The chain I did not know existed

What happened when I did it

It ended with me standing up in a doctor's room, picking up my papers and walking out. And with three sentences I said I was going to do. Write down every question. Remove every person. Fix every feeling that is costing me.

This is what happened when I did.

Because it was never one doctor. It was a cousin. A mother in law. A wardrobe. A kitchen. A set of lamps I hated. The first hour of every morning. None of it looked like a chain while I was wearing it. It looked like my life.

And last year somebody wrote, on the internet, that I was building this application because I had suddenly got no evidence of disease.

Suddenly.

I did not answer her then. This is the answer. Moses waited years. Joseph waited years. Nothing in any story I believe in has ever arrived suddenly, and nothing in mine did either.

You cannot plant a seed in bad soil

Everybody understands that sentence and almost nobody applies it to themselves.

I learned it properly with an actual plant. I had one that had died, and I had another that was alive and beautiful. I thought I would move a little of the earth from the dead pot into the good one. Not much. Just enough to fill a gap.

I killed it.

I did not kill it by neglecting it. I killed it with the thing I added. I took soil out of a pot where something had already failed, I put it against roots that were doing perfectly well, and that was enough.

That is exactly what I did to myself for twelve years. I kept adding. Medication on top of alcohol. Appointments on top of a life I had never once examined. Not once did anybody say to me: before you add anything else, what is in the soil?

“You can give a plant the best water in the world. If the soil is bad, you are watering a problem.”

And you do not fix a desk full of cables by buying another cable

My desk was covered in cables. It made me slightly mad every time I sat down.

So what was the solution? Another cable? Obviously not. It was fewer cables, and a way to keep the ones I actually needed in order.

Now apply that to a body that is already carrying too much, because it is the same arithmetic and almost nobody does it.

The answer is not every drug a stranger online recommends. It is not sending money to a woman performing her illness for an audience. For me it was not a room full of people taking turns to describe how bad it is.

The answer is fewer cables.

I cleared that desk in twenty minutes. I had been sitting in front of it for years.

So here are the pieces

I wrote that when something is wrong in your life, your body runs the bill. Your stress goes up. You swap the cigarettes for food and the weight arrives, because what you actually needed was comfort. And that we are living inside a world that changes every hour, and we let every small voice in it come and sit down inside our ears, and we never once stop and be alone with it.

That is the door, and everything from here is on the other side of it.

And when I say the other side, I do not mean it the way people mean it when somebody dies. I am not talking about heaven.

I am talking about the other side of the line where the fear and the terror of being ill are running your life. That line is real, it is in this world, and you can cross it while you are still here. I am writing to you from the other side of it.

Because I did stop. And once I was finally alone with it, I started finding out what was wrong.

Which is the other sentence I want to pick up. I wrote: everything was wrong, I have been finding out what, one piece at a time, for four years, and finding out has been the medicine.

These are the pieces.

Not in the order I would arrange them in now. In the order I actually found them, which was no order at all, because you do not get to choose which one you see first. You see whatever you happen to be standing close enough to see.

And every single one of them, without exception, was something to take away.

I stopped being afraid

This one is first because everything else sits on top of it.

I told you I used to say “I am bigger than cancer, I do not care, I am going to live my life.” That was not courage. It was a costume.

Underneath it I was terrified, every day, for years, and I would not admit it, and you cannot put down a thing you will not pick up.

I had to sit with being afraid before I could lean on anything that takes fear away. For me that is God. It does not have to be for you. But it has to be something, because fear is not a mood. It is a state your body runs in.

There is a reason you have to sleep. There is a reason you have to breathe properly. A body held in alarm for years does not repair the way a calm one does, and if yours is already sick, fear is one more thing you are asking it to carry while it carries that.

“If your body is sick, fear is not a feeling about the problem. It is part of the problem.”

But I am not telling you I have no fear

Now watch something, because I am not telling you that I do not feel fear.

I still wake up most mornings with a little anxiety and a little fear of what is coming. That has not gone anywhere. What has gone is fear running my day, and fear running my life.

I am not superwoman. If I stood here and told you I am afraid of nothing I would be lying to you, and you would know it was a lie.

Being afraid and feeling fear are two different things. Feeling something moves through you and leaves. Being in a state of fear all the time is somewhere you are living. Can you see the difference?

“Feeling fear and living in a state of fear are two different things.”

