February 2020 – First anniversary since diagnosis, my “first” holiday and a new therapy

I am writing this as February is coming to an end – and what a month it has been!

The 8th February was the first notable date: the first anniversary since I was initially diagnosed. A year ago, it was not at all clear that I would still be around so I thought that, in some way, this would be a day to celebrate and look forward to.

I was wrong. From the moment I woke up, thoughts and memories about my past, when I enjoyed a healthy and unconstrained life, kept entering my mind. Similarly, my ability to focus on the present moment rather than on my highly uncertain future was completely gone for the day.

Luckily, this turned out to be just a temporary blip, most certainly caused by the momentous nature of the one-year milestone: the following day I woke up in a good mood, ready to resume my day to day life.

Since I launched the blog, I have been overwhelmed by many emails full of encouragement and appreciation from both cancer patients and healthy people. One such email was sent to me by somebody whose mother suffers from ovarian cancer.

The email came with a strong recommendation to read a book recently published by Jane McLelland and entitled “How to starve cancer” (see www.howtostarvecancer.com/).

Jane’s story is pretty incredible. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer back in 1994 and she underwent surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. In addition, using her medical knowledge and researching heavily, she put together a “cancer-starving formula”, using natural therapies, exercise and diet.

After being in remission for a few years, the cancer came back. As noted on the How To Starve Cancer website:

“When she developed a second cancer, leukaemia, the result of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for her first cancer, she knew she only had weeks to live. With nothing to lose, she put together a unique cocktail of old drugs. To her enormous relief, joy and surprise, her cancer just ‘melted away’. Her cocktail was more powerful than she had ever hoped.

Since her remarkable recovery, Jane has been a staunch supporter of ‘off label’ drugs for cancer therapy (medicines used for other conditions than their approved licence).”

I got quite intrigued by this story and decided to purchase the book and to take it with me on our forthcoming holiday in the Amalfi coast, which is situated in the South of Italy, not far from Naples.

This was my first holiday since the diagnosis, unless one counts as a holiday my trip to Heidelberg in August 2019!

I had booked a nice hotel for the whole family and had been looking forward to this trip for several weeks, fearing at the same time that something would come up at the last minute, stopping us from leaving London.

In the end, we just about managed to go, missing by one day an unusually heavy storm that led to the cancellation of a large number of flights from the UK.

The holiday felt like a dream. Jane and I had visited the Amalfi coast in 1996 – it was our first holiday together as a couple and we had very nice memories from that trip. The weather was incredible as was the food, I always felt well and the children were in a very good mood throughout.

We stayed there for a week using our hotel in Positano as a base and we managed to pack in an awful lot during that time: climbing the Vesuvius volcano from which we could enjoy amazing views of Naples and the coast, visiting the ruins of Pompei, taking a boat to the beautiful Capri island, and driving to several lovely villages such as Amalfi, Ravello and Sorrento.

I know this blog is not a travel guidebook but I really don’t think there are many places in the world that can provide such a diverse range of memorable experiences!

It is difficult to convey all the emotions I felt during the holiday. On the one hand, I was immensely grateful for being able to enjoy so many happy moments with Jane and the children, especially considering that one year ago I had been told that my life was, in all likelihood, about to end within just a few months.

On the other hand, the thought that this may well be my last opportunity to be away with the family was very difficult to deal with, although it did provide me with a strong motivation to enjoy every moment to the fullest.

Each evening, after coming back to the hotel from one of the amazing restaurants in the area, I made sure to read a few pages of Jane McLelland’s book and found it extremely impressive due to the amount of research conducted by the author on the so-called metabolic approach to cancer that she personally developed for her individual illness and successfully experimented on herself.

The metabolic approach is based on medicines that are supposed to limit cancer cells’ access to and usage of energy sources, reducing their multiplication and eventually killing them.

These medicines include drugs such as Metformin, Atorvastatin, Doxycycline and Mebendazole, which have been used historically to treat a variety of medical conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol, infections, and parasitic worm infestations.

Importantly, the metabolic approach can be adopted in addition to, rather than instead of, other standard therapies like chemotherapy and radiation. And the medicines tend to be very cheap since they have been around for decades meaning that they are all off-patent and that their side-effects are well understood.

In terms of the evidence on the effectiveness of this approach against cancer, it seems quite clear that it worked amazingly well for Jane McLelland. And there seems to be a large number of other people who have greatly benefited from it, including patients for whom conventional treatments had apparently been exhausted.

My understanding, however, is that there is still no evidence based on large clinical trials that has unambiguously demonstrated that the metabolic approach extends life and/or increases the chance of a permanent cure.

And this is the only area where I find it difficult to agree with Jane McLelland’s overall stance, who in my view tends to overstate somewhat the evidence in favour of the metabolic approach and to take an overly critical view of conventional treatments, such as chemotherapy.

As far as I understand, huge progress has been made with chemotherapy treatments in the last few years, for which we should all be grateful. My own experience is one example of this: without chemotherapy, I would not have been able to undergo surgery last year and I would almost certainly be dead by now.

Indeed, the Care Oncology Clinic to which Jane McLelland refers in her book (see www.careoncologyclinic.com) makes it very clear in its homepage that the cocktail of off-patent drugs should be seen as an addition to standard of care therapy:

“The Care Oncology Clinic is undertaking a study into and providing cancer treatments that may complement and enhance standard of care therapy. Treating your cancer in combination with your existing treatment may increase its effect. The medications are well understood, with low side effects, offering you an acceptable quality of life.”

Bearing these points in mind, I contacted the Care Oncology Clinic as soon as we got back to London from our holiday in Italy. I met with them a few days later and decided to try their cocktail of medicines.

From what I can see, there is no known negative interaction with the Folfiri chemotherapy I have been undergoing since October and, should future scans show no sign of disease, it would be great to be able to reduce the frequency of chemotherapy from two to three weeks and/or to take a break from it for a while. And if the metabolic approach contributed to achieve this outcome, it would be great!