Treatment. 2008;107(1):103-111.
Progestin raised risk significantly whereas progesterone did not.
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Chapter Three:
Tell me the Truth!
I instantly felt a strong sense of solidarity with my mother. I
knew how alone and isolating it felt to be diagnosed. Even
worse, she was now facing a death sentence. I could only
imagine how terrible this was. I immediately began a
frantic search for anything that might help her, knowing
full well that time was not on her side and conventional
medicine on its own would be futile.
The Internet in 1996 was pretty sparsely populated, but
there were a few stories of people surviving cancer by
adopting a radical change in diet. The more I looked, the
more I began to wonder why some of these treatments and
altered diets weren’t suggested or explored by more cancer
patients.
As I delved into the world of alternative treatments I began
to uncover facts about cancer that no-one had ever told me.
For example, I learned that glucose feeds most cancers and
that IGF-1 (an insulin-like growth factor hormone found in
high levels in dairy and meat) was implicated in driving its
growth.
Wow. Why hadn’t I known this before? Cancer cells have
many glucose receptors on their surface to ‘feed’ them
glucose and give them the enormous amounts of energy
they need to replicate. Reading further, I learned that
they’re always hungry. Their insatiable appetite for
nutrients helps them carry out their relentless
proliferation, giving them both the building blocks and the
energy to keep on doubling in size. It seemed all the focus
for conventional treatments was on the genetic mutations
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and division in the cell nucleus. What about targeting the
altered metabolism too? Why was this not addressed?
I learned that cancer doesn’t survive in oxygenated
environments. It prefers anaerobic conditions and a
process called glycolysis (a breakdown of glucose in the
cytosol, not in the mitochondria) to ‘ferment’ and grow, a
bit like yeasts ferment. This ‘fermenting’ process is a
grossly inefficient way of making energy, almost as if the
cell had reverted to primitive times when the world had no
oxygen. I learned how cancer sends messages and signals
to build new blood vessels to feed itself (a process called
angiogenesis) and that it needs other factors to feed its
exponential growth. And I discovered the importance of
maintaining a functioning immune system, ironically
something that’s ruined by too much chemotherapy. None
of this had ever been discussed with me.
As a fully trained physiotherapist, I felt I should have
known all of this or learnt it when I was diagnosed. I felt I’d
been very remiss, but it seemed that even the medics
themselves didn’t understand these facts or at least
disputed their importance. When I questioned them, they
told me that diets had never been shown to help. I asked if
there had ever been any trials. There hadn’t. Trialling diets
was notoriously difficult. But that was no proof they didn’t
work, right? And what about targeting the immune system?
No use. The immune system was so overwhelmed by cancer
that it failed to treat it as an invading force. Believing the
cancer to be just another part of the body, the immune
system no longer attacked it, so there was little point
targeting it. This seemed a defeatist argument to me. But
perhaps the tumour needed to be ‘switched off’ somehow
to allow the immune system to be switched back on. How
could that be achieved? Perhaps by slowing or turning off
the altered metabolism of cancer?
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Oncology was not a speciality I’d been familiar with as a
physiotherapist. As a result, I had placed all my faith in my
colleagues in the medical profession to get me well. At the
time I hadn’t even questioned the treatments I was given. I
spent little time researching how effective they really were
or whether there were complementary alternatives that
might help. I had naturally assumed I was getting the best
treatment possible. I believed the doctors’ reassurances
that I’d be cured.
Over the following weeks, as I watched my mother die, the
burden of my grief only intensified. It was a depressing
realisation that the oncology profession was not tackling
cancer on enough levels. My emotional state must have
been massively detrimental to my immune system and I felt
guilty that my own cancer diagnosis must have, in turn,
deeply affected my mum. Nothing I said could persuade her
to cut out or reduce sugar and high glycaemic, refined
carbohydrates in her diet. And taking supplements was not
something she was prepared to do.
In any case, I think it was probably too late to rescue her.
Like many of her generation, she worshipped her doctor.
She blindly did everything he told her, like eating cake and
biscuits to ‘feed her up’ and ‘give her energy’. I was the
only one telling her to try something different. But I was
merely a physiotherapist, while other members of my
family are doctors. They weren’t overtly against what I was
saying but I felt they thought my efforts were misguided
and of little value.
It was frustrating and painful to see my mother wasting
away, but by this time there had been too much damage to
her body from both the cancer and from the chemotherapy.
Slowly, she grew weaker and weaker until she was
bedridden and one evening in early October she finally died
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peacefully at home with me, my dad, and my brother
holding her in her last moments.
Even though it was a peaceful event, it was devastating to
witness. I will never forget it. I had felt so helpless and
powerless. Again, I hit rock bottom. Modern medicine had
let me down and my mother too. Death suddenly felt very
real indeed, no longer something that happened to other
people. I was still in my early thirties and suddenly I wasn’t
feeling as invincible as I had when I first got cancer.
I knew I had to do more research and prepare myself if
cancer came back. Thanks to the confusing and misleading
grading and staging of cervical cancer, only now did I begin
to realise that my ‘stage Ib’ cancer was in fact stage III, as
it had been in many of my lymph nodes. I was only one step
away from a terminal diagnosis of stage IV.
In the months after my mother passed away, not only was I
grieving her loss deeply, but I was haunted by visions of
myself on that deathbed. Instead of seeing her, I imagined
myself lying there, staring into the distance, drawing my
last breaths.
This was a loud wake-up call. I needed no further
encouragement. The shock and trauma of this experience
made me look at my life through fresh new eyes. I had too
much to live for. I didn’t know it at the time but her death
was going to save my life. Her passing became the platform
for a turnaround in my own health. I began to modify my
diet, exercise more, research more, and pay more attention
to the fact that my body had suffered cancer. I had focused
all my energy on infertility but now I no longer tried to
brush the disease under the carpet as if it had never
existed. I knew my health demanded my full attention, that
cancer was a lesson to which I had so far refused to listen.
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I had to reduce my sugar levels at the very least, so I cut
out many simple carbohydrates like bread and sugar
(although at this stage I didn’t take it far enough) and I
removed dairy and most meat, which both contain the IGF1 hormones that drive cancer growth. I rarely ate red meat
anyway, but now I cut out foods I found inflammatory, such
as potatoes, tomatoes, rhubarb, grapefruit, and
strawberries. I felt these were too acidic and they seemed
to stimulate an inflammatory reaction in my body. I could
tell. I’d just been through a knee operation for the ski
accident and my joint would make it clear the next day if
I’d made a dietary error. Inflammation seemed to be a
driving force for cancer and if what I ate sparked
inflammation in my knee, might it spark further cancer?
To monitor my diet this carefully meant paying close
attention to how food affected me, whether I felt tired
afterwards, whether I was bloated or had joint pain. I
eliminated foods and made lists of everything I’d been
eating to try to work out which foods didn’t agree with me.
It was very much trial and error, and it took some time to
sort out which foods where a problem. Today, tests exist to
detect IgG antibodies, so the offending foods are easily
identified. This is far simpler than this hit-or-miss
approach, which was time consuming and inaccurate.
Wheat and dairy, it appeared, were the worst offenders. I
swapped normal tea for green tea and began juicing. I cut
right back on alcohol and started popping more
supplements. If the cancer came back I sure as hell was
going to be prepared. I was already hoofing glucosamine
supplements for my knee, but I increased my intake of
vitamin C and other vitamins.
The glucosamine sulphate it turned out was a good thing.
It’s a great prebiotic, excellent for maintaining a healthy
gut, a fact that is still largely unknown and I was to
discover it is also a matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor
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(more on this later, but in short, it helps halt progression).
But I realise with the benefit of hindsight that I may have
fuelled my disease by taking oral vitamin C and vitamin E. I
had assumed by taking these I was preventing a
‘metastasis’, where the cancer sends out a mass of little
satellite cells and strikes in a new zone of the body. What I
had yet to learn was that supplements for cancer
prevention were totally different to those you need when
you already have cancer. The assumption I had beaten it
would turn out to be entirely wrong.
By the end of 1998 I started to get a nagging cough. I’m
not the kind of patient who runs to the doctor at the merest
tickle, but I was worried. I knew enough about my cancer
now to know the lungs were the most likely place for it to
spread. So naturally I found this new complaint extremely
stressful. I was on high alert.
The doctor told me I had a chest infection, that was all, but
one round of antibiotics failed to clear it. I tried another
course, which again failed, so I decided to adopt the tactic
of waiting for it to clear by itself. It didn’t. Every time I
went back to the doctor I was prescribed another round of
antibiotics and another bug would be revealed, as if I were
peeling back the layers on an onion. One infection hiding
another.
Two months later, I was still coughing badly. No longer
content to accept it was just another infection, I went back
to the doctor and asked for an urgent X-ray. My GP duly
obliged and that afternoon I walked up the road to the
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s radiology department,
my X-ray request clutched in my hand, with trepidation
about what it would reveal.
I told the radiographer I’d been treated for cancer already
and that I feared it might have spread. I asked if she could
please take a lateral X-ray too, as the GP had put only one
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view on the request form. A ‘lateral view’ is side-to-side.
Another angle helps rule out anything suspicious. About
thirty minutes later, she came out smiling, saying it had
been looked at and there was nothing to worry about, it all
looked perfectly clear and a lateral view was not needed.
Phew! I really should try to stop worrying, I told myself. I
was behaving like a typical cancer patient, getting anxious
over every niggle and ache. But I had been let down by
tests before.
Another two months on and the cough was still coming and
going. My nagging doubt continued to grow. I’d started
legal proceedings against the first gynaecologist and the
South London Hospital and my trust in the medical
profession was at an all-time low. Why had my lungs
suddenly started giving me all this trouble, and why
couldn’t it be fixed with antibiotics? I was constantly
dismissed as a ‘worrier’ by the surgery.
Then one Sunday afternoon in August, after a coughing fit,
I tasted blood in my mouth. Whoa! Had it really been
blood? I said nothing to Andrew but quietly took myself
upstairs to cough into the basin in the bathroom. Right in
front of me, as clear as day, was a big streak of blood. Oh
God. Could this mean anything else? I sat on the edge of
the bed trying not to panic. Think, Jane! Had I eaten
something that’d scratched my throat? I coughed again and
there it was, even more blood. Shit. Shit. Shit.
I called Andrew upstairs. He stared at the blood but
somehow remained calm. Perhaps he didn’t quite
understand. Even after I explained the seriousness of what
he was looking at, still an expressionless face. He would be
great at poker. Often I found his outward lack of emotion
irritating but in a time of crisis like this his logical, calm
and practical approach was incredibly useful.
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We sat there trying to figure out the best course of action.
Where should we go? I could no longer trust the Chelsea
and Westminster Hospital. I had a suspicion my X-ray there
had not been read correctly. We decided to head back to
the Hammersmith Hospital, where I’d had all my previous
treatments in 1994-5.
It was a longer drive and I would have done anything to
avoid ever entering that hospital again. The memories and
the trauma of it all had left me with a deep-seated fear and
loathing of the place. Reluctantly, we headed back to the
grim, dilapidated building, the Hammer House of Horror.
In Accident and Emergency that Sunday evening, the staff
were trying to deal with hordes of demanding and angry
patients. An elderly man who’d clearly had a lot to drink
had accidentally cut his finger off. He was charging about
shouting and accusing everyone of being useless, his finger
in a bag of ice. Perhaps they were being useless. Hard to
tell. Someone surely should get him into surgery straight
away.
The blood kept coming to my mouth every time I coughed.
How long would we have to wait? After about an hour we
were seen by a young and nervous junior doctor who led us
into a cubicle. He asked the usual medical history
questions, then tried every vein he could find in my arms
and hands to get a blood sample. He was about to move
down to try my feet when I suggested someone else should
maybe have a go. Andrew has never been very good with
blood and needles and he had to leave the cubicle as he
was feeling faint. ‘Man up!’ I teased through the curtain. I
was feeling like a pincushion.
After that, I was sent for an X-ray. I was still telling myself
it must’ve been something rough I’d eaten at lunch. But the
blood was still there, it hadn’t stopped. It had got worse. As
my business advisor used to tell me, ‘There is nothing
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worth worrying about unless you’re going to die. And if
you’re going to die there’s no point worrying.’ A mantra
that somehow didn’t fit the context of illness, where the
real possibility of pain and suffering lay ahead, but I
decided he was right, I’d stay calm and positive until we
knew exactly what we were dealing with, if anything. Stay
in the present, Jane. Deep, slow, calm breaths.
I made sure the radiographer took both a posterior-anterior
(back-front) as well as a lateral view. Then Andrew and I sat
down and waited. And waited. A junior doctor came out to
see us. He looked seriously concerned. ‘I just have to get
someone else to check this,’ he said. Fine, I wanted it
checked properly. Even if he came back saying it was clear
I was going to get a copy and at least another opinion. I
wanted to be 100 per cent sure there was nothing there. I
had lost faith in relying on one voice on anything to do with
cancer.
We started leafing through magazines and tried not to think
about it too much. Still, we occasionally addressed the
question, ‘What if?’ I braced myself for any bad news and
decided whatever the outcome I was now knowledgeable
enough about stage IV cancer that I was at least going to
be able to have a go at beating it. Knowing where to start
digging for information was something I had already
tackled. I had a head start.
We waited and waited. A couple of hours passed. ‘Okay, this
is normal for a busy outpatient department,’ I said to
myself. It was just typical NHS, too many patients, too few
staff. It was now about nine o’clock in the evening and
Andrew was getting peckish. I was too worried to eat and I
didn’t want him to wander off and leave me on my own in
case we were called. We sat there trying to stay upbeat.
But the staff on the desk were acting strangely. It looked as
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if they were quietly talking about us. I told myself I was
imagining it and tried to ignore them.
Why were they taking so long? Where were they? I already
knew the answer but I continued to deny it to myself.
Finally, a doctor made his way over and asked us into a side
room. I held Andrew’s hand and squeezed it. We looked at
each other and silently acknowledged that this was not a
good sign. If the X-ray had been all clear we would have
been sent on our way ages ago, not been made to wait and
then pulled in here. I took a deep breath and summoned up
every ounce of bravery I could muster.
Once inside I perched on the edge of the bed, trying my
best to act normally. He shut the door and came straight
out with it.
‘Unfortunately, it appears there is a shadow in your right
lung.’
I already knew. He stuck the X-ray up on the viewer and
showed us the slightly irregular round lump in my right
lung. Yes, there it was, cancer. It had come back and I knew
without him saying so that I was now stage IV, so-called
terminal or incurable. Try to stay calm, Jane. Looking
down, I saw my hands were shaking uncontrollably.
‘How many tumours can you see?’ I asked, my voice quite
composed despite the turbulent emotions inside me. ‘Well,
we can’t be sure it’s a tumour. We need the results of the
blood test to be sure, and a biopsy of course,’ he said.
‘Look, I’m a physiotherapist and I know it’s almost certain
to be a tumour. I’ve had cervical cancer, the most likely
place for a secondary is in the lungs and now I’m coughing
up blood with a shadow right there. Please be honest with
me! The chance of it being anything else is extremely
remote. How many tumours can you see?’
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The doctor looked at me silently for a few seconds and
realised there was little point trying to fudge the
information as they normally do, or to break the news
gently in half-truths, not being completely honest with the
seriousness of the situation.
‘Well, yes, it is most likely a tumour, but the good news, if
there is any, is that it looks like there’s just the one,
although it is bigger than a golf ball. The bad news is, I’m
afraid you’re going to have to stay in hospital. We’re
worried you might need emergency surgery if a major
vessel bursts, so we’ve arranged a bed on one of the
wards.’
Whoa. Okay, that hit me like a punch on the nose. They
thought I might be close to popping my clogs at any
moment? Shit. Andrew looked at me and I murmured, ‘I’m
going to be alright, don’t worry. I’m sure they’re just being
over cautious.’ Although I really had no idea if they were. It
may seem strange that here I was, just diagnosed with
terminal cancer and I was taking it far better than five
years earlier. Losing my womb, my womanhood and the
family I’d always craved more than anything else in the
world, had been far worse.
I would usually describe myself as an emotional train crash.
I cry at the most pathetic adverts on the TV. But a strange
calm came over me now. I felt a surge of strength, a new
purpose and meaning flow through me. The survival
instinct was flooding through my veins. I was being reborn.
I knew what I had to do. And it didn’t involve crying, taking
a passive role or relying solely on the medical profession. I
had been let down too often. I’d had such faith in the NHS
and the medical system as a physiotherapist and been so
sure I’d be looked after and put back together. It was a
painful and bruising lesson to discover just how ineffective
it could be at times.
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In the end, it had come as a depressing realisation that
cancer treatments were not nearly as effective as they
make out in the mainstream press. The ‘game changers’
rarely were. The system was inherently flawed, set up to
benefit the pharmaceutical industry rather than the patient.
Patients were routinely let down by a lack of proactive
treatment. Prevention did not seem to exist. Rather, it was
a matter of waiting for the cancer to come back, for the axe
to fall, before they got off their backsides to treat you with
their latest array of toxic chemicals.
The doctor asked what my last squamous cell marker had
been. ‘My what?’ He said I could have had blood markers
that might’ve shown up any progression, but I had never
been offered one. Ever. Why? It was so simple and noninvasive. Why had no-one ever suggested them? Where was
the proactive approach in all of this so-called care?
When the doctor left us alone to work out what we wanted
to do, I put my arms around Andrew and we just hugged in
silence for several minutes. I had no clothes or toothbrush
with me for an overnight stay.
‘Come on, you’d better run home and get my things,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ he said. ‘I can’t go back home
tonight while you’re all alone after what he’s told you. It’s
not right. I want to stay with you.’
‘Look, I really don’t feel that bad. I’m sure they are just
being ridiculously cautious about the whole bursting blood
vessel thing,’ I said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘We can get
through this. Let’s take it one day at a time.’
I was quite surprised I was even able to speak without
sounding panicked. An inner strength had emerged that I
had no idea existed. I’d never felt stronger. I felt I was
rising up from the ashes. I could do this. I was sure of it. I
was being faced with the greatest challenge of my life, and
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I would face it full-on, with bravery. Time to ‘man up’ as I
had told Andrew earlier.
With this terminal diagnosis, suddenly everything came
into focus. Despite all the grief that had overcome me
before, I realised I could not waste another ounce of energy
on that destructive emotion. I had to channel everything
into survival. Dying was not an option. It might seem an
obvious thing to say, but I’ve met many patients who accept
their fate with little resistance. Almost with a shrug of
acceptance. ‘Well, I’ve had a good life,’ they say, conceding
that it’s over without even considering a fight. That
somehow bad luck had dealt its card and there was little
they could do.
No, I had too much living left. I was still only thirty-five and
I resolved to investigate everything I possibly could. There
was said to be no cure, but I was sure the answer had to be
out there, perhaps buried in old papers or an overlooked
study. I would somehow find it.
I refused to see myself as a wounded soldier limping to my
untimely demise. I was a fighter, back on the front line.
Although I was carrying many deep scars physically,
mentally and emotionally, they were not enough to stop me
from picking myself up and walking back into the fray.
Was I ready? Bring it on.
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Chapter Four:
Collaborators not Dictators
It took a lot of persuading to get Andrew to leave me at the
hospital that night. To be honest, I nearly refused to stay.
The warmth and comfort of my own bed, the normality of
being at home, the reassurance of waking up next to him
was the only thing I wanted at that moment. But the
situation was apparently life threatening. So reluctantly
Andrew drove home, gathered up some clothes for me, and
sped back to the hospital to meet me on the ward.
It was after visiting hours, but the staff showed some
compassion and allowed him to stay for an hour. I had a
side room to myself, which was a relief. The last thing I
wanted was the hurly-burly of a ward. I needed space to
think. I was still coughing up the blood, a nasty reminder of
what was going on inside. Otherwise, physically I didn’t
feel that bad.
Mentally, I was terrified, of course. What if they were right
and I burst a major vessel in the middle of the night and
needed emergency life-saving surgery? Andrew wasequally
terrified, but we chose to think about other things,
practical stuff, organising ourselves to deal with this
enormous change in our circumstances.
Our wedding had been planned for three months’ time. The
church, the reception, everything was booked and
invitations had been sent out. I realised with dismay that
there was a good chance I was going to be given
chemotherapy yet again. Not only would I feel sick, I would
be bald, which – let’s face it – is not the best look for a
bride. It wouldn’t be the wedding I had always dreamed of,
looking gorgeous, healthy and radiant. Bugger this cancer.