What I learned, and I learned it the hard way, is how to do the thing I had to do while I was still afraid of it. Afraid, and doing it anyway.

If you believe in God you already know this one. On the mountain Jesus said do not be anxious about tomorrow. Look at the birds. They do not plant and they do not harvest, and they are fed. And not one of you, by worrying about it, can add a single hour to your life.

Knowing that and living it are not the same thing, and the gap between them is enormous. I spent years inside that gap.

I wish somebody had told me all of this sixteen years ago. Instead I had a friend who invited me out drinking every day of the week, and she knew exactly what I was dealing with.

And there were days when I walked out of the hospital, went home, cleaned the flat and went shopping as though nothing had happened. In my head that was the proof that I was not afraid of cancer.

I think it helped me a little, and I am not going to pretend that it did not.

The difference between then and now is that then I was not being responsible with it. I was not addressing it and I was not accepting what I actually had. I built myself a shield against the fear, and for a while that shield did hold something up.

What I know now is that the things I was using to shield myself were the same things that were hurting me.

And that is the whole difference between you reading this and me living it. You get to find out now what I do not do anymore, so that you do not have to do it. For you it should take a great deal less than sixteen years.

I stopped starting my day with everybody else's needs

I used to wake up and walk straight out into other people's requirements. Work, messages, somebody else's emergency. My own body got whatever was left at the end, which was nothing.

Now I slow down in the morning. I pray. I take some time before the day gets its hands on me.

That is the whole change. It sounds like nothing. It is the first hour of every single day for four years.

I stopped keeping people who were costing me

So you have your list in front of you. Two things on it. Three. Maybe more.

“Everything you add is a bet. Everything you take away is one thing less for your body to carry.”

Now comes the hard part, and I am not going to ask you to do anything I did not do. So let me go first, and let me tell you the one that cost me the most.

My cousin

I had a cousin. I say had, because she is not in my life anymore. I wish her well, I pray she has health and a good life, and she is not coming back.

Not ever, and not to my table. She will not sit at my table again. She lost that privilege.

For years I went to see her. I paid the restaurant bills. I paid the shopping in the supermarket. I flew there and I paid for all of it, and I told myself it was generosity.

It was not generosity. I was buying a family.

And I had one, for about three days at a time, for exactly as long as my credit card was open. Then I would want to stay in, and not go out, and just be somewhere that felt like people who belonged to me.

She never accepted me. Not once, not since we were children. She was a bully when we were small and she was a bully when we were grown.

When I was young, with my son, basically starving and close to homeless, I asked her for help.

She told me I should become a prostitute.

I am writing that down because it happened.

And I still went back. Every time I could, I went back, because I wanted to feel like somebody's family.

The last time she did it in public, I had fallen in love and been betrayed. She called me stupid in front of her friends. Why would a man that age love a woman of forty with cancer. She said it for the room, and I stood there with the betrayal still fresh in my chest and felt ashamed on top of it.

March 2024

I was in a bad place.

My sister had died in October 2023, and I was still very fresh in accepting that she was not in this world anymore. For a long time I had not been carrying only cancer. I had been carrying the sadness of watching my sister die through a telephone, over WhatsApp.

I was in treatment. I was vulnerable.

And I had just been refused something I had been reaching for, something I had been waiting for so eagerly that I was desperate for it, because I had decided that if I got it I would feel better. It was a sad day.

And she appeared on my telephone.

She knew what I earned. She knew my card was bigger than hers and that I had always done well in my work. She needed something, and she came straight away, because I was weak and because I was still doing all the things I had not yet stopped. Pleasing people. Putting everybody in front of me.

So I sent her money. All of it.

And here is the detail I want you to sit with, because it is the whole of this post in one image.

“I was sending her my money while I was sleeping in bed sheets that were ten years old.”

I would not spend anything on myself. Somewhere in me I had decided I did not deserve a proper bed, and at the same time I was wiring money to somebody whose only consistent role in my life had been to make me smaller.

That March my tumours started to grow, and they grew fast.

I had been stable. The treatment was working.

And then I let her back in.

And then I invited her into my home

I was in the middle of a cancer battle. I was on systemic treatment. I had put on weight, which for me was new, because I had been very thin my whole life.

I collected her from the airport with flowers.

I had booked one of the best restaurants in Vienna.

She brought a friend with her, to sleep in my home, and eat in my home, and drink in my home. Between them they did not pay for a coffee.

