Welcome 2025!

A major anniversary

Been a while since I wrote here. Having successfully completed treatment, the chemo fog has been lifted and I’ve been keen to really go at life anew. Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the operation that removed 90% of the tumour and left me very much changed. I always treated life as a full contact sport before this and while the last year has shaken my confidence in a few ways, I’m keen to take the fight to life once more and rebuild. Things like, as an ex event operator, large groups were very much an energizer for me. Now, a round table of a dozen people is more cognitively draining! Apparently this is all normal and does improve with time. The phrase “the brain is a muscle that needs exercising” is apparently very true and work has indeed started! If you’re interested in visualising what was done, the 3-D printed model see here was made by a very talented friend directly from my MRI data. They went in though the side rather than took the top off though!

I wanted to offer up a few thoughts today but before I do, I want to turn to a comment someone offered up on one of the social platforms to my previous post on anti cancer baking. Someone felt I was perhaps suggesting that “anti cancer foods are the solution and if you don’t try and you get cancer it’s your own fault”. I want to be clear I believe nothing of the sort. More neurosurgeon was clear with me for example that there was nothing I could have done to cause or prevent my diagnosis. My aim here is simply to recognise that some foods have qualities being recognised by researchers as being anti-cancer, such as offered by the American Institute for Cancer Research here. It’s tiring to constantly research this all by ourselves, so my aim is to document some of what I learn from various sources then highlight ways in which I incorporate some of these things into my diet and make them more widely known and hopefully thus accessible. Some cancers are genetic, if I understand correctly. Optimising your diet is unlikely to stop that ever happening, but in the event that it does it could be less severe and therefore require a less brutal level of treatment. All experts agree that while Radio and Chemo can have some impact in killing cancer cells, the less treatment we actually need, the better. With a disease that is so far beyond our control in many respects, it’s also feels good and is mentally beneficial to take just a little agency back.

Two dietary things to share today. A simple home meal first - pancakes! It’s widely acknowledged by nutritionists that seeds, nuts and berries have some really helpful properties (such as this review on the US National Library of Medicine). I therefore wanted to tweak a classic to take advantage of this. Pancake batter is easy enough to mix up at home for a quick breakfast or lunch - so first, I add a handful of seeds to the batter. A spoonful of no-sugar yogurt for the good gut bacteria, then load up with chopped berries and nuts! Different seeds, berries and nuts seems to have a variety of properties that are potent for different kinds of cancers, so if you have a particular risk profile - for example breast or prostate cancer, choose your mix accordingly! For me, I went for a variety of berries with ground flax seed in the pancake batter and chopped walnuts in the fruit.

Second up today is the game I now play in a restaurant when choosing food. I try to have fun with the menu, reading through and challenging myself to choose not just what I want to eat but what might also be most beneficial to an anticancer lifestyle. Last meal out for example, I went with a stilton souffle because it was topped with walnuts, a truffled mushroom linguine because mushrooms have decent qualities I want too. A side of broccoli for the sulforaphane and finally the frozen berries to finish. I would have happily gone for anything on their menu but I felt extra delight in knowing I’d just optimised in that way in I certainly enjoyed every bite!

Finally today, I was chatting recently with another patient who was struggling and I was reminded of a visualisation I used back in spring 2024. It’s a got something of the new age hippy to it, but it helped me then and maybe it can help someone else now. Back at that time, I had recovered from the physical aspects of surgery and was going through a combined protocol of Radio and Chemotherapy. One is tough, but both is brutal. It can be significantly more effective though, so I committed and went in hard. There were times it had me on my ass, not gonna lie. I was so lucky to have Damon coaching me though and he talked me through his belief that we are all powerful beings, even moreso if we can draw the component parts together. I took that concept and ran with it. Literally, pushing myself out for a 5km run one day, this is what came to mind:

I am a father. I'm a founder who’s built a company and sold it. I'm a snowboarder and cyclist. I cook well for my family and occasionally entertain them by playing bass guitar badly. I am someone's son and I have so many immense childhood memories to look back on. We all contain multitudes of different beings. Those experiences are huge and each of them brings strength. I visualised those beings coming together and felt the strength and resilience building inside me once more.

It was Walt Whitman back in the 1850's whose poem first used the line "I contain multitudes", later deployed in song by Bob Dylan. I first heard it quoted by the legendary Christina Wodtke - it stayed with me from that day, though I didn’t truly understand its power until the run on Hove beach that day. I share it now in the hope that maybe it helps someone else when they need to dig deep and find just a little more to get them through.