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It had ruined my chance of a family and now it was ruining
my wedding too.
We’d have to postpone. We would wait until we knew just
how far the cancer had spread before breaking any news to
anyone except for my sister Suzie, a doctor. I would talk to
her. She had been amazing at helping me through the first
time, although I knew I’d relied on her too much and hadn’t
done enough research for myself. She knew very little
about alternative treatments and I knew that orthodox
medicine this time would not be enough to save me.
At eleven o’clock that night, the staff nurse came in and
said she really was sorry but she couldn’t allow Andrew to
stay any longer. We had a long hug. It was so hard to let go.
‘I promise I’ll be fine. I have a phone. I’ll text you first thing
tomorrow.’ He struggled to leave, lingering at the door.
After the doctors had put the fear of my imminent death in
his head, he wasn’t sure if this was the last time he would
see me.
‘Go on, go home! I’m absolutely fine!’ He slowly turned into
the corridor, blowing me a final kiss. I was left alone with
my thoughts.
Back at home, Andrew got straight onto the Internet and
looked up the statistics and my chances of survival. In 1999
no-one could source information at the click of a button on
a mobile. For me, stuck on the ward that night, it was
probably a good thing, but for Andrew it was a different
story. I don’t think he got any sleep that night.
Sitting there alone in my hospital room, five miles away
from home with no depressing statistics to ponder, I was
already starting to feel more upbeat. I decided I wanted to
see the X-ray taken months earlier at the Chelsea and
Westminster Hospital. I needed to know if the cancer had
been present then, as I was deeply suspicious that it had
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been missed. From that we could work out what the tumour
‘doubling time’ was, how fast it was growing. I had learnt
quite a bit about cancer looking after my mother but
nowhere near enough. Why had I not known about the
blood tests?
Amazingly, I slept well. By the time the doctors crowded
into my room first thing in the morning, I was smiling and
cheerful. Honestly there must have been ten of them, all
full of morbid fascination to see this thirty-five-year-old
with stage IV cancer. I felt like a prize exhibit.
I think they were more than a little surprised by my upbeat
attitude. Perhaps they thought I hadn’t quite grasped the
gravity of the situation. Well, I was still alive, wasn’t I? I
hadn’t bled to death during the night. That was a good
start.
They looked carefully at the X-ray and decided the major
blood vessels were a sufficient distance from the tumour
not to pose an immediate threat to my life. So, I could go
home provided I came back later that day for more tests.
Hooray! I wasted no time checking myself out of the
Hammer House of Horror. I phoned Andrew who
immediately drove over to collect me.
The relief of being back home was overwhelming. After
cuddling my two gorgeous cats I allowed myself to cry for
the first time. Big sobs came from deep down as I buried
my head in Andrew’s arms. But as I cried, I knew I had to
get to work. I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I
needed to be in control. I too wanted to know what the
statistics said. Andrew told me not to look but I needed to
know. What I saw shook me to the core.
Everything the doctors did to me from this moment on
could affect my chances of survival, and too many mistakes
had been made already. This time I was going to play a big
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part in my treatment choices, whether the doctors liked it
or not!
I had been too traumatised and depressed by my diagnosis
the first time round to be able to do anything other than
agree to suggestions and meekly and submissively take the
first path offered. I had been too passive and too desperate
to get rid of the cancer.
This time it was going to be different. It was my body they
were treating. I was going to run the show and the doctors
were going to play important parts but not the lead role.
That part was mine, thank you.
Many doctors are a little affronted by a patient armed with
a long list of questions, particularly about alternative
treatments. And if you dare mention diet then expect a
quick and scornful dismissal (don’t even think about
bringing up the subject of nutritional ketosis – it sounds too
similar to ketoacidosis – your doctor will immediately tell
you to avoid it!). Oncologists are, on the whole, in a league
of their own, certain that they know what’s best for you
with a ‘My Way or the Highway’ approach. Despite this
mostly dogmatic attitude, instilled by years of training, I
knew there were some super ones prepared to listen to the
patient and respect their wishes.
Good oncologists even acknowledge that patients can be
their greatest teachers. But I have come across too many
who are arrogant, who seem to enjoy belittling those in
their care. This does nothing for the confidence of the
ordinary patient, who is made to feel ignorant and stupid in
the presence of their superior medical knowledge. All it
does is feed the oncologist’s ego.
Attitudes are slowly changing, but even today I know a
doctor whose coffee mug reads, ‘You are confusing your
quick google research with my six-year medical degree’,
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which he’ll leave strategically on his desk before meeting
the incurable hypochondriac. Social media and the Internet
has meant many patients now become experts in their own
disease.
There is no doubt that there are doctors who are highly
skilled and knowledgeable, who understand their patients’
diseases. They appreciate the interaction of drugs and they
are aware of the course of the cancer, the statistics and the
conventional options. They are there to help guide you
through the medical minefield with its confusing
terminology and hidden pitfalls. I have great respect for
their knowledge. Despite this, it seemed to me that my
oncologist was missing the bigger picture.
I was going to have to become my own expert. I would need
to learn all the medical terms if I was to understand the
research, be treated as an equal, and have the doctors
listen to me, rather than treat me as a patient with a lump
that had to be shrunk. And I would have to learn fast. Time,
the doctors reminded me, was not my friend. But I already
had a great deal of medical knowledge – that was a bonus.
And I had already learned much about cancer from
researching for my mother. Terms such as ‘angiogenesis’
and ‘apoptosis’ were already familiar.
I was never going to turn my back on conventional
treatment completely, but there had to be other options to
the surgery and chemotherapy. It seemed medical progress
had made little headway for decades. To survive, I needed
to take the treatment further than anyone had done before,
to add things to my treatment not only to address the
genetic mutations but the metabolic problems that went
with it, an area that seemed to be ignored by the
mainstream, despite Otto Warburg’s research dating back
to 1924.
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To beat it, I had to know my enemy. I had to discover its
every little nuance, exploit its weak points, its Achilles’
heels, and hit them all together. I would tackle it from
every angle I could, whether with conventional drugs,
supplements or alternative therapies. There had to be more
to it than surgery and chemo.
As a physiotherapist, I had been trained in science and
evidence-based medicine. I knew that elsewhere,
combinations of drugs were being tested, such as for HIV
infections. Several different drugs with different actions
were being used together, a combination sometimes called
a drug cocktail. Cancer was indeed a complexity of
abnormal pathways and cell signalling, so where were the
combinations to match it? They didn’t exist.
When I spoke to my sister the following night, she tried to
keep upbeat despite being clearly upset. ‘Oh no. You have
another spot of bother,’ she said, using Mum’s phrase for
her cancer. A spot of bother. Was she being dismissive? No,
she was trying to minimise the emotional impact. ‘Yes, let’s
just think of it like that, an irritating little problem, a
disobedient child that needs a time out. Not some
invincible foe.’
I started to formulate my plan. I drew out a map of how I
was going to attack it. In the centre, I made a little jagged
circle, the ‘Spot of Bother’, and then drew arrows hitting it
from every direction. From the North whizzed the surgery
arrow. From the South, chemo attacked. But those two
arrows were not enough. I knew it had also to be hit by
arrows from the East, West, and everywhere in between. I
even visualised it in 3D.
One thing I knew for sure was that my diet would need
even more drastic changes. Cancer wanted glucose. Lots of
it. If I could reduce this, at the very least it would weaken
its defences. Surely this made logical sense? I ignored the
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medics telling me that diet would make no difference. How
could it not?
During the first three days after I’d started coughing up
blood, I had been given CT scans and ultrasounds and was
prodded and poked by various staff of the hospital. By
Wednesday of that week I had been ‘staged’. The search for
other tumours was over. To my immense relief, there were
none but I was still diagnosed with stage IV. The realisation
that I had only one ‘spot of bother’ made the diagnosis that
bit easier to accept. I had been convinced that if the cancer
had been lurking inside me all this time, it must have
spread elsewhere.
Had I been lucky or had my change in diet since my mother
died already helped slow it down? The disease at this stage
was normally rampant and aggressive. I knew whatever I’d
been doing must have had an effect. This was strangely
reassuring amidst all the gloom. I was certain my low sugar
intake and the supplements I’d taken must be helping. Diet
makes no difference? Rubbish. I’d already proved to myself
that it did.
The oncologist also wanted to take a biopsy from my
tumour. No way was I going to let them do that! What the
hell for? Just to prove it was a tumour? That was
investigation for the sake of it. It was highly unlikely to be
anything else and it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of
difference to my medical plan. They were still going to
remove it surgically.
As far as I was concerned, they could wait and perform the
histology after it was cut out properly. I did not want to risk
breaking the capsule surrounding the cancer, thus
increasing the likelihood of it spreading elsewhere. Surely
this was common sense? To my mind, biopsies were a surefire way to mess with the body’s attempt to contain
damage.
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Tumours have a kind of fibrous capsule. A tumour the size
of a tip of a pencil can contain billions of cancer cells and
surgeons do their utmost not to spill those when operating,
especially during lung surgery. I was aware by now that
post-surgical metastatic spread was a widespread
phenomenon, something surgeons never mention to the
patient or even seem to acknowledge. What was the point
of stabbing it with a biopsy cutter and leaving the barn
door wide open? It seemed completely farcical. I didn’t
want any more tumour cells whizzing around my body
looking for another cosy place to live.
This difference of opinion led to a heated ‘discussion’ with
the doctor for a good thirty minutes. I told him in no
uncertain terms that they’d leave it alone. In the end we
reached a compromise. I allowed him to take nearby
sputum sample by bronchoscopy but on absolutely no
account was he to break into the tumour. He got the
message. I was starting to feel as if I might have some
control, that perhaps I would be allowed a voice in this
medical merry-go-round, but my goodness it was not going
to be easy.
I was not seeing eye-to-eye with the oncologist I had been
allocated at the Hammersmith Hospital. I can’t even
remember his name, as he lasted only two visits. He had
been brusque, dismissive and scornful of my point of view.
Stuck in his rigid, blinkered approach, he wasn’t able to
answer many of my questions and seemed resentful that I
was asking them at all. It wasn’t long before he got the flick
off my team.
I wanted to find the professor who had treated me first
time round. She had moved out of London to Guildford, an
hour away, but I knew she would be worth the trip. I would
rather make the longer journey for someone who knew me
and was more likely to tolerate my difficult and awkward
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behaviour. She listened and she respected me. I needed a
collaborator, not a dictator.
It had been a revelation that between the primary and
secondary diagnosis, on any of my routine six-monthly visits
over the past five years, a simple blood test could have
been taken to detect changes. I felt despair that the system
had failed me on so many levels. Now the test came back
showing high levels of the squamous cell carcinoma
antigen – around 190. A normal reading was under 150.
The higher the number the more active it was. So a reading
of 190, while bad, was not terrible. I felt sure my diet and
healthier lifestyle was keeping the reading lower than it
could have been. Was it starving the cancer of what it
needed to grow?
I contacted the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and got
hold of the X-ray they’d taken of my lungs. When I showed
it to my oncologist, she could see it clearly showed the
tumour. I felt I could not let this go without comment, so I
wrote to the hospital manager. Surprisingly, I received a
contrite letter of apology, but at least they had admitted
guilt.
Getting hold of the X-ray was not to say, ‘I told you so’,
although the temptation was huge. I wanted to show the
medics just how much bigger it had grown over time. Sure
enough, there was a tumour in the same place, a little
smaller, but there. Once I knew where it was, it was easy to
spot. It should have been obvious to any decent radiologist.
And it had not grown rapidly since the last X-ray, not at the
rate I feared, which also meant I was doing something
right.
Given that I had lived with it for several months, I was not
in an enormous panic. Perhaps I could control my tumour
with an even more radical diet and supplements? I took big
positives out of this. I decided I was not going to be rushed
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into any treatment or surgery. I needed to do further
research and take my time before I let the medical
profession loose on my body again. I made the decision to
wait a few weeks before I had surgery, to take stock and
prepare myself for the battle ahead.
My other siblings were understandably shocked when we
broke the bad news. I have two younger brothers as well as
an older sister. Going through Mum’s illness had brought
us all quite close together. My new diagnosis coming so
soon after we buried our mother was a blow to them all.
Would they have to suffer that anguish and heartbreak once
again?
Although we were united in the fight against cancer, having
doctors in my family made my route to health more
complicated because we held different views. They had
been sceptical about what I’d suggested to Mum, so I
decided I wouldn’t discuss my ‘alternative’ plans with
them, in case they put me off or influenced me in some way.
I wanted to be entirely responsible for my decisions if I
decided to take a different path. I was open and receptive
to their ideas and suggestions, but I would try to steer my
own course. They decided wisely to let me do my own thing
without offering any judgement.
Suzie, I later learned, had quietly informed the family that
she thought I was unlikely to survive a year. I am so glad I
didn’t know this. Being told would have been worse.
Fortunately, no-one ever said it outright to me, even though
I’d read as much online. Twelve weeks had been the
average. Predictions like that can become self-fulfilling,
particularly from someone in the medical profession. That
damn white coat is just too powerful.
I have often wondered whether patients should be told by
medics how long on average a person with their stage and
level of disease has to live. On the one hand, it is deeply
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depressing. Also, every patient is different. Many go into a
protective cocoon from which they never emerge. On the
other hand, it’s important to know just how deep in the
quagmire you’re standing, so you can take the appropriate
level of action.
Armed with some knowledge already, I was tough enough
to know my statistics. No-one would fight this as hard as I
would. I was going to defy that death sentence. I could see
that as cancer progressed it became harder and harder to
treat, becoming more and more resistant to conventional
therapies. By stage IV, the oncology profession regard the
disease as unstoppable. Oncologists remain convinced that
the fight is futile, that treatments will ultimately fail, that
we’re merely ‘delaying the inevitable’.
I needed to try something drastic. Throwing a bucket of
water onto a raging fire was not enough to put it out. It was
an urgent situation that required an immediate response.
Stage IV in most cases means you have a year or less to
live, if you stick to orthodox definitions. Stage III means
you generally have at least a year to live, with the
possibility of overcoming the cancer completely – if you’re
lucky. The bigger it is, the more aggressive it is and the
further it has spread means the response must be
proportionally greater. And, I surmised, be attacked from
more angles. Was this not common sense? So why did
oncologists persist in their monotherapeutic approach,
attacking merely the genetic angle and not the metabolic?
It was clear that I had lots of work to do. Monotherapy
meant treating every single cancer patient like a guinea pig
in one great big experiment. We all buy into trials because
we’re sold the belief that it’s ‘for the greater good’. But a
disease as complex as this demands an equally complex
solution. Combinations of metabolic and genetic. The
metabolic approach was not even acknowledged, it was as
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if it had no importance at all. And what of patient choice? A
stage IV patient is defined as ‘terminal’ or in the ‘final
stage’. Were we not allowed any say in our treatment
decisions? In the manner of our deaths? Were we just
pawns in a system that serves the pharmaceutical industry?
I was not going to let fear guide my decisions.
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Chapter Five:
A Cancer Sherlock Holmes
And so began my quest for answers.
I didn’t limit my search to alternative treatments, as many
patients do. I couldn’t turn my back on conventional
treatment altogether. In fact, many useful areas of
conventional oncology seemed to be completely ignored. I
became a ‘Pubmed’ explorer, scouring endless published
medical articles. A cancer ‘Sherlock Holmes’, piecing
together clues and trying to make sense of the confusing
and complex picture.
Research had focused primarily on the activity of genes in
cancer. But what about the rest of the tumour, like the
growth factors it used to fuel itself? These growth factors,
like IGF-1 and Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF),
were clearly linked to inflammation and metabolic changes
which sugar, meat and dairy intake would only make worse.
It seemed to me that oncology researchers’ focus on
genetic changes blinded them to the overall picture and led
them to ignore the general health of their patients. Cancer
was a systemic disease; markers were detectable in the
blood, so it affected the whole body. It was not just a ‘lump’
to be excised.
Patients often talked of being ‘healthy’ before getting
cancer, but this was almost never true when you dug a little
deeper. There were always prior infections or gut issues or
both. In the medical literature, I came across references to
cyclo-oxygenase or COX inhibitors being useful for cancer. I
had no idea what the heck these were when I first started
looking, but I sure as hell would made it my business to
find out.
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COX (cyclo-oxygenase) was an enzyme linked to
inflammation. COX seemed to be involved in the process of
helping to stimulate new blood vessel growth around the
cancer, stimulating Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor
(VEGF). These new blood vessels brought nutrients to the
cancer to allow it to keep increasing in size, to fuel its
growing biomass. With my troublesome and often swollen
knee, I wondered if I had low-grade inflammation
throughout my body. Perhaps that’s why it was so slow to
get better. I had little doubt I had an inflammatory
component to my disease and my gut instinct told me I
needed to damp this down.
Would a simple anti-inflammatory stop this enzyme?
Indeed, aspirin was a COX 2 inhibitor and a Vascular
Endothelial Growth Factor inhibitor. It seemed like a good
idea to me – all I had to do was walk to the pharmacy and
get it over the counter. But why was it not mentioned or
implemented already by my doctors?
‘How much does my tumour express COX 2?’ I asked my
thoracic surgeon who was soon to operate on my lung.
‘My goodness,’ he said in a somewhat condescending tone,
‘you have been doing your homework.’
‘Yes, I have. I want to know if you think I could take it,’ I
said, slightly affronted by the implication that it was
beyond mere laypeople (he’d forgotten I was a
physiotherapist) to investigate these things, let alone
attempt to understand them, then muster the sheer
audacity to use their special secret language.
‘There’s not enough evidence to suggest it’s useful,’ he
said.
‘Surely surgery causes inflammation? Wouldn’t an antiinflammatory before and after surgery be useful in that
case?’ I pressed on, not in the slightest bit fazed by his
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dismissiveness. I had read that tumour markers invariably
shot up after surgery. Was this rise caused by
inflammation? Or spillage of cancer cells into the blood? Or
a dampening of the immune system? Or quite possibly all of
these?
‘Well, I would be very worried about stomach bleeds,’ he
added. ‘I don’t advise it. It’s up to you if you want to take
that risk, but if you do take it I don’t want you taking it too
close to your surgery as it makes you bleed more.’
Fair enough. I wondered if another non-steroidal antiinflammatory like ibuprofen might be better in the run up
to the surgery as it wasn’t a blood thinner like aspirin. He
thought this would also be risky. It seemed illogical. Or was
he really saying that anything I tried would be futile
anyway?
I wondered what the real risk of taking aspirin was. Other
non-steroidal anti-inflammatories carried a higher risk of
stomach ulcers. As far as I was aware, aspirin seemed to be
liberally prescribed for stroke and heart attack prevention.
If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.
I would look up the stats when I got home.
I made the decision to take aspirin at low dose despite his
negativity, but his words wormed their way into my psyche
in a way that would prove catastrophic years later. Indeed,
if only I had known the risk with aspirin was a mere 2%,
which compared to my 100% risk of dying, would have
made it an easy decision. Any improvement in my survival
odds was surely a risk worth taking! Besides, keeping the
cancer cells circulating would be better than letting them
stick to my blood vessel walls and set up camp somewhere
new.
I continued to probe.
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‘Okay… this surgery. I know that right now it’s only one
tumour, but I’m really worried it might come back
sometime in the future and I might have more tumours next
time. Have you operated on more than one tumour before?’
‘Oh yes. Many,’ he said with a reassuring smile.
‘How many have you taken out at one time?’ I had a
macabre curiosity.
‘Oh… about twenty!’ He said this with obvious pride.
Crikey. Twenty! Was there any lung tissue left after that? I
wanted to know just how skilful he was.
‘Did the patient survive?’ I immediately regretted asking
this question. I knew the answer before he shook his head.
Again the reality of my situation hit me like a train. I was
going to die.
If I was going to die, I might as well enjoy myself feeling
well while I could. Coughing up blood was a constant
source of alarm, but otherwise I really didn’t feel ill as
such. Tired, but not ill. I knew it was the upcoming barbaric
treatments that would mess me up and make me feel
terrible, not the tumour itself.
I continued my questioning, putting on my brave I-candefeat-this face, trying not to stammer with fear or look
shaken by this revelation.