And not thirty minutes after walking through my door, she was sitting at my own vanity table, telling me how happy she was to see me fat. That I looked better fat than I had when I was, in her words, an obsessive fitness person.

I was not fat. I was inflamed, and I was poisoned, and I was in treatment. I felt sick most of the day. I had headaches. I wanted to vomit.

And I was on benzodiazepines, which I had been given year after year for seven years, because I believed that was treatment. I never read what it was. I had handed my health to somebody else and never once participated in it.

That was the condition I was in when I bought the plane ticket for a woman whose only reliable job in my life was to make me feel like nothing.

She left my home with a bag full. A Mac. A computer. A whole office for a digital nomad.

Six weeks

It lasted about a month and a half, that period of transferring money for everything she needed.

In the same weeks I did not go for the hyperbaric oxygen treatment I had been looking at. I did not go and find a second doctor. I did not look at what else I could be doing for myself. I did not replace anything in my home.

I was funding the thing that was draining me and refusing the things that might have helped me, in the same month, with the same money.

Then I told her no. I said I could not help her anymore, because I was getting very sick.

And it hurt, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I can say no many times. But there is a point where I mean it forever, and I feel it in my chest, like something stopping in my heart. That is how I knew this one had to go.

I am a fighter. I do not give up easily. So I fought for things long past the point where the fighting itself was the thing killing me.

“That is what I stopped. I stopped fighting for things that were not worth fighting for, and I started fighting for me.”

And then she wrote this

I tried to end it quietly. No argument, no scene, nothing said that could not be taken back.

And for a while she wrote to tell me how much she missed me, and why was I not speaking to her, and could I help because she could not even turn the computer on.

And then she wrote this, and I am going to put it here exactly as it arrived.

“I hope that you die from cancer and I will sit with popcorn to see you dying, together with your mother.”

Think about what that means for a moment.

Ask yourself how a person is supposed to thrive in an environment where she keeps people close who are using her, and where the moment she sets one boundary, the only thing they have left for her is a wish that she dies.

What that did to my body

She was not giving me cancer. I want to be clear about that, because I am not going to make a claim I cannot stand behind.

But I had been doing well, and then I started getting sicker, and the months she was around me were the months it went backwards.

My body was not reacting to her. It was reacting to the sadness, and to the stress, and to the financial fear she put on me every single time she manipulated me into sending more.

That is the bill I talked about earlier. That is what running it looks like.

So I stopped giving my resources, my energy, my love and my hope to people who had never deserved any of them.

And I started looking better. Not because I bought anything. Because I stopped paying for something.

Now your list

Maybe there is somebody like that on your paper. Probably not at that scale, and I hope not.

But maybe there is somebody who takes something from you every time you see them, and you have been calling it family, or history, or loyalty, and refusing to call it what it is.

That is the one to confront, and you can only confront it once you have accepted what is actually happening in your body.

It is called cancer. Or endometriosis. Or an autoimmune disease. Whatever it is called, it starts with a capital letter, it is big, and it has to be out in the open where you can see it.

Because if it is not there, you are back to fighting a ghost. And you cannot fight something you will not give a shape to.

The one I did not understand at the time

There is one more, and it is older, and I did not understand what I had done when I did it.

My ex mother in law.

When I got cancer she telephoned me every single day. Checking on me, she would have called it.

She never once asked how I was feeling. She never told me anything good. She interrogated me, the way you are interrogated in a police station, and she wanted every detail of everything.

I would spend hours in a hospital waiting for an examination, come home emptied out in every way a person can be emptied, mentally, emotionally and physically, and then have to deliver a full report to a woman who was not my family, who had not stood by me, who brought me nothing, and who behaved as though she supervised my life.

She was not my mother in law. I was not married anymore. I owed her nothing, and certainly not material for her conversations.

So I deleted her number, I blocked her, and I never answered again.

I did not explain. I did not have a discussion about it. I did not give her notice.

And it brought me an enormous amount of peace.

This was years ago. I was still drinking then. I was still calling myself a wine lover. I was still a people pleaser in every other part of my life.

I had no idea that I had just done the most important thing in this entire series.

“I had taken something out.”

So let me say the permission out loud

Because nobody says it to people who are ill.

It is allowed to stop speaking to somebody who hurts you. It is allowed to put distance between yourself and people who arrive carrying stress. It is allowed to stop answering the daily check in where you have to perform being unwell for somebody else's curiosity.