‘Andrew and I have just married. Would it be okay if I
delayed the operation for a few weeks while we have a
honeymoon?’
‘I’m sure that’d be a good idea. Go ahead and I’ll book you
in for the end of September.’
Wow. Five weeks away. An age, particularly when I only had
a mean survival of twelve weeks. Either he didn’t give me
much hope and thus wanted to grant me one last holiday, or
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perhaps he genuinely felt I could afford some time to relax.
I decided, probably incorrectly, it was the latter. My brain
refused to accept he thought my chances were zero. It was
all too depressing. In any case, I felt it was important to
prepare for the onslaught of surgery. Five weeks would be
time well spent. I was definitely in no rush.
As I left the hospital, I’d already decided the conservative
approach was not for me. He hadn’t given me a straight yes
or no about the aspirin and like all risk-averse doctors, had
erred on the cautious side, but sod it. I had stage IV
‘terminal’ cancer. My developing theory was that anything
that might weaken the tumour had to be a good thing.
Attack from every angle. That was my mantra. This was
war. No question I was going to take aspirin! The doctors
found it easy enough to recommend high-dose
chemotherapy! Why was it so hard to recommend humble
aspirin if my gut was okay? Was he just blindly accepting
what he assumed was my predetermined fate, that any
intervention, no matter how small, was ultimately a waste
of time? Perhaps he worried about the heavy hand of the
General Medical Council coming down on him because of
the lack of a randomised clinical trial? The gold standard
which ensures no doctor steps out of line. God forbid
doctors should try anything innovative like low dose aspirin
to help a dying patient!
It was true that we’d just got married. Four days after
discovering the tumour in my lung, I had realised there was
no point waiting until my hair grew back to hold our
wedding. I had no idea how I might respond to chemo, if
indeed I decided to have it. Also, if I was brutally honest
with myself, I didn’t know how much time I had left on the
planet. I had to be realistic as well as positive. Despite my
best efforts, I might not be around in six months. My
feeling was we may as well go ahead and tie the ol’ knot.
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Having confirmed that Andrew did still want to marry me
despite this new diagnosis, I followed up with, ‘How about
this Saturday?’ I wanted to be married but I didn’t want the
distraction of planning it. My dreams of a fairy-tale
wedding were already shattered and I kind of needed it out
of the way. I had a bigger task ahead that demanded my full
attention.
I was delighted to hear Andrew respond, ‘Great idea! Let’s
do it!’ So I took it upon myself to organise the event lastminute, having only just finished cancelling the
arrangements back in Guernsey. I think Andrew was mighty
relieved, to be honest. He hates big parties (I love them)
and was not relishing the idea of a huge event dominated
by my massive family. A quick registry office affair was
much more up his street, even though it wasn’t mine.
‘I’ll book it then,’ I said, glad to have something positive to
do in the midst of so much depressing news.
I phoned the Chelsea Registry Office, but because it was
such a popular venue, and this was August, it was
completely booked up. The Fulham Registry Office was also
fully booked that weekend. But after I put the phone down,
I ran over there in person and had a little chat with the
registrar face-to-face. After I callously played the
‘terminally ill card’, he slotted me in between two other
brides who can’t have been too chuffed about the wedding
assembly line they found themselves on that day.
Andrew’s only two tasks in the whole event were to (1) turn
up and (2) bring a ring. The second half of this extensive
list he somehow managed to completely forget.
‘You do have the ring, don’t you?’ I asked on the morning,
innocently assuming he’d gone shopping as we discussed
the day before while I was having the bronchoscopy. The
look on his face was akin to realising a tarantula was
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running up his leg and if he moved the wrong way he might
be dead.
‘Um… ah… oh.’
Without another word, he turned on his heels and dashed
out the door. He told me later he frightened the life out of
the cleaner in the jewellers (who had yet to open) by
bashing on the door so loudly while she was hoovering she
thought it was an attempted robbery. Fortunately, he had
my engagement ring for size, so, quick as a flash, the
jeweller sorted it out. Andrew came back looking very
sheepish, but I was not cross. We laughed! He was
understandably a little distracted by recent events.
Our wedding day was beautiful. The sun shone, we drank
champagne in the garden and were joined by 23 close
family and friends, some of whom had flown over from
Guernsey. We had cocktails outside in our garden, a case of
pink champagne arrived, courtesy of my fabulous aunt Jane
in Guernsey, then we all walked over the common to the
Registry Office.
After the ceremony, we headed off to lunch in a French
restaurant in Pimlico. There were tears of joy, problems
forgotten, more drinking (at least by everyone but me) and
much merriment.
This photo was taken that day in 1999. I have the lung
tumour but I really don’t think I look unhealthy. I certainly
didn’t feel it. I bought the dress hurriedly on the Thursday
afternoon (my real wedding dress was only half made) and
the flowers were chosen the evening before. Amazing how
much you can arrange in a couple of days. All this less than
a week after my diagnosis of terminal cancer.
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Do I look weak and defeated? No. In that picture is a strong
determined Jane. (And a particularly strong new husband).
The evening finally ended in a fabulous art deco suite in
Claridge’s, bigger than most London flats. This had been a
complete surprise, arranged by our lovely friends – we
thought we were going back home. I felt happy and blessed
to have such support and love. What followed was quite
some party. We had to nudge people out of the door at 2am.
I woke up the following morning a married woman. It felt
good.
But with the wedding over, it was back to the serious
business of research. As every cancer patient soon realises
in this situation, it is an exponential curve of discovery. I
was convinced the clues to survival were out there if only I
could find them. I could not believe after all these years of
medical and scientific advance that there weren’t drugs or
treatments that could destroy my cancer.
It was 1999. We flew people to the moon, landed rovers on
Mars, connected the world via the Internet, built the
International Space Station, and we had the spectre of
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genetically modified food. How and why did we not have a
cure for cancer?
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Chapter Six:
No Stone Unturned
‘Good God!’ Andrew cried in horror as he picked up a receipt
from the Health Food shop. I’d left it casually – carelessly – on
the kitchen surface. ‘I knew you’d be a high maintenance wife,’
he added with a grin.
”I know. Sorry,’ I said sheepishly as he looked through the bill.
‘Well, as long as you really need them all and you’re not just
creating expensive toilet trips,’ he said, watching me expertly
swallow five supplements at a time.
He was right, of course. How could I be sure they’d do
anything? Were they mostly filler? Did they have the correct
amount of active ingredient? How much lead, cadmium,
arsenic and other nasties did they contain? Was I just throwing
my money straight down the toilet? It was so hard to tell. I
bought quality brands I felt we could afford and kept my
fingers crossed. Even if I only absorbed a little, it might be
enough to tip my body back into health and make the
difference between death and survival.
Every time I read about some exciting new supplement to
target cancer, it went into my cocktail, another addition to my
Spot of Bother Chart. What I had failed to learn at this point
was that there’s a clear distinction between supplements that
prevent cancer and supplements that treat it. There is a
tipping point in cancer development, where some antioxidants
useful for prevention (low oral doses of vitamin C, E and NAcetyl Cysteine aka NAC, a precursor of glutathione, a master
antioxidant) then switch allegiance and support the enemy,
helping to promote and fuel its resistance to apoptosis (death),
effectively making it immortal. I was to learn this later. In these
early days, I simply took the lot.
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Over the next few months, between hospital visits, my head
was stuck into every reference book I could find, discovering,
learning, trying to decipher fact from fiction. Hearsay and
anecdotes were not enough to convince me to try something. I
drove my oncologist and integrative doctors mad with
questions, almost to the point of mental combustion. I rifled
through endless scientific papers. There had to be real hard
scientific evidence. Although there was often no real ‘science’
behind the stories, anecdotes of survival against the odds were
also therapy. I bought as many of these as I could, looking for
any kind of recurring pattern that linked them. I was desperate
to find clues that it was even possible.
Every unusual disappearance of the disease was described as a
‘spontaneous remission’ by the medics, a deprecating term
when you realised the herculean effort involved to achieve it.
Each appeared to be linked with a radical change in diet.
Cutting out sugar was a common theme. While these worked
for some cancer patients, few anti-cancer diets I investigated
seemed to go far enough in lowering glucose. The term
ketogenic diet , a more extreme low glycaemic diet, had not
even been coined in those days. Bizarrely, some diets still
included honey and pizza, bread and other starchy foods, foods
I would class as high glycaemic, they released a lot of glucose.
As a result, they still raised insulin levels. Surely these would
be disastrous for cancer patients.
This was the diet espoused by Professor Jane Plant in her
bestselling book, Your life In Their Hands . Her focus had been
on lowering IGF-1 by cutting down on meat and dairy.
Professor Plant’s diet suggested a swap from sugar to honey,
which seemed illogical to me. How would that starve the
cancer of glucose? Sugar is sugar in all its guises, honey
included.
My Spot of Bother Chart thus far only had treatments I’d heard
about while researching for my mother. It was 1999 and
information was still hard to come by. Now Facebook is awash
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with ‘cures’ and alternative doctors ready to share the latest
trend. In fact, it has now become too confusing to track.
Back then, with a bit of digging online I found the Gerson diet,
macrobiotics, proteolytic enzymes, bitter almonds, and
intravenous vitamin C. I hadn’t been radical enough with my
diet but I was not convinced that Gerson took the whole low
sugar approach far enough either. Potatoes were allowed for a
start – they were definitely on my banned list! Not only would
they potentially elevate insulin and glucose levels, they were
part of the nightshade family of plants and could cause gut
reactions. While potatoes were alkaline foods and neutralised
acid foods, they can also cause inflammation, something I knew
to be a major factor in my cancer. Today, you can buy kits to
test yourself for inflammatory reactions to food with just a few
drops of blood. Interestingly the Gerson approach seemed to
work best for melanoma patients. What was so different about
this cancer? Was it metabolically different to other cancers,
less driven by glucose? (It turns out it is more driven by fat and
glutamine – so ketogenic diets are a disaster for melanoma
patients).
Cancer diet books in 1999 focused mainly on either
macrobiotics or Gerson. I thought both had their merits and
pitfalls, but the low-glycaemic approach of macrobiotics with
its emphasis on whole high fibre complex carbohydrates
seemed to make more sense to me. The seaweed element,
disgusting as it sounded, was probably useful; I’d wondered if I
might have an underactive thyroid and I wanted to boost my
iodine levels naturally. Seaweed was said to do just that.
I instinctively felt my focus should be on starving the cancer,
but there was very little information about keeping blood
glucose low. I could find no information on this specific to
cancer.
A diabetic friend of mine had discussed low-glycaemic diets
with me when I treated him with physiotherapy. I had saved
him from major back surgery. At the time I had been
researching for my mum and as a thank you, he gave me a
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book by a Frenchman called Michel Montignac. Michel
Montignac was the first to actively promote a low-glycaemic
diet to the public. It was called Eat Yourself Slim . Perhaps my
friend was really just telling me I was a fatty!
His diet method became very popular in Europe in the 1990s.
It was designed for weight loss, to avoid cardiovascular disease
and diabetes, but not for cancer. Montignac had been a
seriously chubby young man and had ended up working for the
pharmaceutical industry. He realised that it was the high
glycaemic foods that caused weight gain and health problems.
He was the first to expose the hoax of calorie counting. The
quality and choice of what you ate was far more important than
counting the energy input versus the energy output. Je Mange
donc Je Maigris (I eat but lose weight) was a very popular book.
It certainly seemed a good idea to adopt the low glycaemic
principles.
I discovered that eating fat on its own was apparently not a
problem for insulin and glucose levels. It wasn’t the demon it
was made out to be for cardiovascular health. I memorised the
glycaemic value of different foods, the amount of insulin
released by the pancreas to deal with the sudden spike of
glucose released after a meal. And how food preparation and
the method of cooking could make big differences to the
glycaemic index.
Reducing blood sugar was my primary focus but I worried
about the type of fat I ate. High-fat diets had been linked to
cancer too. As if to prove the point, I discovered Michel
Montignac had died at the young age of 63 of prostate cancer.
His heart and insulin levels perfect. Prostate cancer I was to
learn was driven by fat and protein.
Low-glycaemic diets made perfect sense to reduce blood
glucose. I still lacked any further specific information on how
precisely to starve my cancer of the nutrients it craved. But
lowering glucose and saturated fat seemed to be critical. I was
concerned that high fat diets might be too taxing on my liver
and gallbladder.
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Je Mange donc Je Maigris was a forerunner to the more famous
Atkins diet and the recent Eat Fat Get Thin by Dr Mark Hyman,
who has gone further into healthier fats – from eggs, nuts,
avocados, olive oil and coconut oil. Both books are focused on
losing weight; they weren’t written for cancer. Cancer nutrition
needs specialist attention beyond weight loss and heart
disease. The principles of the diet, though, were the real
message. In particular, they taught me which foods raised
glucose and insulin (high-glycaemic foods); how to best
combine foods; how to best prepare foods; and that slow
cooking was preferable to both speedy cooking and
overcooking.
Simple carbohydates – refined grains, sugars, some fruits –
triggered spikes in glucose and insulin levels. The liver then
converted excess carbs and fat to more fat. This was the
problem. Slower-release carbohydrates, in contrast, did not
lead to an insulin or glucose spike. Fat without sugar just got
shuttled out of the body (through the reverse cholesterol
transport system, I would later learn).
But I still wasn’t sure what to do about fat. Too many of the
omega-6 oils (sunflower, canola) routinely used for cooking
encourage angiogenesis – the growth of new blood vessels
around a tumour to provide it with nutrients. These were
definitely on the banned list.
Perhaps it was a lack of omega-3 fats in our diets? Found in
fish, these damp down inflammation and help put the brakes
on cancer. Did some saturated fats help drive cancer, then?
Coconut oil was saturated. Could it be trusted? It’s become the
‘oil du jour’ nowadays and an integral part of a ketogenic diet.
Coconut oil may in part be good – the Medium Chain
Triglycerides – MCT part – which makes up 13-15% of coconut
oil, but the rest might be less beneficial. I decided to stick to
olive oil and small amounts of butter to cook with. Grass fed
butter contains an important ingredient called CLA
(conjugated linoleic acid) which has been linked to lower rates
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of cancer. I also took CLA as a supplement (sea buckthorn oil
may be a better choice).
Researching cancer treatments was as clear as mud.
Particularly if there were no proper trials conducted or the
data had been manipulated. 2 I was learning that gut health
was crucially important for the immune system, but I was more
than dubious of those coffee enemas encouraged by the Gerson
Protocol. I worried that while they allegedly ‘cleansed’ the
colon, probably a good thing, if the enemas were done to
excess (and the Gerson diet seemed to suggest three times a
day!) then you might be losing valuable nutrients or
electrolytes, like magnesium.
According to the Gerson diet, the enemas could encourage
more glutathione to be released by the liver, which I soon
learned might actually help cancer progress. Might this be a
potential disaster? Like most patients I’ve met, I made the
common mistake of thinking glutathione would be beneficial
for cancer. If I were to try enemas, it would be straightforward
colonics after my chemotherapy and using water only.
Proteolytic enzymes are a large part of Gerson therapy and
would do me no harm, as far as I could tell. They’d at least help
me absorb food better. But the suggestion was to take these
between meals, allegedly to dissolve the outer fibrin protection
of cancer. I was not sure this was the reason they worked.
Cancer had been often linked to parasites. Perhaps they helped
get rid of parasites in the gut by dissolving their protein
membranes. Not that I knew I had any at this stage. 3 Bitter
almonds or laetrile seemed interesting. Could they help to
selectively kill my cancer? Every time I found something that
looked useful there was something conflicting in another book
or website.
I bought many books, subscribed to integrative cancer and
health journals, and spent weeks in the library, sipping green
tea, popping my ever-expanding quantities of supplements and
knocking back (as quickly as possible) my revolting ‘primordial
soup’. I scoured medical journals, PubMed, and Medline. I read
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many self-help books and huge tomes on alternative cancer
therapies, desperately looking for clues. Dr Ralph Moss and
Burton Goldberg were fascinating and informative on
complementary treatments. How many of these might help me?
Iscador, a mistletoe treatment, seemed interesting. Coleys
toxins? Essiac tea? No stone unturned. But what had the best
evidence? Intravenous vitamin C at high doses seemed to have
good evidence for increasing oxygen around a tumour. That
would help kill it.
I wondered what might happen if I combined chemotherapy
and intravenous vitamin C. Would it boost its effects and help
maintain my immune system? I was tempted to have a go at
alternating the two, but in the end fear of the unknown got the
better of me. I would have it as soon as I finished chemo and
perhaps the supplements would be enough to maintain my
immune system.
After visiting Dr Etienne Callebout, a very knowledgeable
integrative doctor, my Spot of Bother Chart was filling up
nicely. I collated all the information and went with my gut, as
well as with my research, on what I felt would work best for
me.
Dr Callebout wanted to do a full examination, send off a stool
sample for a thorough analysis of my gut bacteria and take a
blood specimen to evaluate my vitamin, amino acid and fatty
acid status. But as soon as he learnt I was to have
chemotherapy he decided there was little point until I’d
finished. These blood and stool tests went on my ‘to do’ list. I
would wait for a month post-chemo to allow my poor body to
settle.
Dr Callebout also guessed I was low on folate, as I had been
given methotrexate chemotherapy when I was first diagnosed.
Folate is necessary for the de novo (‘from new’) formation of a
nucleoside, a building block of DNA, specifically thymine.
Methotrexate in effect ‘starved’ the cancer of this vital B
vitamin needed to create a new daughter cell DNA.
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Interesting. Was it safe to add folate into my regime again? Dr
Callebout said if I was not taking methotrexate or 5FU then I
should supplement with B vitamins – these were essential for
detoxifying my body of excess ‘bad’ oestrogen (oestradiol),
which I knew to stimulate cancer growth. He also
recommended I take the B vitamin niacin, even though it gave
me an odd flush for a few minutes. This happens to most
people who take it. It is totally normal and does not suggest
toxicity. 4 I now believe niacin should be part of most cancer
protocols – it helps starve cancer by reducing fat.
I was now taking supplements I hoped would target and block
different cancer pathways and growth factors, angles ignored
by conventional medicine. I was soon on a first-name basis with
the owners of my local health food store – I’m quite sure I
single-handedly kept them in business. All further receipts
went promptly into the bin, out of Andrew’s sight.
At first, I found it hard to believe that potentially useful
treatments were forced into obscurity. Yet the more I
researched, the clearer it became that many studies were
biased, that data was often hidden, and that methodology was
frequently twisted to confuse the results. As my knowledge
grew, so did my realisation that cancer was first and foremost a
business. Anything that didn’t have a patent was belittled by
the industry, particularly by some of the big cancer charities.
Survival with alternative approaches seemed to be littered with
failures, but then so were conventional ones. I guessed this
may have been partly because patients often started to look for
complementary therapies too late. Generally, the longer cancer
is present, the harder it becomes to treat. So I kept an open
mind.
I noted that people tended to throw their faith behind just one
modality. Nowadays people are not only terrified by
chemotherapy, with more patients refusing it than ever before,
but there seems to be an obsession with cannabis oil,
regardless of the strength of the THC or CBD content. I see
many patients using cannabis, DCA, or the ketogenic diet to
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the exclusion of anything else. It seemed obvious to me that
combining approaches was far more effective.
But combining treatments requires a huge dollop of courage.
What will the interaction be? Is it safe? Targeting different
cancer pathways at the same time were surely the way
forward, but a patient needs the guidance of a qualified doctor
experienced in nutritional and medical interventions. The
growth in numbers of Functional Medicine Practitioners is a
relief to all cancer patients. However most people cannot
afford this kind of help, and with a shortage of integrative
oncologists, many go it alone on a wish and a prayer.
The first rule in war is to Know Thy Enemy. This rule
underpinned everything I did. I had to put fear of the unknown
aside. This was ‘no time for feak and weebleness’ as my sister
used to say when I was feeling drained. She was right. A lot of
it was in my head. Stay strong, stay positive, and never give up
looking for answers. I was convinced they were out there, even
if neither the conventional nor the complementary side had the
complete answer. What else had I missed, that neither side
were using?
A hallmark of cancer is that a patient’s white blood cells fail to
recognise their own cancer as the enemy. Cancer seems to
switch them off. They needed to be woken up again. Might it be
possible to reactivate the immune system in some way? If each
treatment I discovered weakened and ‘switched off’ a different
part of cancer’s armour, adding them all together might
eventually allow my immune system a chance to gain the upper
hand. Could it then deliver the final punch?
Still unsure about chemotherapy, I came across a new option
called insulin potentiated chemotherapy. The insulin made the
cancer cells more permeable to chemo, so you didn’t need as
much. It was reportedly getting a lot of success. Still I didn’t
like the thought of all that extra insulin. It might make the cell
more permeable to glucose too. I decided to put it on the
backburner in the event that everything else failed.
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Andrew and I sat down and had a chat about how we should
handle the problem of having so many options and no clear
roadmap.
‘The only way is to approach it scientifically,’ I said. ‘We need
to know how all these different options actually affect my
cancer. I’m getting blood markers taken now. Maybe they’ll
show what’s working and what isn’t.’
Andrew set up an Excel spreadsheet and we began plotting my
blood antigen marker levels on a chart. Although there was
likely to be a bit of variation, I might be able to spot a trend
when I began a new line of treatment. I wanted to approach it
with my decisions based on evidence, not guesswork, even
though I knew I could be making mistakes. I was aware it
could all go horribly wrong and time could run out before I’d
discovered anything.
Hunting for reliable advice on the Internet is as confusing as
trying to sail in thick fog. And potentially as dangerous. I came
up against conflicting and alarming advice, especially about
the use of supplements, vitamins, and juicing. Trying to
extrapolate and dissect out the truth can be difficult.
For this reason, Dr Google can be your foe. Half an hour on
Cancer Research UK (the aim of which is to reduce the number
of deaths from cancer) has a strategy to get more patients into
trials, – it’s ‘Big Pharma’ thinly disguised, or on Wikipedia
(founder Jimmy Wales has long been a staunch critic of
alternative and complementary therapies) will have you
running a mile from anything unconventional. Pharmaceutical
companies do not want you to try anything other than their
unholy trinity of chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgery or
the latest targeted drugs and immunotherapies. I had to dig
deeper. Much, much deeper.
Big Pharma would rather you didn’t know about a natural
substance until they’ve worked out a way of copying the
beneficial effects with a lucrative patented drug. At the time of
writing, if you look up ‘disproven cancer treatments’ on
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Wikipedia you can see two major cancer charities in action.
Quick, before they change it! One of these charities has tried
for years to patent a synthetic formulation of resveratrol while
denying that this supplement is of any help despite easy-to-find
research that proves just how useful it is.
The same with hydroxycitrate, a supplement that mimics
fasting and improves the effectiveness of chemotherapy. The
same charity is happy to tell you that a diet or short-term
fasting is dangerous, despite burgeoning evidence to the
contrary. What about stage IV terminal cancer? Isn’t that more
dangerous? The advice is not to try any diet or supplement
until there’s a nice patented drug available.
Debate and contention was just as evident in 1999 as it is
today. Back then, research did not fall into my lap at the touch
of a button. No Facebook, no support groups, no Internet chat
rooms, no list of resources from helpful charities like
Yestolife.org.uk . All I had were journals, books, and medical
sites like Pubmed and Medline.
Only a couple of weeks after my diagnosis and intense
research, I was brimming with new knowledge and ready to
take a much-needed break. We flew off for a few days’ belated
honeymoon in Majorca, soaking up some essential vitamin D,
taking the rest of my supplements with me in their ziplocked
sachets. I was quite sure I was going to be stopped at security
and forced to explain why I was carrying this suspiciouslooking stash.
Andrew had booked us into the honeymoon suite of a four-star
hotel. Our room opened out onto a private pool. We were
greeted by rose petals strewn over the bed in the shape of a
heart. It was a relaxed, soothing atmosphere. The husband had
done well! Tick.
It was just what I needed. For five days, I meditated and swam
every day, went on long scenic walks and ate a healthy low
carbohydrate Mediterranean diet doused with lots of extra
virgin olive oil. It was heaven.
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This was a pre-surgery strategy I can highly recommend to
anyone who can afford it. Having surmised I was not about to
drop dead from the tumour, that it wasn’t pushing on vital
arteries or any other life-threatening structures, I took my time
to make sure I was in a fit state for the operation, mentally and
physically. I knew what treatment traumas lay ahead.
Delaying my surgery was a decision I will never regret. The
knee-jerk reaction of almost every cancer patient is to want to
remove a tumour as soon as humanly possible. The thought
that they’re harbouring a parasitic alien creature in their
bodies means they can’t book themselves in for surgery fast
enough. Panic influences far too many early decisions and
patients often feel bullied into early operations. Having
evaluated the dangers of my situation, I decided I needed time
to allow the aspirin, my radical diet and the supplements to get
to work. I was not going to be rushed.
Surgery replicates the inflammatory process of mass
‘apoptosis’ and subsequent fibrinogen (scar tissue) production
and this suppresses important T cells and Natural Killer cells,
exactly the ones your body needs to knock out the cancer. It
triggers an inflammatory reaction in the body, one reason I felt
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin were so
important. Tackling the problem of post-surgical metastatic
spread is an area still ignored by mainstream medics despite
its huge potential for massive improvement in survival
outcomes at little cost or toxicity.
Science has revealed that my decision to take aspirin
perioperatively was correct. Anti-inflammatory drugs used for
two or three weeks before surgery and then for up to a year
after have been shown to massively improve survival statistics.
Around 90 per cent of cancers are not immediately deadly, but
cause death by metastasising. Cancer patients regularly live
with large tumours, so it was stopping further metastases that
was important. Low dose aspirin (75mg) prevents metastasis
by about 20 per cent 5 , greater gains can be made in some
inflammatory cancers with short term stronger NSAIDs up to
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70%. Instant improvements in survival by these simple
interventions continue to be overlooked by surgeons who pride
themselves that good surgery is the main reason that cancer
patients survive. They could vastly improve statistics if they
would only add an anti-inflammatory before and after their
excellent surgical skills.
I knew my natural defences needed to be at their highest
during surgery. Why give my already stressed body all that
extra work?
After the negativity of my surgeon I still had my worries about
gastric bleeding, so I asked my GP his thoughts. He was a little
more encouraging.
‘Lots of people take low dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks
and strokes so it should be okay,’ he said after a little thought.
‘Would taking an antacid help protect my stomach?’ I asked
‘I’m not sure about that. We don’t like to suggest taking more
than one drug at a time and I don’t know what effect it would
have on your cancer, so best not,’ he added If only I had
discovered cimetidine (or Tagamet) at this time. This was in
widespread clinical use for gastric ulcers, and the first antacid
on the market. It used to be freely available over the counter in
the UK and has since been shown to have enormous potential,
attacking cancer through multiple pathways. Long term use of
antacids has been linked to gastric cancer though, but a shortterm hit could have been a great help.
When I discovered cimetidine in 2007, many years later, I took
it for three months for its immune-boosting effects and I still
occasionally take it. Cimetidine, I realise now, would have also
helped protect my stomach from the aspirin and may even
have provided a bigger anti-cancer punch if I’d taken them
together. The downside is that this anti-histamine inhibits a
detoxifying liver enzyme (cytochrome P450), meaning it
increases the dosage of any other drug you may be taking. But
this could be used in a beneficial way too, increasing either the
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plasma level of a drug or delaying clearance to maintain the
anti-cancer effects in the body.
One of its potential uses may be post-operatively. If you are a
patient recovering from surgery, there is a critical period of
seven days when you experience a surge of T suppressor cells.
These subdue levels of white cells called tumour infiltrating
lymphocytes (TILs), which are the good guys that fight your
tumour cells. Suppression of these allies is one reason cancer
may flourish after surgery in the inflamed environment, the
effects becoming visible about 10 months after surgery.
Cimetidine helps reverse the suppression of the T suppressor
cells, which in turn helps keep the levels of tumour infiltrating
lymphocytes up. If I had discovered this vital piece of evidence
before my lung operation I have little doubt I would have taken
it after my lung operation for those critical seven days. 6
Cimetidine is also sometimes effective against Epstein Barr
Virus, even when the virus is latent, and this is implicated
(along with the HPV virus and MMTV) for activating many
breast cancers. When the patent lapsed, cimetidine went out of
fashion in the UK and unless you have friends in either
Canada, the US or Germany where it’s still available over the
counter, it can be hard to obtain.
Ranitidine (Zantac, an H2 inhibitor) and cetirizine (H1
inhibitor), are both readily accessible antihistamines that can
be bought over the counter. These may be useful for both their
antiviral and anti-cancer effects, boosting tumour infiltrating
lymphocytes, and helping to protect the gut from gastric
bleeds, possibly working best together. (As always, check with
your health practitioner).
Perhaps I should have been more confident about my aspirin
use, which I took cyclically, a few weeks on, a few weeks off,
put off by my surgeon. A study 7 by Professor Peter Elwood at
Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, looking at the overall
risk of stomach bleeds using aspirin had shown there was no
increased risk of death from stomach bleeding in people who
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take regular low-dose (75mg) aspirin, and that the spontaneous
bleeds from non-users were far more dangerous.
Elwood hoped his study would make doctors more comfortable
prescribing aspirin. Other research agrees. Low doses of
aspirin, given alongside chemoradiation, boost the effects of
this therapy and increase the five year progression-free
survival (86.6% vs 67.1%) with a lower risk of metastasis. 8
Generally caution is needed giving aspirin alongside
chemotherapy as this could increase the risk of bleeding but
there are benefits to adding it to radiation therapy. My
rationale was, and still is, that all these little additions were
not just cumulative but worked in synergy, multiplying each
other’s effects. If I approached from all these different
directions, would I be able to tip the odds back in my favour
and steer a course to health?
The early use of anti-inflammatory drugs and growth blockers,
like the humble aspirin, made so much sense to me. Why was it
that oncologists and surgeons who should know these facts,
still resisted? When faced with overwhelming odds of failure,
why was it unreasonable to try a combination that might
produce a synergistic and potent anti-cancer formula?
If 90 per cent of deaths are a direct result of the cancer
spreading, stopping 20 per cent of metastases would improve
cancer survival statistics significantly. And that’s just with
aspirin. It is shocking that only in 2016 did Cancer Research
UK begin a trial of aspirin – the ‘AddAspirin trial’ – but at
dangerous levels of 100mg, 300mg and even 600mg! It’s a
double-blind trial, meaning neither the patient nor the doctor
will know the dosage given. If and when patients end up with
stomach bleeding as a direct result of these higher doses, will
they then claim that the risk is too great, putting cancer
patients off taking it and thereby keeping the pharmaceutical
industry alive? Every other piece of research suggests the half
dose of 75mg is enough and the evidence is there to see.
Professor Peter Rothwell has run many trials on aspirin, all
reported in the Lancet or Lancet Oncology. Simply, I believe
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the trial is not needed and is a waste of public money. It would
be more productive for the cancer charity to lobby NICE to
change their guidelines and list low-dose aspirin as an anticancer medication.
If you’re one of the intended 11,000 participants in the
AddAspirin trial, I urge you to check the literature and discuss
with a doctor familiar with gastro-intestinal problems before
taking what could be potentially harmful levels of anticoagulants. Consider taking a smaller amount of aspirin,
otherwise you may be putting yourself at unnecessary risk of
harm. In the meantime, patients could needlessly die without
that small preventative dose. As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘An
ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ Ah, but there is
no money to be made in prevention.
Many natural substances can help reduce inflammation. I had
included quite a few of them in my pre-surgery regime: ginger,
curcumin from turmeric and of course omega-3 fish oils,
clinically proven to reduce inflammation and increasingly used
in lieu of drugs for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. All
these supplements have well-researched anti-cancer effects.
Even old-school oncologists know of curcumin! They don’t
suggest it though.
As I went about discovering more about cancer, I realised I
needed to reduce something called vascular endothelial growth
factor (VEGF). VEGF is a main stimulator of tumour growth,
encouraging the development of new blood cells to feed itself –
a process called angiogenesis. Aspirin, as well as reducing
inflammation, also reduces angiogenesis.
At this point, my menu of supplements was as follows:
green tea with high levels of the catechin ECGC
ellagic acid (found in pomegranates, raspberries, walnuts,
very hard to source as a supplement at the time!)
resveratrol
silibinin (milk thistle)
Pycnogenol
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B vitamins (sublingual methylated form of B12 and folate)
Glucosamine sulphate
Curcumin
CLA
Pycnogenol, like aspirin, can increase the risk of bleeds so it
needs to be taken with caution. It’s a patented blend of several
bark extracts (aspirin comes from bark too) but it can also
lower blood sugar. I took it with aspirin even though I might
have been doubling their risks, reasoning that cancer patients
have far worse risk of blood clots. As instructed, I stopped all
anti-coagulants several days (some surgeons suggest a week)
before my operation. I had no intention of bleeding to death on
the operating table!
The operation went well with no complications. One third of my
lung was gone. Oh well. I could live with that. Pre-op I’d had
exceptionally good lung volumes, above normal, so now I was
about average. Damn. I didn’t like being average.
After surgery, my blood antigen markers were taken again. Postsurgical metastatic spread is a common problem, and I knew
that blocking VEGF with the aspirin peri-operatively would
have helped. But waiting to hear the results made me feel sick
with worry.
It took all day to summon the courage to phone up to find out.
On the one hand, I wanted to stay in denial. But on the other, I
knew I needed to plot and chart these markers. My head
eventually won the argument. Sticking it in the sand was not
going to help.
Andrew stood next to me as I received the news. I was gutted
to learn my markers had surged to a new high, a reading of
nearly 600, up from 190 despite my best efforts. Normal was
anything under 150. This meant I now had tumour cells
roaming around my body in my blood. I couldn’t bear to think
about it.
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I was so dismayed. I told myself it was to be expected, surgery
always did this, but I was incredibly disappointed. I felt I was
failing already. My positive mood sunk again. Would I ever get
back in the driving seat or did the cancer now control me?
Medical interventions had made me worse, but I was hoping
this was just a temporary problem. Had I tipped it to the point
of no control? Was I powerless to defeat it? How could I get
those markers down now? Had surgery been a mistake?
Andrew was far more practical. ‘We knew that was going to
happen, you told me the markers would go up. Try not to worry
about it too much. It won’t help. You always said there’d be a
spillage of tumour cells and inflammation. Let’s stick to the
plan and keep those tumour cells whizzing around your system.
You told me it was when they got stuck in the blood vessel wall
that they can then metastasise.’
He was right. I had decided the best strategy would be to keep
those pesky cells in my circulation and not allow them a
chance to settle, to cling to the blood vessel linings
(endothelium) and set up camp somewhere else in my body. It
was the metastases, or secondary cancers, that caused death.
If I kept the little blighters moving with aspirin, an anticoagulant, might my army of cancer-killing white cells be able
to pick them off? Aspirin was also an anti-platelet drug. If the
platelets were kept from forming little clumps that hid the
tumour cells, would my Natural Killer cells, my white cell army,
find it easier to win?
I now added nattokinase, an enzyme supplement that digests
fibrin to reduce my tendency to excessive scarring. Combined
with the aspirin, they would help keep my blood from
becoming too sticky. With hindsight, some blood clotting tests
(rather than just self-hacking) would have been useful. Clotting
issues can be a tricky and very personalised area requiring
professional advice. Getting this wrong could be dangerous.
After the operation, life was a daily ritual of green and
apple/carrot/celery/beetroot juices, swallowing pills,
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meditating, and engaging in gentle exercise, such as a brisk
walk or a bike ride. Then came the dilemma of chemotherapy.
I wasn’t sure what to do, but now that my cancer markers had
shot up so high, chemo seemed the right choice. It would help
mop up the potential of ‘micro-metastases’, any little clumps of
cancer cells. However, it would also suppress my immunity.
What if I only had enough chemo to kill cancer but not enough
to wreck the immune cells in my gut? Perhaps I could have half
the normal dose for twice as long? It might be less damaging.
Why did I have to have the ‘maximum tolerated dose’ anyway?
Was more really better? It seemed so brutal. And onedimensional. Given that I was already attacking the cancer
from so many angles, was it possible that chemotherapy could
be equally effective at much smaller doses?
And were there drugs or supplements that might synergise
with chemotherapy? I’d discovered green tea, resveratrol and
curcumin all made it more effective and decided to carry on
with these if the nausea would allow it. 9
When I had raised the subject of taking supplements with
chemotherapy to my oncologist, her response had been
immediately negative.
‘You have to try and make this as effective as possible.
Antioxidants can wreck chemotherapy’s power. It’s best if you
avoid all of them.’
But green tea was an antioxidant. So was resveratrol. Both had
well reported anti-cancer effects in combination with chemo. I
deduced there were particular antioxidants that were
synergistic with chemotherapy and others that might interfere.
I was not convinced she was right. The articles I had read
stated quite clearly that there were benefits.
Ultimately, I decided that chemo was something I probably had
to undergo, despite my huge reservations. I was under a lot of
pressure, not just from the oncologist but also from my family. I
knew if I refused it would cause enormous stress for them.
They’d be terrified that I was turning it down and ‘doing
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nothing’, passively waiting for cancer to return. But to me,
chemo felt like passive acceptance.
As I have come to realise, many patients die of politeness to
their oncologist and fear of upsetting their loved ones. It
happens far more than anyone would imagine. Relatives and
friends wade in with their personal opinions on what you
should do, pushing for high-dose toxic treatments because
that’s what the men and women in the white coats recommend.
Conversely, some well-meaning relatives put patients off chemo
altogether, when it could be so much more effective if used
differently. Oncologists give either the maximum tolerated dose
or a palliative dose. Too much or too little. Neither will be
curative. Where is the sensible middle ground? One that
doesn’t crucify the immune system? Perhaps a low dose of
chemotherapy that is used in combination with other
treatments?
Being ill is quite enough to contend with, without this extra
emotional baggage. Tip-toeing around everyone to make sure
all their wishes and wants are looked after. My family were of
course gunning for me to survive and fortunately for me they
didn’t interfere with my decisions, though I was sure they
didn’t always approve. They were expecting the disease to
return, expecting to watch the ‘car crash’ happen in slow
motion. The medics among them had been told there was no
cure and that death was inevitable. They watched silently, not
sure what to say, wondering whether I might be harming
myself or making things worse, hastening my demise.
Chemotherapy reduced the size of tumours. Agreed. It was
hard to argue against it. But did it get rid of cancer? I had read
that chemotherapy given to stage IV patients encouraged the
cancer to come back faster and more aggressively than before.
This is because chemo and radiotherapy fail to touch the
cancer stem cells. My oncologist agreed that it was a crude
and blunt tool and that it caused much collateral damage, but
she had little else to offer me. How to get those pesky cancer
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stem cells? Would they respond to being starved? Be that
cancer-starving supplements or an altered diet?
So my choice was either high dose or nothing. Low dose was
not even an option in 1999 (and still isn’t offered, despite good
evidence that it’s as effective and less damaging to the immune
system). Cancer was an invincible foe requiring the most
barbaric of treatments, wasn’t it? A full onslaught with huge
potential for personal suffering. How else could it be defeated?
Anything less would surely not be enough.
But as much as I told myself that, another voice inside me
whispered that there were options. Perhaps I could start with a
high dose and taper it off? After a couple of months, maybe I
could persuade my oncologist to gradually lower it if I was
responding well. That seemed to be a good compromise. I
might have to lay it on thick though, complain loudly about
side effects to persuade her.
I knew boosting my immunity would be key to surviving. The
immune system is ultimately the master controller, the final
piece of the jigsaw, and it would be needed to wipe out the
cancer cells naturally. In contrast, high dose chemo was an
immune system destroyer and the statistics clearly showed it
failed in every case at my stage of disease. Perhaps a reduced
tumour load would make it easier for my body to cope? Even as
I said it to myself, I was not convinced.
Reducing the stress hormone cortisol would be essential.
Raised levels suppressed lymphocytes in the gut, in an area
known as GALT, the central hub of my immune cells.
Intermittent fasting or reducing food quantities, I’d read, also
helped immunity. On the advice of Dr Callebout I dropped my
food intake significantly. I finished eating for the day at 6
o’clock in the evening (although he suggested 3 o’clock) and
ate a late breakfast. I added medicinal mushrooms, maitake-Dfraction, beta glucans, a rice bran extract called MGN3, DHEA,
and melatonin at night. All would help boost the number of
Natural Killer cells (NK cells) in my body to help counter the
immune depleting effects of the chemotherapy.
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Although I was outwardly positive and upbeat, I desperately
needed to address my rocketing stress levels. My constant
research was taking over my life and inevitably I’d regularly
come across my deeply depressing survival statistics. No
matter how hard I tried they’d knock me back for days.
I knew making it to six months would be an achievement. The
cloak of death could descend at any moment and smother me,
striking me down when I was momentarily off-guard. Cancer
demanded my full attention. Someone told me I would have to
get through ‘180 dark days of the soul’ until I could start to
come to terms with the diagnosis. Would I even get that far?
My soul felt pretty gloomy already as I peered over the edge
into that fathomless abyss below.
These negative feelings needed banishment. I was tormenting
myself with such morbid thoughts. Cancer was all-consuming,
it allowed precious little time for joy, laughter, and fun.
I had read that hypnotherapy might be useful, so I sought out a
brilliant hypnotherapist based in Putney. He was wonderful.
After every session, he handed me a personalised tape of his
treatment to play back at home. When I first started seeing
him, my future timeline stopped at just six months. Eventually
he talked me into believing I had a future that would last years.
Yes! His sessions helped me improve my diet and encouraged
me to drink more – I had been very dehydrated. He also
focused on the white cell army roaming my system. Through
visualisation, l could see those white cells as soldiers, picking
off the nasty intruders one by one.
As well as hypnotherapy, I also received spiritual healing from
a local healer, I learnt to meditate, went for walks in the park,
and spent time connecting with nature. When everyone else
was complaining about the wet, blustery weather, I’d wrap up
warm and grin as I paced around the park, Mother Nature
battering me with her awesome power. I saw beauty when
everyone else saw the mundane. The twinkle of dew drops, the
greenness of the leaves, the majesty of trees and the hills, the
sparkle of the spray when I was sailing. Why did everyone
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complain so? Why didn’t people rejoice every morning to be,
well, alive? It was as if the rest of the world was too busy,
wrapped up in day-to-day minutiae to realise what an
incredible blessing it was to be part of creation.
I would lie on the ground, stare up at the sky and feel my
connection to the infinite universe. How small and insignificant
I was. How lucky I was to be alive. I felt reborn, like I was
seeing life through the eyes of a child.
Just three months after finding the spot of bother in my lung,
I’d made huge strides. My list of supplements was growing,
even if it seemed to be never ending. I wanted the terrain, the
area around the cancer cell, to be as inhospitable as possible
and the rest of my body functioning as well as it could. My diet
was becoming ever more extreme as I gradually added in more
low-glycaemic foods and took out simple carbohydrates and
inflammatory foods. To my surprise, I felt less hungry on this
diet and my energy levels soared. I felt truly alive!
Shopping for health foods in 1999 was another nightmare.
Choice was extremely limited. Even green tea was virtually
unheard of in those days. Waitresses stared at me in confusion
when I asked for it in a cafe. ‘Do you mean peppermint?’ they
would ask. Aargh! I took to keeping a ready stock of teabags
with me wherever I went, along with my little sachets of pills.
I was still on the hunt for supplements to lower blood glucose.
It seemed increasingly clear that the medics were ignoring the
obvious. Diabetic patients were a third more likely to contract
cancer – they had higher insulin and higher glucose and both
fuelled cancer’s growth. Was I oversimplifying the problem? I
didn’t think so. Inner wisdom told me that perhaps diabetes
medications might help control blood glucose in cancer
patients too.
I knew nothing about the wonder drug metformin at this point.
I only associated diabetes with taking insulin. But insulin, I
deduced, would fuel the fire by allowing the tumour to take up
yet more glucose. This was not the answer. I wanted to pursue
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the natural route, supplements or a diet that might lower my
blood glucose without raising insulin.
It was then that I stumbled on research in a Journal about an
ancient Traditional Chinese medicinal extract that it seemed noone else in the West was using for cancer. It would control my
blood glucose and offer several other incredible anti-cancer
properties. It would help with every aspect of my treatment.
2 See Doctored Results by Ralph Moss.
3I later discovered that I had Blastocycstis hominis a common gut parasite 4 No- Flush
Niacin brands are now available 5 Peter C. Elwood et al. Aspirin in the Treatment of
Cancer: Reductions in Metastatic Spread and in Mortality: A Systematic Review
and Meta-Analyses of Published Studies. PlOS ONE, 2016; 11 (4): e0152402
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152402
6long term use of cimetidine (over years) has been linked with cases of
gynaecomastia (enlargement of the breast) and hyperprolactinemia, so perhaps it
has a hormonal component that some cancers should steer clear of. But short term
the benefits, in my opinion, may outweigh those negatives.
7 ‘Benefits of daily aspirin outweigh risk to stomach, study suggests.’ Science Daily
, 30 November 2016.
8Restivo A, Cocco IMF, Casula G, Scintu F, Cabras F, Scartozzi M, Zorcolo l (2015)
Aspirin as a neoadjuvant agent during preoperative chemoradiation for rectal
cancer. Br J Cancer 113(8):1133–1139.
9Hydroxycitrate, fasting, statins and metformin would have helped but were yet to
be written about.
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Chapter Seven:
Summoning My Inner Dragon
My discovery of berberine, a herbal extract used for centuries
in China to treat diarrhoea and other infections but almost
unknown in the West, came out of left field. I had quizzed my
oncologist extensively about my tumour. I needed to know not
only the basics of the cancer biology but exactly how and what
my tumour was made up of, the types of cells, how quickly they
were dividing, my cancer’s doubling time. All of this
information helped me to determine I had a keratinising
tumour. Keratin is a protein found in hair, nails, and skin. It
was also an epithelial cancer, in other words a surface tumour.
As I listened to my oncologist, I realised the description of my
tumour had many striking parallels with psoriasis. They were
both made up of squamous epithelial cells. Both involved
inflammation, rapid cell turnover, and an over-production of
keratin. That was interesting. Could any psoriasis treatments
be useful for cancer? I decided I’d look into it.
One afternoon, I was leafing through health journals when I
came across an article on psoriasis. It had been published in
the Journal of Herbal Medicine in February 1999 by Dr Maher
Succar, who trained in the Ukraine and was teaching
Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine at the University of
Westminster. He described how a particular extract from a
plant was found to be effective in treating 80 per cent of
patients with psoriasis. It was called Mahonia aquifolium ,
and its main ingredients were berberine and berbamine. He
wrote: In recent years, scientists have discovered that the
extract of the bark and root of Mahonia aquifolium contains
alkaloids which have been shown to be strong antimicrobial
andantifungal agents –berberine,protoberberine, berbamine
and oxycanthine.
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Cell culture studies have demonstrated that these alkaloids inhibit the growth
of various tumour cells as well as induce powerful antioxidant activity which
inhibits keratinocyte (abnormal skin cell) growth and alleviates
inflammation . The action of these alkaloids explains why Mahonia aquifolium
extract has been successfully used to treat a variety of skin disorders (e.g.
psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema, fungal conditions) as well as digestive disorders
and blood conditions.
Even more interesting! So much in there to make me sit up. It
didn’t just focus on the inhibition of tumour cells, either. All
cancer patients seemed to have problems with their guts, so
anything that might kill the nasties in there sounded good too.
Perhaps it helped kill fungi, parasites and other bugs? A
healthy intestinal tract was of paramount importance to the
immune system.
Dr Succar went on: ‘Tests by US and Canadian researchers have
revealed that Mahonia aquifolium is one of the top five most
powerful herbal antifungal agents and that it promotes
healthy fat metabolism . Scientists at the National Cancer
Institute, NIH, Bethesda, USA have demonstrated that Mahonia
aquifolium inhibits lipoxygenase and lipid hydroperoxide, and
that this effect may be a crucial factor in explaining why it
seems to be so beneficial for psoriasis sufferers.’
Wow. Clearly this was awesome stuff.
More hunting about berberine unearthed a report from 1995.
With mounting excitement, I read that through serendipity,
researchers in Changchun, China had discovered berberine
also reduced blood sugar. The research had been led by
scientist Ni Yanxi who’d been treating diarrhoea in patients
with diabetes.
So, it lowered blood glucose, reduced inflammation, promoted
healthy fat metabolism, fought off bugs in the intestine – and
fought cancer – amazing! Exactly what I needed.
The article reported the reduction in blood glucose was
achieved with doses between 300 and 500mg, three times a
day. There were no side effects at all, even with doses up to 2
grams! This was perfect. And it was good for diarrhoea too – it
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helped gut infections as well as diabetes. I knew my gut health
was crucial for my immunity and although I didn’t have
diarrhoea I wanted to kill off any pathogenic bacteria that
might compromise me. I wanted my immune system focused on
the cancer.
The full effect of Mahonia aquifolium and its berberine and
oxycanthine content is pretty inspiring stuff:
reduces inflammation
reduces blood glucose
antimicrobial and antifungal
has strong anti-cancer activity
improves lipid profile and fat metabolism
reduces keratinocytes and improved psoriasis
improves gut health (and thereby reduces leaky gut)
What wasn’t there about this supplement to love? If everyone
took it then doctors might be out of a job! I simply had to have
it.
If it helped the gut, inflammation and glucose levels, berberine
might also help many cancers. I was bouncing with excitement
as I told Andrew all about it that evening. He was delighted I
was so happy but was concerned that no-one else was using it.
‘Are you sure about this? It doesn’t have any trials or research
in the West at all.’
‘What’s the downside? Berberine had been used extensively in
Chinese medicine for centuries. We’re way too aloof and
dismissive of Eastern concoctions in the West and far too
reliant on Randomised Clinical Trials.’
‘Why don’t they just run those on natural botanicals?’
‘Because there’s no money in it. No new drugs to market. I’ve
no doubt many of their medicines are very powerful and useful.
Modern medicines mostly start from plant discoveries, which
are reproduced synthetically, then patented. I’m going to hunt
it down, take it and see how it goes,’ I said.
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I mentioned Mahonia aquifolium and berberine to Dr
Callebout, my lovely integrative doctor, when I next saw him.
On my first appointment I’d been armed with a long list of
supplements, thinking he’d cut them right back, but to my
horror, he suggested a whole lot more! This time he rubbed his
beard thoughtfully and said berberine sounded ‘very
interesting.’
It sounded more than interesting to me. I felt like Alice in
Wonderland at the bottom of the rabbit hole in a small room
staring at a bottle with the words ‘Drink Me’ written on it. I
had terminal cancer, I felt boxed in and berberine sounded like
a magic potion. I didn’t want it to shrink me though, just any
little tumours lurking in my system would be great thank you!
I found a website for psoriasis sufferers that sent it out by mail
order, and into my regime it went.
Today researchers are falling over themselves to explore
berberine’s amazing potential not just against cancer but as a
PPAR gamma agonist, antiviral, antimicrobial, antifungal, and
anti-inflammatory. Many herbalists now describe it as the most
powerful supplement in the world. There are moves afoot to
make it prescription – which of course plays to Big Pharma’s
clampdown on our choices.
I began taking Mahonia aquifolium just before starting
chemotherapy, unaware of how much it synergises and
enhances the drug. I was facing six months of the maximum
dose of gemcitabine, cisplatin and 5FU (affectionately known
as ‘five foot under’). Ugh. Was I going to be able to handle
that? My body recoiled at the thought. I knew full well how I
was going to feel, I’d been through chemo five years earlier
and had been sick as a dog. This time it was going to be a
much heavier dose and for much longer.
Little did I know (and to be fair to my inner Sherlock Holmes,
neither did the scientists at the time) that berberine is also a
calcium channel blocker, which meant that when I was given
chemo, the cytotoxic drug was held inside my cancer cells for
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longer. Chemo must ‘catch’ a cancer cell when it’s actively
dividing or else it doesn’t work. Balancing toxicity with
effectiveness is why the maximum tolerated dose is favoured
by medics, even though this high dose destroys the immune
system.
Every cell in the body goes through a period of rest before
dividing. Chemo cocktails are made up of different cytotoxic
drugs that work by catching cancer at different stages of its
division. So, the longer you can keep the chemo in the cell, the
better its chance of catching it during its active dividing phase
and killing it. Cancer cells have far less rest and lots more
action than healthy cells. But other cells are fast dividers too,
which is why healthy cells in the gut (the centre of our
immunity) and hair are the losers by collateral damage. 10
High-dose chemo only reduces the size of a tumour. It does
nothing to the stem cell at the heart of the cancer.
Conventional treatments using both radiotherapy and
chemotherapy leave behind these different cancer cells, the
ones that act and behave differently to the rapidly dividing and
obvious tumour cells. In the vast majority of cases
chemotherapy does not offer a cure 11 (the real reason it works
with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, I describe later in Part
2) and the percentage of positive outcomes at stage IV are
zero. No benefit, apparently. Was it worth it? How could I make
it more effective without crippling my immune system,
destroying my gut, developing neuropathy, hearing issues,
cardiac damage and other horrid side effects, not to mention
the risk of death by toxic lysis syndrome?
I was also concerned by the medical profession’s unhealthy
obsession with a tumour’s size. What if I had put its future
certain growth (as I was assured would happen, it would
inevitably return) on pause with my radical diet? Would it
eventually die anyway if I was starving it of what it needed to
grow, without subjecting myself to chemo? Why was there no
interest in any of the other areas of my health, exploring the
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reasons cancer had begun in the first place? How was it they
didn’t even bother to take serum vitamin levels, like vitamin D?
Starving the cancer cell seemed to be a perfectly logical
intervention to me. And recent research proves that fasting
prior to chemo will one day be standard practice. But the
medical profession will only learn of this when the cancer
charities have somehow patented their own approved diet
sachets (they are working on this as I write, despite telling
patients that diets don’t work). The correct diet protects
normal cells, leaves the immune cells more active, and
decreases side effects. Professor Valter Longo, a Professor of
Gerontology in Southern California, had initially been studying
reducing food intake for its known anti-ageing effects, then
began investigating a three-day starvation diet before
chemotherapy. The results were so impressive, he now
advocates a fasting-mimicking diet. 12 Professor Thomas
Seyfried, a lead researcher in the field of metabolic cancer
therapy, is also an advocate of starving cancer with the
ketogenic diet. Dr Callebout suggested in 1999 that I stop
eating at 3pm, which I did for a few weeks. His reasoning was
that the liver was more efficient in the mornings and digesting
food was harder in the evenings. Also, slouching on the sofa
after an evening meal, watching telly and not burning off the
food, seemed a bad idea.
I hadn’t heard the term ketogenic in 1999, creating ketones
was not something I had focused on. My diet had been what
would be described as ‘Paleo’ nowadays, a diet that our
ancestors would have eaten, with a focus on removing
inflammatory foods as well as reducing simple carbohydrates
and lowering IGF-1. My number one priority was to reduce the
dangerous insulin spike after meals and lower any glucose in
my blood that might feed any little seedlings of cancer.
My tumour load at this stage was low. Unlike others who wait
until cancer returns before acting, I was proactive. I would
kick it hard while it was weak and vulnerable. I was convinced
there was much I could do to change the dismal statistics of its
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inevitable return. Changing the chemotherapy type, perhaps to
a less aggressive drug, lowering the dose, and giving the body
longer breaks between infusions would allow me more time to
starve the cancer and give my immune system a chance to
recover. I was desperate to have a lower dose. It would mean
less nausea, so in theory it would be easier to combine chemo
with other treatments and boost its efficacy and attack from
different directions. Sadly for me, this was not an option.
Green tea’s properties seemed almost magical to me. Not only
did it boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy, but it is a
growth inhibitor, its two extracts epigallocatechin gallate
(EGCG) and catechin gallate (CG) blocking vascular VEGF. But
its effects seemed to go beyond merely blocking new blood
vessel growth (angiogenesis). I later discovered both EGCG
and CG are inhibitors of glutamate dehydrogenase (GHD), a
precursor of glutamine (an amino acid), the other key nutrient
cancer uses with glucose to fuel its growth. 13
Even though I knew nothing about mTOR pathways or other
metabolic pathways that are abnormal in cancer, I was taking
many supplements that inhibited these during chemo:
berberine, hydroxycitrate, gymnema, and pycnogenol. My
oncologist was interested in what I was doing, intrigued to
know why I wasn’t deteriorating as she expected, but I was
worried about telling her. I was expecting only negativity,
which seems to be the default position of many oncologists. I
didn’t want that. I was confident with my choices and I’d
double-checked everything with Dr Callebout. But I was tiptoeing around the oncologist. It didn’t feel good to mislead her
and lie. That made me very uncomfortable.
With hindsight (an especially wonderful thing – I never thought
I’d be looking back at all) so much research has been published
in the last three or four years about berberine, the natural
equivalent to metformin, that I can honestly say this may have
had the biggest single effect on chemotherapy. But of course it
would have been a combination of everything I was taking, the
synergistic effect.
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I became ever more convinced that starving the cancer,
stressing it by making access to nutrients more difficult or
impossible, then adding the killer blow of chemotherapy, was
the way forward. Why waste energy and resources on a foe
without shutting off its supply system first, starving it and
weakening its heavy defences?
Historically, the thinking has been that patients should be
given as much chemotherapy as they can tolerate without
dying. Expert opinion is now that a reduction by 50-70 per cent
in the amount of chemo, taken for a longer period,
metronomically (with rest periods), may be equally effective
and far less toxic, especially if used in combination with other
drugs or modalities. 14 But high-dose chemo is so ingrained as
the only method of administration, oncologists are fearful of
offering anything less, even though the evidence has been out
there for some time. If they chose this different path, not only
would they risk the scorn and derision of their colleagues, they
would risk the loss of their licence to practice if the patient
sues or a fellow oncologist claims they’re not following
protocol. This is exactly what happened to a doctor in
Australia. It’s no wonder cancer treatment has changed so
little in 50 years.
If I dropped chemotherapy, I was directly disobeying doctor’s
orders. But instinct told me high-dose chemotherapy was
entirely wrong. I felt I was letting my body down by agreeing
to it and I was cross with myself. But I also had great respect
for my oncologist. She was very persuasive. In the end,
reluctantly, I caved in.
‘See it like a course of antibiotics – you have to finish the
course,’ she told me. This line of argument was repeated by my
obviously worried relatives and my husband every time I
mentioned giving it up.
‘But it might kill me! What if it destroys my immune system
and I never recover?’
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‘Yes, I’m afraid I might kill you with it too, but it’s the best
option we can offer,’ she said, trying to keep things light.
Jesus. It’s not like I didn’t know this already. Was this really the
only option? It was now 2000, the millennium. Chemotherapy
felt like some kind of torture from the Dark Ages.
So, still reluctant, I went ahead. And despite all I was doing to
help mitigate the side effects, I felt dreadful. I had not yet
come across early research suggesting that a fast for three
days before chemotherapy would help maintain the immune
system and reduce side effects.
I tried to continue with supplements when I wasn’t feeling ill,
keeping as fit as possible with regular walks and bouncing on a
mini trampoline to boost my oxygen, energy, and wellbeing. If I
felt up to it, I’d go sailing at weekends and try and keep my
wig on!
Berberine is also very useful for healing a chemotherapydamaged leaky gut, an inevitable side effect of treatment.
Glutamine is also a useful supplement given during the
chemotherapy, it is pretty much all absorbed into the gut wall,
and although some cancers use glutamine as fuel, it doesn’t
‘feed’ the cancer in the same way as glucose. 15 By helping to
salvage my gut lining and maintain a better microbiome, it
would help maintain my precious immune system, vital for my
long-term survival.
The effects of my cancer-starving supplements (berberine,
EGCG, gymnema sylvestre, hydroxycitrate, pycnogenol,
silibinin) and a low-glycaemic diet made the chemo far more
effective than either I or my oncologist had hoped for. To my
absolute joy, after my first round of chemo my blood markers
plummeted from nearly 600 to 130, below the normal range of
The relief of being in that ‘normal’ bracket again was
huge, although I knew it was quite possibly false hope and a
temporary reprieve.
Chemo on its own never cures my type of cancer, it merely puts
it on the back burner for a while. But it was time to celebrate. I
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had won a small battle. Andrew and I went out that night for a
quiet meal in the local Italian restaurant. Perhaps high-dose
chemotherapy was OK after all.
Tempting though it was to think otherwise, I knew it was
unlikely I had won the war. And after another two months of
the toxic infusions I was steadily feeling worse and worse. By
now I was completely bald and the nausea was unbearable.
Would this maximum-tolerated dose kill me as my oncologist
and I feared?
Enough was enough. I was being dragged down and no longer
felt empowered and in control. I was feeling frail and weak, yet
again becoming a passive and submissive patient. I had to find
the strength to stand up for my rights and have chemotherapy
on my own terms.
I was in a tough spot. I realised the wrong decision might mean
the difference between survival, permanently disabling side
effects, or worse, death. But I was comfortable with my choice.
A lower dose might be equally effective and less damaging.
Somehow, I had to persuade my oncologist to drop the dose.
But she had been so insistent I knew it wasn’t going to be an
easy debate to win. Exhausted, my willpower and my energy
drained, my spirit quashed, how would I persuade her? After a
lengthy discussion with my hypnotherapist I decided I’d try the
bolshie patient tactic. I was going to be an obstinate, difficult
and bloody-minded. Passive patients die. Noisy ones survive.
Known fact.
‘It is your body, don’t forget that. You have every right to
refuse chemotherapy if you want,’ he’d said. I knew that, but it
was so hard to break the ‘doctor’s always right’ mentality. It’s
hardwired into our psyche. We are conditioned from a young
age to follow every suggestion that leaves their mouths.
Oncologists seemed to dismiss the Warburg Effect, 16 the
differing metabolism of cancer or how to alter it. Was I now
becoming just as much of an expert in my own cancer as the
oncologist? Did much of what they suggested stem from the
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NICE guidelines, from following the recommendations of
(always biased) pharmaceutical companies, or from a fear of
being sued? Rather than take a risk and try something
different, do most just follow the herd? I refused to be a sheep.
I was a 1964 baby, the Chinese year of the Dragon. Time to
summon my inner Dragon and exhale some fire.
My therapist made me repeat the phrase, ‘I am in control. My
body can heal’, several times a day. The more I said it, the
more I began to believe it, and regain the feeling of being back
in the driving seat. Yes, I could steer the treatment direction
back down my path. Yes, I knew I needed lower dose
chemotherapy. I could fight the disease on my own terms. The
positive affirmations helped me switch off my defeatist attitude
and empowered me enormously.
When I next saw my oncologist, I begged her to stop the chemo
completely. I knew she was unlikely to do it but I told her I felt
dreadful, that it was intolerable. I laid it on thick, describing
terrible stomach pains, telling her that I had been sick for a
week. Of course, it was not all true, but I called on my best
drama skills, gave an Oscar worthy performance and gave her
no choice.
It worked. She promised to lower the dose right down for my
last three months. ‘As your blood markers have remained
steady, below normal ranges, I’ll drop the dose,’ she said. ‘And
we’ll keep the remainder in reserve, if you ever need more.’
I nearly hugged her! I was so relieved. I believe she saved my
life that day.
Despite the lower dose, my six-month chemotherapy was still a
gruelling endurance event, like competing in the Volvo Ocean
Yacht Race with no stop-overs. I was also vaguely aware that
on top of the chemo and radiotherapy I’d already been given,
this second wave of chemo might encourage a secondary type
of cancer in the bone marrow called leukaemia.
I shrugged that off. No, I was strong and fit enough not to
succumb to that, wasn’t I?
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10 In our bodies the gut, hair follicles and the cells inside bone marrow making red
blood cells all divide much faster than other cells in the body. Immune cells in the
gut have a rapid turnover of every four or five days, hence the collateral damage to
the lining of the gut. Same with hair loss and altered bone marrow. So, holding the
chemo inside the cells until it begins dividing makes it much more effective.
Professor Ben Williams, a long-term survivor of Glioblastoma (brain cancer) used
verapamil, a calcium channel blocker during chemotherapy, as an off label drug.
11 A 2016 study in the BMJ, looking at five-year survival, agrees. Dr Peter Wise
reported: ‘An important effect [of chemotherapy] was shown on five year survival
only in testicular cancer (40%), Hodgkin’s disease (37%), cancer of the cervix
(12%), lymphoma (10.5%), and ovarian cancer (8.8%). Together, these represented
less than 10% of all cases. In the remaining 90% of patients – including those with
the commonest tumours of the lung, prostate, colorectum, and breast – drug
therapy increased five year survival by less than 2.5% – an overall survival benefit
of around three months.’ The 12% survival figure for cervical cancer was for
primary cancer with lymphatic spread. http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6027
12 He has also been helping to formulate a product called Chemolieve, which is to be
launched soon, in which he apparently has no commercial interest.
13 Glutamine is used by many cancers in combination with glucose. Some as much
or more than glucose, including triple negative breast cancer, ovarian or pancreatic
cancer, glioblastomas and the more aggressive prostate cancers. Malignant cells
create lots of ammonia as a by-product of their excessive metabolism and they
need glutathione (an antioxidant) to neutralise it. Without this they’re very
vulnerable to being tipped into cell death by the presence of enough free radicals.
14 Nars, M. S. and Kaneno, R. (2013), Immunomodulatory effects of low dose
chemotherapy and perspectives of its combination with immunotherapy. Int. J.
Cancer, 132: 2471-2478. doi:10.1002/ijc.27801
15 Glutamine can be made from scratch in the body or shunted from one place to
another to provide the nutrients that cancerneeds.
16 Nobel prize winning German scientist Otto Warburg noticed the abnormal
fermentation of glucose (glycolysis) in cancer cells in the 1920s.
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Chapter Eight:
Keeping the Beast in its Box By
the summer of 2000, I had
finally finished my
chemotherapy. I had survived
nine months, far longer than my
predicted expiry date of weeks,
and my cancer blood markers
were good. Now I just needed
to keep them there, or better
yet, push them further down, as
far as possible. How low could I
go?
I was bald, exhausted, and still full of toxic chemical
garbage but I was alive. I was wary that after high-dose
chemotherapy cancer tends to return with a vengeance,
harder and faster than ever because of the lack of any
immune control. The body has been wrecked and ruined by
the treatment, so chemotherapy was ultimately self-
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defeating. It’s at this point, looking at a reduced or absent
tumour, that most patients take their foot off the gas,
switch to cruise control, breathe a sigh of relief and assume
they’re cured. They return to bad habits and carry on as
they were before their diagnosis. This was a common and
fatal mistake.
There was so much more I needed to do. I was confident I
was starving the cancer of glucose, but not confident that
the diet and the berberine would be enough. I needed to
detox, get rid of any remnants of the chemotherapy and
rebuild my gut, which I assumed would be badly damaged.
My bone marrow, if that too had been hit, I hoped would
heal on its own. My hair would eventually regrow – that
was the least of my worries. I would just have to keep my
fingers crossed about the possibility of future leukaemia
and hope it wouldn’t happen to me. I couldn’t find any
statistics on this as women with my stage of cancer died in
weeks. I was apparently a goner already.
Post chemo, my plan was to: 1. Detox with a hard core
macrobiotic, low GI, pescatarian, anti-inflammatory, low
saturated fat diet for three months (must think up a name
for it) 2. Check my gut microbes at Great Smokies
Laboratory (now Genova Diagnostics) 3. Check my
micronutrient status (minerals, vitamins, fatty acid profile)
Take intravenous vitamin C and UVBI (ultraviolet blood
irradiation) as soon as possible 5. Exercise more, go
sailing, and enjoy life!
Launch a new business (hmm… perhaps not one of my
better ideas) By this stage, I had become a supplement
junkie. Relaxing my rigid self-imposed timetable for even
a day was a luxury I felt I couldn’t afford. I wanted to
control glucose release at every meal. I got stressed out
when I missed taking them. Would the cancer get the
upper hand? Every meal seemed like a life or death
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decision, would the meal feed the cancer, or would it
starve it, help to heal my body and boost recovery.
For now, I seemed to be keeping it under control. My blood
tests showed I was still in remission. But how long could I
sustain this lifestyle? Did I really need to be so tough on
myself? On the other hand, was I doing enough? Would the
supplements and diet really protect me? Would the cancer
mutate and come back with a rage and force I wouldn’t be
able to contain? The only way to keep track of my progress
was to take regular blood markers, that way I could be on
the case immediately if it made an unwelcome return visit.
If diabetic patients needed to control glucose and insulin
release every mealtime then so did I. Both levels spike after
meals and this seemed to be the critical time to control it. I
didn’t know anyone else approaching cancer in this way but
to me it seemed like common sense. I had felt too ill after
chemotherapy sessions to be able to take much of anything
let alone supplements, however in the preceding days
before each session I would hoof lots of cancer-starving
compounds to carry me through. Now I was feeling better I
was making up for that.
If berberine controlled glucose release into the blood then I
concluded the best time to take it would probably be just
before a meal. This was not easy going, but eventually it
became a habit, religiously pill popping at breakfast,
lunchtime and supper. The downsides were that taking as
many as I did, washed down with green tea and even
sometimes olive oil, I could end up a bit nauseous again.
Sleep had been an issue for years, ever since the first
diagnosis. To help that, I took melatonin at night an hour
before bedtime. It has immune-boosting effects, such as IL2
and IL12 (good cytokines), which are controlled by the
pineal gland. But I now wondered whether I needed to take
as much. I was afraid I had switched off my own
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endogenous supply and suspected I would have to stay on
melatonin for life.
Fear and worry were my bed pals. Racing thoughts were
hard to push aside. There seemed to be no escape from the
nightmare. If I stopped the supplements, the cancer might
return. That was not a risk I wanted to take. There was to
be no denial of cancer, no going back to the carefree life I
had before.
Organisation was going to be paramount. Nothing could be
left to chance if I wanted to keep the beast in its box. I
made a chart of everything I was taking, wrote a list of
where I was obtaining each supplement, and made note of
phone numbers and websites for re-ordering. Every Friday,
I would dedicate an hour in the afternoon to preparing for
the week ahead, filling sachets and ordering up any
supplement running low. Normal pill boxes just weren’t big
enough! ‘Maracas’ indeed. It was an effort, but the choice
was this or quite possibly death. No choice at all, to my
mind.
I became exceptionally strict with myself. Cancer was
lifestyle related, wasn’t it? If I believed the media stories, I
would never have got cancer if I’d looked after myself
better. But others lived far worse lifestyles than I did. I
knew that blaming myself for my situation was not
constructive. Instead, I harnessed the strength of my
feelings, the anger, guilt, grief, sadness, fear and worry
about my diagnosis to spur me on.
My expanding list of supplements, visits to integrative
doctors, tests, and organic food was costing a small fortune
but I needed this lifeline. We weren’t poor but even so, it
was a struggle. How could every cancer patient afford all
this? And now I decided I needed intravenous vitamin C.
Yet another expense.
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Andrew never again mentioned the drain on our finances.
He was 100 per cent supportive. Even so, I felt terribly
guilty that I was denying us both a much-needed holiday
and digging into pensions and reserves. There can be so
many unspoken factors weighing down on thesubconscious
of the patient, sapping precious energy, piling yet more
stress onto the already overburdened psyche. But if the
boot were on the other foot, I would do the same in a
heartbeat.
Under the care of the medical profession, there’s a sense of
security, a safety net to catch you, that there is something
being done. When I came to the end of my six months of
chemotherapy I was going it alone. I had been cut loose
and like many patients in this situation I felt vulnerable.
But I’d already found my integrative doctors, alternative
treatments. I was also empowered with knowledge. I didn’t
wait around in limbo waiting for it to come back. There was
so much more I could do.
I couldn’t rest on my laurels, keep my fingers crossed,
hoping time would erase the memory of the dreadful
treatments and the diagnosis, believing everything would
be OK. I’d already been down that road and it had led to
more cancer. This time I wouldn’t be complacent. While my
tumour load was low and I was still in relatively good
shape, I felt it was a good time to be proactive, to be taking
control, not waiting for the axe to fall yet again, knowing
each time the cancer would become more and more
difficult to treat.
Top of my list was a detox diet for my damaged gut. And a
series of intravenous vitamin C infusions, given twice a
week with integrative physician Dr Kingsley in
Leicestershire. The mere mention of high-dose intravenous
vitamin C causes many to shout, ‘This has been disproved!
Linus Pauling was discredited!’ I stood in a meeting with
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several health editors recently and this was indeed the
response. Next time I’ll be more prepared. I’ll have the
recent medical literature to hand, which definitely proves
its worth. Many patients are put off this valuable therapy
by angry doctors, convinced it will only hasten their
demise.
In fact, this forgotten and maligned treatment is rightly
making a comeback. Big Pharma have, yet again, been hard
at work quashing this cheaper alternative to chemo, but its
great results are hard to counter.
Linus Pauling was a Nobel Laureate for chemistry in 1954,
then discredited because he made a hypothesis about the
action of vitamin C that was proven to be incorrect.
However, his assumption that higher doses might be useful
for cancer were indeed correct, just not in the way he
thought. He and Dr Ewan Cameron were both convinced it
had something to do with lowering hyaluronidase, an
enzyme that caused the extra cellular matrix (the ground
substance surrounding cancer cells) to soften, allowing
cells to move apart and the cancer to spread. Pauling was
so in favour of vitamin C that anything seeming to disprove
his theories led to fierce debate. He was angry with how
the studies were carried out and made many enemies
defending it, but his anger was mainly frustration. Others
were not investigating it in the way he suggested:
intravenously.
The two-time Nobel Prize winner was a genius, dragged
through the mire only to be proved right decades later. 17 If
you look at recent trials using intravenous ascorbate
vitamin C, they show he was correct. So, before you throw
this book into the bin, it’s important to note that the early
trials failed because they were performed using low oral
doses. And later intravenous vitamin C was combined with
glutathione, an antioxidant, which totally negated its pro-
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oxidant effect, another reason why many believe it is not
useful.
Cameron and Pauling published the results of a clinical
study in 1978, which showed survival of ascorbate treated
individuals was 20 times greater than non-treated subjects.
Another in 1991 showed survival was 343 days compared
to 180 for controls who did not received ascorbate.
Crucially these tests were performed using intravenous
combined with oral vitamin C, not oral route alone.
Two clinical trials followed in the late ’70s and early ’80s by
Moertel at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota which
showed using vitamin C orally produced no such results.
Moertel and Mayo concluded that there was no significant
difference in survival between ascorbate-treated and
untreated groups, but Cameron had administered
ascorbate orally and intravenously together, whereas
Moertel administered ascorbate exclusively orally.
Any good oncologist will tell you that free radicals, given
the name ‘reactive oxygen species’, kill cancer. This is
exactly how intravenous vitamin C works. At high doses it
turns from an antioxidant into a pro-oxidant, giving off free
oxygen to the area around a tumour.
In this case, the reactive oxygen species (ROS) is hydrogen
peroxide (H2O2). This oxygen production near the cell
causes a kind of ‘rusting’ and allows the cell to be attacked
and killed. This balance of ROS production and the
antioxidant status of cells is crucial to the survival or death
of tumour cells. The judicious use of antioxidants is
something I have seen patients continue to get wrong.
Many patients take huge amounts of antioxidants that
counter the effects of the intravenous vitamin C and then
are disappointed it hasn’t worked.
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As is the case with any drug or supplement, the dosage
determines whether it is effective, ineffective, or toxic.
Using it in the right combination is also key. In the case of
vitamin C, the sweet spot for its cancer busting properties
is a high dose. Unlike the situation with chemotherapy,
more is most definitely more, and the higher the amount
(up to 75mg) the more it becomes selectively toxic to
cancer cells by producing more H2O2. Patients often fail to
understand the need to avoid specific antioxidant
supplements like vitamin E, cysteine, and N-Acetyl Cysteine
(including whey protein). However, CoQ10 and ALA
supplementation during intravenous vitamin C infusions
recycle the vitamin C and may raise the levels in the tissues
and increase its effectiveness, but both of these would be
contraindicated in chemotherapy. CoQ10 also negates the
beneficial effects of statins for cancer therapy (more on this
later).
The hydrogen peroxide created by intravenous vitamin C
treatment releases one of its oxygen molecules into the
cancer microenvironment. The cancer cell then has to deal
with this extra free radical. Because cancer cells are unable
to neutralise it – they lack the enzyme catalase – they die.
Best of all, for such a potentially useful therapy, normal
cells remain completely unharmed as the extracellular
spaces and neighbouring healthy cells contain the catalase
enzyme. In fact, intravenous vitamin C has been shown to
target the mitochondria in cancer stem cells, the original
cancer cells that are responsible for chemo and
radiotherapy resistance, because it stops a key step in the
process of glycolysis, effectively starving the cancer as well
as triggering apoptosis or cell death. It helps block off one
of cancer’s main energy supply lines.
This makes it significantly safer than chemo. After coming
into contact with the tumour, it releases one of its oxygen
molecules, kills the cancer and then the H202 (hydrogen
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peroxide) turns into plain old water (H2O), which is then
excreted safely by the kidneys. Simple chemistry that even
a six-year-old could understand.
Low doses of vitamin C and ALA, on the other hand, are to
be avoided. At these antioxidant levels vitamin C and ALA
helps glutathione neutralise the excess toxicity inside the
cell allowing it to remain immortal. For a short time, I was
fooled into thinking that oral levels could be taken up to
‘bowel tolerance’, but this is a dangerous strategy. It is
impossible to raise blood plasma vitamin C to the prooxidant levels necessary to create hydrogen peroxide by
oral route alone unless you take large quantities of a
liposomal version. 18
If you go the liposomal route, it must be ascorbate and no
less than 5000mg should be taken in one go – possibly, to
be safe, a little more – to cause the production of H202.
This is an important point because there are still many
advocators of the bowel tolerance method. But this will not
raise vitamin C to the levels required. It will instead help
immortalise the cancer and fuel its growth.
An infusion dose is typically from 25g up to 75g, depending
on the tumour size and size of the patient. It is given three
times a week or even daily for several weeks. The infusion
of IV vitamin C increases plasma levels until it changes
from being an antioxidant (neutralising oxygen) to a prooxidant by accumulating and creating hydrogen peroxide
(H2O2) in the connective tissues around the tumour, but
not in the blood. Perhaps because of this, intravenous
vitamin C has been found to be more effective in solid
tumours than in blood or lymph cancers, but more recent
research is showing it is useful for these cancers too,
probably because of its normalising effect on aerobic
glycolysis, the abnormal cancer metabolism.
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While on chemotherapy, I had seriously considered adding
the high-dose intravenous vitamin C at the same time but I
didn’t have the confidence to go through with it. Now, with
hindsight and new research carried out at the University of
Iowa, I wish I had taken it with low ‘metronomic’ (regularly
spaced apart) doses of chemotherapy. 19
Integrative and alternative doctors have stood by and
watched the misrepresentation and skewed results of the
promising early data. Integrative doctors knew it worked
and have been successfully using intravenous vitamin C as
part of an overall strategy to treat cancer for decades. They
witnessed with their own eyes its beneficial effects. But
mistakes were also made by some integrative doctors, who
tried adding glutathione to the infusions. This is the most
important antioxidant in the body. It rendered the
intravenous vitamin C useless by neutralising the prooxidant effect and may have made cancer patients worse by
helping the malignant cells remain immortal, able to resist
normal apoptosis mechanisms.
Doubt, disbelief and discreditation of doctors using natural,
cheaper alternatives are recurring themes in
complementary therapy. It takes a brave soul in the medical
establishment to step outside the box, research a publicly
discredited treatment and claim it does indeed work.
Recently a small trial on nine patients with pancreatic
cancer using twice-weekly intravenous ascorbate infusions
of 15-125g showed some efficacy. 20 Another trial on
ovarian cancer 21 showed that combining intravenous
vitamin C with chemotherapy extended cancer survival and
reduced toxicity. Mark Levine, an author of the latter trial,
notes that ‘the atmosphere was poisoned’ by the earlier
failures with oral vitamin C.
Few doctors feel ready to take the risk of scorn and
derision by colleagues, so hats off to Mark Levine. Public
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criticism and humiliation on sites like Quackwatch provide
the ultimate deterrent to doctors trying anything new or
innovative. Thanks to Levine’s bravery and to others now
following his lead, this treatment is now about to return,
not as a miracle cure, but as an adjunct to other
treatments. 22
I wanted to start having intravenous vitamin C immediately
after finishing chemo, so I hopped on a train up to see Dr
Patrick Kingsley in Leicestershire a week later. I had asked
the medics if I could keep my ‘PICC line’ in, a small tube
that passed through a vein in my arm up into my chest for
administering the chemotherapy. It would be useful for the
vitamin C too.
When I arrived at Dr Kingsley’s house (which was also his
clinic) I saw why patients travelled from all over the
country to see him. He was so reassuring I immediately felt
at ease.
My friend Cathy kindly offered to accompany me on my
first trip. When I sat in the consulting room, I suddenly
found I couldn’t help crying. To my surprise tears just
began rolling down my cheeks. It was a kind of emotional
release I think, and relief that there were amazing doctors
out there willing to administer these treatments and keep
hope alive. These doctors were thinking and researching
for themselves rather than blindly following protocols laid
down by Big Pharma, the General Medical Council and
NICE.
Cathy was a huge support, although slightly taken aback by
the tears. I’d been laughing and joking on the train there.
Dr Kingsley didn’t try and make me stop. He let my cry,
handed me tissues and instead talked me back to positivity.
‘If there is any cancer left, we have to make sure we’ve
stopped it growing, then we destroy it. Finally we can flush
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anything left out of your system. Only once we’ve done all
of that can we get you back to full health. Intravenous
vitamin C will help.’
Dr Kingsley didn’t offer any guarantees but assured me
he’d seen some great successes. I was keen to get going as
soon as possible and blitz any remaining tumour cells. It
only took a few of these little buggers to seed a new
tumour, and given there can be billions of tumour cells in
an area the size of the end of a pencil, I wanted to get
started immediately. I might have little time left to fight it.
Effort now might pay huge dividends later.
I relaxed in one of the comfy armchairs in his sitting room
to read a paper while the vitamin slowly infused into me
over a period of a few hours. It was nothing like the
clinical, sterile atmosphere of a medical setting. The
Hammersmith Hospital instead screamed, ‘You are a
patient, you are ILL!’
At first I was a little nervous about how it would feel. Other
patients report an occasional mild stinging. But with the
PICC line in place, I felt nothing.
After each intravenous infusion he would give me a
treatment called Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation (UBI) to kill
bacteria and viruses. Cervical cancer (along with head and
neck cancer) is linked to the HPV virus so this made perfect
sense to me. 23 An altered ‘microbiome’ (the mix of
bacteria, fungi, parasites surrounding tumours) is slowly
being recognised as a cause of the disease. It is this tumour
microenvironment or terrain surrounding the cancer cells
that is now the focus of research.
UBI was achieved by withdrawing a large syringe of blood
from my arm through a line that was then passed under a
UV lamp. This simple but effective technique (the Knott
Technique) was regularly and successfully used back in the
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1940s for polio and other viruses. With the introduction of
mass vaccination programmes, it was side-lined and
eventually phased out, except by a few holistic doctors.
Nowadays, it’s still used by the famous Riordan Clinic in
Kansas but most people I talk to have never heard of it.
There are clinics that now offer a more modern version of
this treatment. 24
UBI works its magic by acting as a natural antibiotic and
stimulating an immune response. There is no question that
UV kills pathogens – that’s how city water supplies are
sterilised, as well as some spas or pools. But how might it
work if you don’t treat the entire blood system, but only a
few syringes of blood?
The difference between us and a swimming pool (well okay,
not the only difference) is that we have an immune system,
an army that normally does the job of cleaning up
infections very efficiently. In cancer this immune army is
suppressed, but UBI triggers a vaccine-like response, upregulating it again. When pathogens die, they’re left in a
broken-down state in the blood. The remnants can then be
recognised by the immune system. These become antigens
that then stimulate your white cells to mount a more
efficient attack on the pathogens, viral, bacterial or
otherwise, that may be at the heart of your cancer.
Even when treatments use a very small amount of blood,
UBI seems to have a beneficial effect. Is this a much
cheaper, simpler and more effective alternative to the
emerging use of dendritic vaccines that work on
stimulating a patient’s immune response? Or would the
addition of this therapy alongside a dendritic vaccine help
them work better? UV blood irradiation has been shown to
provide a beneficial systemic response (throughout the
body), improving the abnormal microenvironment around
cancer cells. 25 26
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It may sound counter-intuitive, but when you have cancer
you want, actually you need some free radicals to kill your
tumour cells. Free radical generation is exactly the method
orthodox medicine employs with chemotherapy and
ionising radiation to kill tumour cells and why intravenous
vitamin C works. Each produces so many free radicals that
it pushes cancer into self-destruction. Yes, those things
we’re all told to steer clear of, those troublesome radicals
that cause so much damage and allegedly age us (I fear it
has been mainly excess glucose and insulin, not just free
radicals). We are told we should avoid them at all costs,
right?
Wrong. Not when you want to get rid of cancer cells.
Tumours defend themselves by neutralising ammonia (a
result of abnormal cancer metabolism) by producing more
of the major antioxidant glutathione to stop too much
internal damage from oxidation and ammonia. By being
able to do this, the cancer cells become immortal, resisting
normal cell death. Glutathione is to be avoided, especially
during a kill phase.
Giving these tumour cells an excess of free radicals
overwhelms their defences, giving them the push they need
to die through a normal process activated in the
mitochondria when there is too much damage.
Chemotherapy and radiotherapy do the same, they provide
free radicals, but they’re normally given in such a way that
they damage healthy cells in the process. What is not
generally known is that you can replicate this free radical
effect efficiently, and more selectively than either
chemotherapy or radiotherapy, with high dose intravenous
vitamin C.
Free radicals (Reactive Oxygen Species or ‘ROS’) are
chemically unstable oxygen molecules. ROS are chemically
reactive molecules containing oxygen, such as hydrogen
H2SC-JYLH-FPNE-KQ7F-JRSS
peroxide and superoxide, normally produced in low
numbers during normal cell metabolism. It has been known
for almost a century that oxygen selectively kills tumour
cells. To avoid creating too much oxygen during the cell’s
metabolism, cancer cells use a process of fermentation to
make their energy, an anaerobic (oxygen free) process. This
alternative energy pathway (The Warburg Effect) keeps the
production of ROS lower and so helps ensure the tumour’s
survival. When a normal cell is injured (in the
mitochondria, for example), an increase of ROS signals the
white cells to come and sort out a problem to either repair
or destroy the defective cell. The aim of chemotherapy,
radiotherapy, and indeed high-dose intravenous vitamin C
27 is to create an excess of ROS, unstable free radicals,
because when this exceeds the tumour cell’s ability to
neutralise the damage caused by the free radicals with
glutathione, the cell is earmarked for destruction.
If you’re now scratching your head, let me summarise: in
cancer, ROS (oxygen free radicals) are good as these kill
the cancer cells, glutathione (antioxidant) is bad as it keeps
the cancer cells alive. If you’re healthy, it is the opposite.
Almost everyone seems to confuse this point. Compounds
for cancer prevention are not equally beneficial for treating
active cancer. They are two separate situations entirely.
There are major natural cancer organisations out there
who mean well but have yet to realise this fundamental
flaw when they recommend patients take N-Acetyl Cysteine
(NAC), a precursor to glutathione, to help treat their
disease.
NAC, low dose oral vitamin C – at an antioxidant dose,
vitamin E and CoQ10 all recycle the master antioxidant
glutathione. All are to be avoided during chemotherapy
treatment. NAC is also found in whey protein and bone
broth. Bone broth is great for healing the gut but choosing
the right time to take this becomes paramount so that
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treatments don’t cancel each other out. Taking glutamine
with glucosamine is in my view a better strategy to heal the
gut during chemotherapy. However, if at some point you
need to boost white cells, detoxify of harmful metals (NAC
is good at this too), or detox the effects of too much
chemotherapy, then seek advice. A short burst of NAC may
be beneficial. It is contentious and there will be divided
opinions. If in doubt, leave it out.
I have also come across differing opinions between
complementary therapists and other health practitioners
about whether you should take the amino acid glutamine
during chemotherapy, which can also be used to make
glutathione, but it cannot create this without the presence
of cysteine. Lowering cysteine intake is a better strategy
than reducing glutamine. Glutamine can indeed fuel cancer
cells but it’s also crucial for the defence of the body. It
heals and maintains a good gut lining and is essential for
the proper workings of the immune system. It is the most
abundant amino acid in the body. It can be sequestered
from anywhere in your system to feed cancer’s insatiable
appetite, so cutting it out from the diet may be a poor
decision during chemotherapy. If your muscles are wasting
away, it’s a sign that your body has a high demand for
glutamine. It’s best to starve glutamine indirectly, by
working on the enzymes that break down glutamine for fuel
(e.g. glutaminase or ketoglutarate dehydrogenase – see my
‘Metro Map’). Although your cancer cells demand it, your
body needs it too. 28 Cancer will grab glutamine from any of
your tissues whether you starve it or not and replenishingit
should not be feared. It is lowering cysteine levels thereby
blocking the production of the antioxidant glutathione that
is a more important strategy to weaken the cancer cell.
Researching diabetes treatments, I discovered elevated
circulating insulin also elevates insulin-like growth factor
(IGF-1), which in turn stimulates cysteine and other amino
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acid uptake. This in turn then boosts glutathione levels,
allowing the cancer cells’ immortality and the ability to
neutralise ROS. 29 A reason why diabetics have much
higher rates of cancer and are much harder to treat.
Oxygen is known to attack and kill cancer cells. In fact,
researchers use it to destroy cancer cells at the end of an
experiment. Normal cells are aerobic – they can deal with
an oxygen environment – whereas the stem cells in a
tumour cannot. They metabolise their energy anaerobically,
like primordial single cells did aeons ago, before the earth
was oxygenated. With glutathione lowered, the cell is much
more vulnerable to an increase in oxygenating substances,
making it far easier to destroy (through the ‘caspase
cascade’). I was to discover a way to trigger this apoptotic
(cell death) process more easily using a better combination
a few years later.
Most cancer patients, when they think of oxygenating the
body, immediately think of hyperbaric oxygen therapy
(HBOT), a chamber used initially for deep-sea divers to
stop the bends and now used for MS sufferers. Or they
think of ozone or DMSO, both useful too. But patients need
to seriously consider using intravenous vitamin C as a
powerful oxygenating method to kill cancer alongside
chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy at high doses wrecks the gut. No question.
Many patients are so severely affected it means they can no
longer eat normally afterwards. My gut, I felt sure, had
suffered damage too, but because I’d insisted on the lower
dose I hoped I’d fared better than most. I was confident I
could repair it.
By now my head was swimming with a lot of information
which was hard to compute with ‘chemo-brain’. I was
learning and assimilating so much. There was no doubt the
medical profession was failing to realise that whatever they
H2SC-JYLH-FPNE-KQ7F-JRSS
were prescribing, it was nowhere near enough to fight the
disease. It was hard to take everything I wanted to take
during treatment. Worried for my stomach, I had dropped
taking aspirin and instead I took pycnogenol, a natural but
not necessarily equal alternative. Curcumin I tried for its antiinflammatory benefits, but it often made me feel nauseous.
Instead I kept inflammation down by taking more fish oils.
After my chemotherapy treatment finished, I came across
another fish oil, shark liver oil, which would not only help
control inflammation with its omega-3 content, but also
contained high levels of other beneficial substances. Sharks
rarely get cancer although a few solid tumours have been
detected. But no blood cancers that I can find. A
Scandinavian oncologist called Dr Astrid Brohult decided to
study shark liver oil after first noting the beneficial effects
of calve’s marrow on children with Leukaemia (a blood
cancer). She discovered the calve’s marrow had immune
stimulating effects because of compounds called
alkylglycerols (AKGs). Dr Brohult then realised these
compounds were found in significantly higher levels in
shark liver oil. The AKGs occur in humans in our bone
marrow and spleen (in very small amounts) and are
involved in making our white and red blood cells. These
compounds are also found in human breast milk (there are
ten times more AKG compounds in breast than in cow’s
milk) and these are thought to make a significant
contribution to an infant’s immune system.
Dr Brohult discovered that shark liver oil stopped cancer
proliferation and radiation sickness. A study on cervical
cancer patients taking SLO before, during and after
radiotherapy found that it reduced radiation-induced
injuries by a very significant 50%. 30 Dr Brohult suggests a
dose of 0.3-2.6g will help minimise the associated decrease
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in platelets and white blood cells that accompany radiation
treatment.
The mighty shark’s resistance to cancer was mistakenly
thought to be attributed to shark cartilage after William
Lane published his book Sharks Don’t Get Cancer in 1992
reporting that this was the secret ingredient. The medical
profession were quick to damn this suggestion after
repeated experiments with shark cartilage failed to show
any direct cancer killing effects. After that anything ‘shark’
related was tainted and it caused much uproar when it was
discovered that William Lane’s son was selling shark
cartilage products.
Shark liver oil contains four anti-cancer substances:
squalene, omega-3, alkylglycerol and squalamine.
The substance squalene has a partial inhibitory feedback
loop on the mevolonate pathway, the same growth pathway
used by cancer cells to make cholesterol that’s blocked by
statin drugs, as I would learn later. (Statins are particularly
effective for blood cancers). The alkylglycerol component of
shark liver oil has an immune stimulating effect, improving
the production of all the blood components
(haematopoiesis) so it reduces side effects of radiotherapy,
also boosting white cell counts and improving platelet
counts during chemotherapy. 31 There was a suggestion
that taking shark liver for several months might ‘thicken’
the blood too much. But most patient’s blood counts suffer
horribly with the traditional treatments, as mine did. I wish
I had discovered it earlier.
The alkylglycerols also perform another important function
alongside their immune-boosting effects – they reduce a
key growth factor that promotes angiogenesis called basic
Fibroblast Growth Factor. 32 And the squalamine content is
causing much excitement amongst researchers for its
antiviral effects. Sharks have a rudimentary immune
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system but are surprisingly resistant to viral infections.
Viruses are known co-factors associated with many
cancers. Rather than fighting the virus directly, it makes
the blood and liver resistant to infection by ‘kicking off’
proteins that stick to the inside of blood vessels. These
proteins are a source of food for some viruses and without
them the viruses are starved to death. 33
Squalene is also found at lower levels in olive oil (0.7%
versus circa 40% in SLO) and amaranth oil (6-8%), which of
course are more environmentally friendly (I blush with
shame at my use of shark liver oil, but it was the only
option I knew about). It’s this component that may make
extra virgin olive oil especially good at fighting cancer, not
just the much-touted oleic acid. I used lashings of it on my
food – I still have a couple of spoonfuls first thing every day
even now – along with cod liver oil for its omega-3 DHA and
EPA anti-inflammatory effect. Fish liver oils are also a
natural and balanced source of vitamins A and D, both
essential for the PPAR gamma pathway.
I am hoping that alkylglycerols are now available without
damaging the populations of those majestic sea creatures.
If you do decide to take shark liver oil, perhaps take for
three months only as I did as this may be enough to have a
long-lasting effect on your immunity.
Was I winning? I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but regular
blood tests helped confirm that for now I was doing all
right. I was staying within ‘normal’ limits. I had to keep
blind faith that I was on the right track.
The diet was especially hard to maintain. I no longer craved
the sweet foods, but could I never let my hair down again?
Was my future to be lived on a knife edge, checking foods
all the time, unable to go out and allow myself a couple of
cheeky drinks? Was there no easier way?
H2SC-JYLH-FPNE-KQ7F-JRSS
17 Sadly, Pauling now has a page on Quackwatch, a site written by Pharmaindoctrinated individuals. The ignominy persists, perpetuating the idea that
vitamin C is useless.
18 A ‘liposomal’ formulation means the molecule is encapsulated in a lipid so
that it passes through the digestive tract in the small intestine and is taken
directly into the bloodstream.
19 https://now.uiowa.edu/2017/01/why-high-dose-vitamin-c-kills-cancer-cells 20
Cieslak JA, Cullen JJ. Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer with Pharmacological
Ascorbate. Current pharmaceutical biotechnology . 2015;16(9): 759-770.
21 levine M et al Ascorbate in pharmacologic concentrations selectively
generates ascorbate radical and hydrogen peroxide in extracellular fluid in vivo
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2007, 104 (21) 8749-
8754
22 Pofessor Michael lisanti at the University of Salford, Manchester has
researched the effect of doxycycline, intravenous vitamin C and berberine,
with stunning results. De Francesco EM, Bonuccelli G, Maggiolini M, Sotgia F,
lisanti MP. Vitamin C and Doxycycline: A synthetic lethal combination therapy
targeting metabolic flexibility in cancer stem cells (CSCs). Oncotarget .
2017;8(40): 67269-67286. doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.18428.
23 In fact scientists have now discovered at least seven cancer causing viruses
and I suspect more will be found in the future. Also the tumour
microenvironment can host many pathogens that might be parasites, bacteria,
protozoa or fungi.
24 See resources online at www.howtostarvecancer.com 25 Given the huge
implications of superbugs, a looming crisis for which we currently have no
pharmaceutical solutions, using UBI would be an easy and cheap trial to run on
patients. As the Riordan Clinic website says: ‘The net result is the induction of
a secondary kill of these infecting agents throughout the entire body. Treating
only 35 cc of blood with UBI induces a beneficial systemic response.’
26 The current trend with resistant bacteria – like MRSA or clostridium difficile –
is faecal microbiota transfer (yes, poo transplants – don’t throw up). MRSA now
kills more people than AIDS, and TB now has a resistant strain. Both are
gaining ground fast. Maybe in the future there will be UBI clinics in every
surgery, walk-ins for a six-monthly zap! Will UBI work against these superbugs
on its own or as an adjunct to antibiotics and FMT? Phage therapy (viruses that
kill bacteria) is another option with specific phages being bred to fight specific
infections, a therapy to fight bacteria that has been used for decades in
Russia.
27 low dose oral Vitamin C and E can help recycle glutathione, which will not
have the cancer killing effect required. Instead it will have the oppositeeffect
and keep a malignant cellimmortal.
28 Glutamine is excellent for healing a leaky gut and for helping to arm your
white blood cells, in particular your Natural Killer cells. It is also vital to the
peyers patches, which is where a large part of your immune system lies. I’d
use alongside arginine (unless you have an arginine-fuelled cancer). Bothare
vital in this battle.
29 I would find out later that this is one reason why metformin is useful for
cancer treatment – it lowers IGF-1, which in turn reduces the cysteine uptake
H2SC-JYLH-FPNE-KQ7F-JRSS
and therefore lowers glutathione.
30 Iannitti T, Palmieri B. An Update on the Therapeutic Role of Alkylglycerols.
Marine Drugs . 2010;8(8): 2267-2300. doi: 10.3390/md8082267.
31 Mitre, R., Etienne, M., Martinais, S., Salmon, H., Allaume, P., legrand, P., &
legrand, A. (2005). Humoral defence improvement and haematopoiesis
stimulation in sows and offspring by oral supply of shark-liver oil to mothers
during gestation and lactation. British Journal of Nutrition, 94(5), 753-762.
32 -O-Alkylglycerols reduce the stimulating effects of bFGF on
endothelial cell proliferation in vitro. Pédrono , Frédérique et al . Cancer
letters, Volume 251, Issue 2, 317-32
33 Michael Zasloff, A. Paige Adams, Bernard Beckerman, Ann Campbell, Ziying
Han, Erik luijten, Isaura Meza, Justin Julander, Abhijit Mishra, Wei Qu, John M.
Taylor, Scott C. Weaver, Gerard C. l. Wong. Squalamine as a broadspectrum systemic antiviral agent with therapeutic potential.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 2011; DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1108558108
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Chapter Nine:
Beating the Odds
Each month I tracked my blood markers. Even as a
physiotherapist I had been taught that stage IV meant certain
death. It was unavoidable. The cancer would come back.
I tried hard to block out the negative thoughts. I refused to
believe it. I knew starving the cancer and halting its growth
was key to preventing an unwelcome return. It was tough
going, sticking to the diet, but I learnt to adapt, and soon
realised that all those unhealthy foods I’d eaten in the past I
really didn’t miss. Well, maybe watching others tucking into a
bacon sandwich on a Sunday morning still made me yearn
wistfully for a bite.
As my blood markers remained within normal levels, my faith
in my own abilities was slowly growing. And as self-doubt
faded, I began to feel so confident in my progress that I threw
myself back into the toiletries business I’d started just before
the diagnosis of secondary cancer in my lungs. It was certainly
a welcome distraction from the dreary hospital appointments,
the nail-biting wait for results and the sad and sorry looks from
the medical staff. I could see what they were thinking. They’d
all been taught the same dogma. ‘Stage IV. I wonder how long
she’s got?’
In the hospital, I was constantly putting up barriers to the
undercurrent of negativity I knew was lurking just below the
surface. I was not immune to thoughtless off-cuff remarks from
the staff. My inner equilibrium could be knocked off balance by
the slightest hint of pessimism.
‘I am really pleased with my progress,’ I said to a nurse taking
my blood pressure. ‘Let’s hope I can keep it at bay now.’
‘When it comes back, I’m sure there’ll be many new therapies
to consider.’
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‘Don’t you mean if?’ I replied, shocked at her lack of empathy. I
bet I knew more about how to control my cancer than she did.
How dare she assume progression was inevitable? It made my
resolve even stronger.
At home I was juggling sales meetings, new toiletries
formulations, creating designs for bottles, tubes and gift boxes,
and sourcing production from all over the world. Creating a
brand-new product range was exciting. It was also a kind of
organised chaos, an antidote to my structured and scheduled
medical regime.
A period of ‘extreme multi-tasking’ is how I would describe
these years. But I always put aside twenty minutes for daily
meditation. I did this immediately after my morning
supplements. I made time for a bike ride or a brisk walk to the
park after lunch. This was surely boosting my immunity,
oxygenating my blood and allowing my body to soak up any
glucose released from my food.
Starve cancer. It became my mantra. I would chant it as I
marched briskly around the block or the park, squeezing each
buttock in turn with every step as I did so, hoping no-one
noticed my bizarre bottom-clenching gait! I would stop
occasionally to do a few knee squats by a bench. I wanted to
make sure my gluteus maximus, the biggest muscle in our
bodies, was getting a decent workout. It didn’t take a genius to
work out it’d be the ideal one to target (along with the quads in
the thighs). Muscles make up 40% of our body mass and
provide a valuable sink to soak up excess glucose. Exercise
also increases insulin sensitivity in the tissues so it becomes
ever more efficient at taking up the glucose and using it.
Even with the distraction of starting a business, I was still
learning and assimilating new cancer information and trying to
formulate a new anti-cancer strategy. If, after everything I’d
done, the cancer made its return, I would need a contingency
plan. I continued to buy survivor stories, huge tomes on
alternative medicine and many other books and journals. My
home cancer library now filled several shelves.
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I still felt sure there were other ‘big guns’ I might have missed.
Green tea, with its powerful ingredient epigallocatechin gallate
(EGCG) was definitely one. But it only had a short half-life, so I
would need to drink it constantly through the day, sometimes
as many as ten cups! Other natural compounds were also big
guns. Curcumin targeted inflammatory pathways, while
genistein, silibinin (milk thistle), quercetin and resveratrol all
seemed to stop cancer growing and spreading. All became
constants in my routine, alongside my supplement cocktail and
morning juice of beetroot, celery, carrot and apple. Quite how
they might starve cancer I’d yet to find out, but each seemed to
be very effective from the research I’d seen on their cancerkilling and angiogenesis-blocking activity. All were taken at
every mealtime.
There seemed to be no ‘one size fits all’ for diet. Each
complementary doctor had an individual style of treatment, yet
all focused on rectifying deficiencies of vitamins and minerals
(e.g. magnesium and A, B, D, K vitamins) or adding
supplements that would enhance other treatments. But more
than anything, they were all completely against sugar.
Making vegetable juices, exercising, home cooking, sourcing
healthy food, exploring new ones, researching, meditating,
hospital appointments, the business, it all took time. This was
hardly the kind of lifestyle I would recommend to anyone just
out of a terminal diagnosis. It was exhausting. In the evenings I
would slide into a warm naturally fragranced bath, light
candles, play music and relax for half an hour. Shutting out the
hustle and bustle of the day was important. I needed my own
little sanctuary just for thinking. Or not thinking. It became my
nightly refuge.
In the end I created my own Tranquility Spa CD, a relaxation
ritual with a bit of reflexology, affirmations and visualisations
all included, designed primarily for myself – but later I
packaged it up as a gift pack with candles, mineral-rich bath
salts and a bath pillow. When I launched, the pack was
shortlisted for Gift of the Year.
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Bath time was a great place to ponder life, business, my cancer
and all its complexities. Once I had calmed my racing thoughts
I would think about how my cancer was behaving and try and
see the bigger picture. I had no detectable cancer in my body,
but I was not about to sit back and rest. It could pounce at any
time. ‘When it comes back’, were the words that always
haunted me. The wily cancer cell had been able to steal my
body’s nutrients, blood supply and immunity, and it had used
all these against me. How could I outwit this parasite?
Parasites thrive and reproduce unabated until either their food
source runs out or the host dies. Sadly, with cancer it is usually
the latter. How to starve cancer without starving and damaging
myself? On the outside, it appeared to be super powerful, able
to resist the most toxic of treatments, to mutate just when you
thought you were getting the upper hand. A cunning little
beast. But was it really powerful, or did it just reroute itself
down whichever path was left unblocked? What if you blocked
all the routes? How many were there? Was it an impossible
task to find out? Was it just IGF-1 and aerobic glycolysis, the
Warburg Effect? If so, then why was it so hard to treat? There
must be other metabolic pathways that needed blocking.
Cancer research was getting more reductive, scientists
examining smaller and smaller parts of the cancer genome and
then turning their attention to the immune system when the
genomic treatments failed them. What had gone wrong with
the patient’s immunity to allow the cancer to thrive? What had
come first, the altered immunity or the cancer? What if the
altered immunity was a result of an altered metabolism and
inflammation? If so, targeting the immune system would be
futile unless you shut down the altered metabolism and
switched off the inflammation. Moreover, how had cancer
started? Had researchers and orthodox doctors lost sight of the
bigger picture?
I lay there thinking about how the cancer cell was different to
a normal cell. It had been reprogrammed to endlessly divide
and make two ‘daughter’ cells and to do this it used huge
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amounts of nutrients. On a very basic level, cells are made up
of various proteins (enzymes, organelles, nucleic acids, etc.)
encapsulated by a fatty membrane. Each cancer cell would
need both the fat required for new cell membranes as well as
protein for building new internal cell structures. Like building
a house, you need a workforce (the energy to build it) and
bricks and mortar. With cancer the main energy source seemed
to be glucose, but it needed access to fat and protein too to
build its cell structure.
The process was essentially the same no matter what type of
cancer it was, pancreatic, lymphoma or breast. Starving these
cells of fat and the protein it needed was surely important, as
well as blocking the glucose it used for the cell division. Did
that mean a starvation diet might work? But even when
patients had cachexia, when the body began wasting away, the
cancer often continued to thrive, stealing nutrients from other
parts of the body. It certainly seemed to be a systemic problem,
affecting the whole person, not just a zone or specific area in
the body.
I gleaned information from every doctor I saw and as many
journals as I could find. I continued to modify my diet. A
description of my approach would probably be a low glycaemic,
low inflammatory, high fibre, mostly pescatarian ‘Paleo’ diet
but low in saturated fat – in other words, the caveman diet. I
had cut out potatoes, aubergines, tomatoes, rhubarb,
strawberries and all citrus foods. Grapefruit was the worst. All
too acidic or inflammatory for me. I ate no dairy apart from a
little parmesan as a treat and occasionally a little bioactive
yoghurt. It was more about how my body was able to digest the
food, the glycaemic index and how it reacted to different food
types. If I bloated after a meal, then I must have triggered an
inflammatory reaction in my gut and inflammation needed to
be avoided at all costs.
Meals were no longer a source of comfort as they had been in
the past and cooking was an added burden to my already jampacked day, so my meals were very basic. Simple salads with a
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bit of short grain brown rice doused with olive oil at
lunchtimes. I wondered if this intense level of commitment was
necessary, there was really no way of knowing, but when I
remembered the statistics, I knew I had little choice. I would
never be able to return to my pre-cancer diet.
If cancer needed both fat and protein for creating two identical
new progenies, as well as glucose for energy to create them,
then starving the cancer was going to be tricky. I needed to cut
all three food sources, the ‘macros’ in my diet – fat, carb and
protein – and just starving myself might kill me in the process.
It didn’t seem to be a long-term solution. I wondered if there
were some foods I could eat safely that cancer didn’t like.
Cutting back on volume came first. The benefits of caloric
restriction for cancer were reported as early as 1914 by Peyton
Rous, 34 who also discovered that viruses could trigger the
disease. His work on a viral cause for cancer was not given
proper recognition until much later – he was finally awarded a
Nobel Prize in 1966. Still no-one has yet acknowledged his
observations on diet restriction in mice or his suggestion that it
could be useful for many cancers. The effects of underfeeding
gained attention again in 1940, 35 but it lost momentum with
the advent of chemotherapy and the scramble for new ‘game
changers’. The latest drugs were allegedly magic bullets.
A reduction in volume seemed obvious to me, even without
sight of this research. I gradually ate smaller and smaller
portions. Perhaps this alone would be enough to tip the
balance, weaken the cancer and allow my immune system to
regain the upper hand.
Reducing protein was relatively easy, but were beans and
lentils a healthier substitute? I couldn’t be sure. 36
In my quest to lower fat and simple carbohydrates, several
supplements piqued my interest. Gymnema sylvestre is an
Indian Ayurvedic herb and a trial on diabetic patients (Type 1
and 2) showed it reduced glucose. It also seemed to raise
insulin levels, which might make it a risk. Perhaps it made
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insulin work more efficiently in the body? I was still taking
Mahonia aquifolium tincture but no-one else had written
about berberine, the main constituent of Mahonia aquifolium
for cancer. There was no trace of it in any of the literature.
If no-one was using berberine for cancer maybe I was wrong,
perhaps it wasn’t as good as I thought. In 2002, I decided to
swap berberine and try Gymnema instead as the article on
Mahonia (which had mentioned its anti-tumoural,
antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory as well as glucose-lowering
effects) in the 1999 Journal of Herbal Medicine was fading from
my memory, crowded out by the clutter of additional
information. This swap was a mistake in hindsight. The
combination may have been much better.
Hydroxycitrate, from a plant called Garcinia Cambogia found
in India, was able to modify and reduce fat in the body. My
instincts were fortunately correct as I later discovered this
compound could block ATP citrate lyase which converts the
excess pyruvate produced by cancer cells into fatty acids for
making new cell membranes. 37 But would it then just push the
cancer to use more glycolytic or other fat driven metabolic
pathways? Research relating to cancer was non-existent for
both gymnema and hydroxycitrate – it was all about diabetes
and weight loss. But in they went, into my cancer-starving
regime. Blocking each cancer fuel supply was imperative.
But how many were there? Was I blocking enough?
Chromium Picolinate was shown to improve insulin sensitivity
and improve glycaemic control, so perhaps it would make the
Gymnema work better and reduce the insulin. Taking the two
together might work synergistically. Sure enough, a later
review of both treatments by physician Richard Nahas in 2009
showed that both gymnema and chromium picolinate to be
effective for glycaemic control. 38
Niacin-B3. This precursor of the coenzyme NAD (nicotinamide
adenine dinucleotide) had fat reducing properties too. It also
has a beneficial effect on insulin although the mechanism for
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this is less clear. NAD is important in not just the breakdown of
fat, but also carbohydrate, protein and alcohol breakdown and
storage, as well as cell signalling and DNA repair. It may be
very useful in the post treatment period as well, when the body
needs to rebuild cells with normal mitochondrial function. Dr
Callebout, my integrative doctor, prescribed a ‘no-flush’
version. 39
A higher caloric intake is associated with more aggressive and
worse survival cancer rates, but was this a result of too much
sugar, too much fat, too much protein, or just too much of
everything? Omega-6 oils promoted cancer growth, this was
very clear. I completely avoided sunflower oil and other
processed vegetable oils as they made inflammation worse. In
contrast, the Mediterranean diet had a much lower incidence
of cancer. Perhaps olive oil was a ‘safe’ fat to use despite
containing omega-6. Its high omega-9 content I learned
neutralised the omega-6. Butter I used sparingly, even though
it contained the vitamins A, D and K and something called
Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA).
CLA was reported to have huge beneficial effects for both
prevention and treatment of cancer. Many natural substances
contain this fatty acid (butter, cheese, saturated fat in red
meat) but I wanted to avoid saturated fat, so taking a
supplement was the safer option. It was the omega-7 part of
CLA, the palmitoleic acid, which I have since discovered was
the beneficial part. Not to be confused with palmitic acid, a
bad oil, (although this can be neutralised by omega-9)
palmitoleic acid can be found in both olive oil and sea
buckthorn oil. And the most beneficial part of palmitoleic acid
is vaccenic (aka rumenic) acid. A natural trans-fat! This has
beneficial effects on high blood sugar, elevated lipid levels,
inflammation and excess fat gain, and it enhances insulin
sensitivity. It is a super nutrient.
Instead of taking CLA as a supplement as I did in those days, I
now take a daily Sea Buckthorn oil capsule, which contains
omega-7. But it only really works efficiently in the presence of
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bifidobacteria in the gut. Hence the need for checking your gut
has adequate amounts and no ‘dysbiosis’, or abnormal levels of
pathogenic bacteria. For metabolic health, I believe everyone
should include omega-7 alongside adequate omega-3 (fish oils)
and omega-9 to help prevent all the major metabolic diseases:
Alzheimer’s, cancer, stroke, metabolic syndrome and heart
disease. As a follower of both medical trends and the latest
trends in cosmetics and toiletries, I always see the cosmetics
industry taking on board these beneficial nutrients much
faster. Sea Buckthorn oil has been big news for a while in
toiletries, and yet is still virtually unheard of as a supplement.
It should be big news in cancer and cardiovascular treatment
too!
Periodically, Dr Callebout reviewed my supplements and to my
horror he would prescribe yet more. He prescribed Vitamin K3
and maitake-D-fraction (a mushroom extract) both shown to
boost immunity and enhance the effects of intravenous vitamin
C. He also prescribed DHEA (not recommended for hormonerelated cancers) which enhanced my wellbeing and immunity
and it also ‘starves cancer’ by blocking the pentose phosphate
pathway, part of the process of building new DNA molecules.
All cancer patients researching their disease will come across
articles that link cancer to sugar, poor diets or lifestyle habits.
The result is that on top of feeling unwell there is an unspoken
sense of guilt and shame that somehow you had played a part
in causing your illness. This may not in fact be the case,
despite reports that lifestyle and environmental factors (like
pathogens) and carcinogens are thought to be up to 90%
responsible for cancer. 40 Avoiding pathogens can be
impossible unless you live like a hermit at the North Pole.
Parasites, bacteria and fungi are all linked as well as the wellknown association of viruses. Many viruses are linked to
cancer such as Epstein Barr, HPV, 41 hepatitis B and C, CMV, 42
human T-lymphotropic virus, Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated
herpesvirus (KSHV) and Merkel cell polyomavirus. More are
being discovered as scientists actively search for a link; the
bovine leukaemia virus was added in 2015 as a risk for breast
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cancer, a virus highly prevalent in milk worldwide. I suspect
many more cancers will be linked to viruses in the future.
Many people eat appalling diets and have shocking lifestyles
yet remain immune to cancer, while vegans who pride
themselves on their healthy lifestyle can be afflicted too. But
the media propagates this blame culture. This victimisation of
the patient is unwelcome and unhelpful baggage; those with
the disease stoically submit themselves to tortuous and
barbaric treatments with little complaint, a punishment they
feel they deserve for failing to be a paragon of health before.
With cancer shouldn’t you expect to suffer horribly to get well?
If a medical treatment doesn’t make you feel violently ill and
have terrible side effects, then it can’t possibly be killing or
controlling all those pesky cancer cells, can it? Isn’t cancer
virtually impossible to rid unless you load yourself up with
large doses of toxic chemicals? After decades of burning and
poisoning ourselves with these destructive treatments, the
‘standard of care’, we are ingrained to believe this nonsense.
I felt the self-blame too. I had abused my insides all my life,
thoughtlessly downing foods and drinks that disagreed with me
and made me bloated or tired. I too felt I had to be strict and
hard on myself with a punishing and gruelling diet. Had I in
some way been remiss and allowed cancer to develop?
Dr Callebout pressed upon me the need to sort out whatever
might be wrong with my intestinal health and to check the
nutrient levels in my blood. Now I was through chemotherapy,
I knew it was essential to be properly assessed and have my
stools checked and my micronutrient, fatty acid, vitamin and
mineral profiling examined. My medical training had done me
a disservice in this department. Diet and my intestines had
always taken a back seat, never receiving the attention they
desperately needed, as the focus or the reason why other
systems in the body go wrong.
Many cancer patients will be able to tell you about infection in
the gut or in the site where cancer developed. Why these prior
infections are treated as irrelevant and unacknowledged in
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oncology is truly astonishing. Oncologists see cancer as a
totally organic disease that somehow developed out of
nowhere, ignoring all the other infections that came before.
There are many different causes of cancer, many from
infectious diseases, but most integrative doctors will tell you
that every cancer patient, at some point, has had a problem
with their intestinal health.
Today, much emerging research is focused on the
‘microbiome’, the collection of organisms that live on and in us,
and the nature of our symbiotic relationship. Scientists are
trying to establish why correcting the microbiome has such a
big impact on the health of the cancer patient, no matter
where the cancer has developed. 43 Every little crevice on
every surface in our bodies is home to legions of tiny
microorganisms and the gut has by far the most.
I am not alone in my assumption that my intestines would just
deal with dietary abuse, whilst accepting that fatigue, bloating
and irregular bowel movements were perfectly normal. I had
not appreciated how easily our gut linings are damaged,
particularly in early life with the use of antibiotics, or other
supposedly ‘safe’ drugs. How they might lead to later damage
and longer term systemic effects and disease is only just
beginning to be understood.
My own gut woes may have stemmed from an infection in my
early twenties. I’d been on holiday with my family, windsurfing
off a popular tourist beach in Turkey. After a series of failed
‘carve gybes’ and subsequent ‘face plants’, I drank far more
seawater than I had intended and a couple of days later had
developed lobar pneumonia in my lungs. The mere act of
breathing brought out the searing pain of pleuritis
(inflammation of the lung membranes) and if this wasn’t
torture enough, I had a dose of pericarditis (inflammation of
the membranes around the heart) thrown in, which caused
severe pain to radiate down from my neck and shoulder into
my left arm. I couldn’t lie down, so nights were spent sitting up
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on deck unable to sleep, watching the stars. I really should
have been in hospital.
A local doctor prescribed a course of crude, uncoated and
strong antibiotics, after which nothing stayed down, not even
water. I have never been so thin! I dropped a stone in weight
within a week to just over seven and a half stone. All of this in
forty degrees of heat and on a boat. I became completely
dehydrated, and felt so terrible I remember thinking that if I
fell over the side I had no intention of saving myself. I would
have quite happily slipped beneath the waves never to return.
Those antibiotics must have totally wrecked my gut and upset
my microbial ecosystem. I had no clue about probiotic use in
those days. No-one did. With both good and bad bacteria wiped
out, my defences were at an all-time low. It may well have been
at this time that I picked up a parasite.
Now I was fighting the spectre of cancer, years later, I was
aware that the gut was the centre of my immunity and I would
not be well until I had fixed it. Re-establishing a good ‘gut
balance’ was a critical part of the jigsaw as well as mending
my damaged insides.
I decided periods of intermittent fasting might allow my gut to
rest, heal and reduce any inflammation. As a physiotherapist it
was usual to advise rest and anti-inflammatory treatments
(such as ice and ultrasound) for a damaged body part, before
the process of rehab. Dr Callebout was in favour of
intermittent fasting, or time-restricted feeding, allowing the
intestines to rest after three p.m. until the following morning.
The rationale being that the liver is more active in the morning
and better able to process food. This would also starve the
cancer of course.
He explained about the constant turf war going on in our
intestines, the balance of our beneficial (commensal) versus
bad (pathogenic) bacteria constantly shifting, particularly
when we take antibiotics or eat and drink unhealthy foods.
Doctors rarely suggest a course of probiotics after antibiotics

how to starve cancer

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