You do not owe anybody a bulletin. You do not have to explain, and you do not have to have the conversation about it if the conversation will cost you more than the silence.

Carrying an illness is already an enormous weight. You are permitted to not also carry the people who make it heavier.

And then the one I promised you

I used to say “I am bigger than cancer”. What it actually meant was: I will go to the hospital and let a doctor manage my health and decide for me.

And he did decide for me, until he had completely damaged me.

This is that.

I chose him the way almost everybody chooses. I searched for him. He was the director of a clinic. He had a good position in an important hospital. The internet said he was one of the best. A white coat, a title and a good search result, and I handed him my life.

I never took a second opinion. Not one, in ten years. It did not seriously occur to me, because I had decided the question was already answered by somebody better qualified to answer it than me.

A position is not a character reference. A man can be one of the pillars of his community and the worst thing that ever happened to the people behind his door. You already know that is true. We simply never apply it to the person holding our results.

What he decided

He decided to open my body. More than eight surgeries, and sixteen interventions in total if you count every time somebody went inside me, a large number of them inside a span of two years. Every single one felt, at the time, like something being done for me.

I did not need even one of them.

He decided to leave me for fourteen months without my own cancer results, after I had brought him an ultrasound that said there was a suspected metastasis.

He decided to let that metastasis grow, and he never called me back to tell me how serious it had become. In 2021 it was in my neck and above my collarbone. It became metastatic and it did not have to. Nobody lied to me. The information existed, it was written down, and it was simply not handed over.

He decided to answer a text message with we will see each other in February, instead of telling me to come immediately because I was dying.

By 2022 there was a ten centimetre tumour at the base of my throat.

I did not find out what I had become from a person. I found out from a page.

And when I complained about how he had behaved, he decided to humiliate me in front of one thousand six hundred and nineteen people, and to tell them that I was somebody who wanted to die.

And there were the invoices. Ten years, privately, two hundred and fifty euros a consultation, much of it to have my own results read out loud to me. In ten years of files there was no proper medical history. Nobody had ever written down who I actually was.

He now says I was never his patient, because I came through my social insurance.

So I stopped handing my life to other people.

So I left, and I did the same thing again

I took my papers and I went, which on its own felt enormous.

And then I handed myself to another one. I decided that this one was the only doctor left in the world I could trust, and I relied on him totally, because that was the only way of being ill that I knew.

“I changed the hands. I did not change the habit of putting my life in somebody else's.”

And what he did with it

I was having attacks. I was told they were in my head. I was told medication was the only option there was.

He was handing me 2 mg of Xanax a day, until it became 6 mg a day. At one point I was on more than twenty five medications simply to function, and I had reached the place where I could not breathe without them.

“If somebody hands you seven boxes of benzodiazepines in a single month, stop and ask what is actually being treated here.”

They were not in my head. They were coming out of my body.

When I asked him to change the medication, or to send me somewhere else, because it was making me sick, he changed the brand.

Seven years of being handed that is not a treatment. It is poisoning, whatever anybody meant by it.

He is the one I was with when I lost the use of my hand.

And I am not going to say that he paralysed me, because that is not the sentence, and it has never been the sentence. I handed him the decision, exactly the way I had handed it to the one before him, and the decision cost me my hand.

He is not my doctor anymore.

Everything else in this post is what happened when I finally changed the habit.

I stopped telling the story every day

I wrote about this already, the quiz show, the phone that starts the moment you walk out of the clinic.

Here is the part I did not say.

Every time you tell it, you are sending your own brain a message, and the message is: I am in the middle of the storm. You say it in the morning to one person and in the afternoon to another, and by the evening you have spent the entire day standing in weather.

That is the same energy you could have spent finding your way out of it.

Tell the people who need to know. Once. Properly. Then stop renewing the subscription.

I stopped living in a house that was working against me

This sounds small until you hear it properly.

There were lamps in my home I hated. I had not chosen them for me. I saw them every single morning and every single morning they put a small amount of stress into my body before anything else had happened.

I had the money to replace them. What I did not have was one hour of stillness to notice they were doing it.

My wardrobe was full. I was stressed about having no space and certain the flat was too small. It was not too small. I was hoarding. Clothes I bought, then gained or lost weight, then never wore, while actually wearing the same three things for years.

So I cleared it. What was good I gave away to people who could use it, because I am not handing anybody a thing I would not wear myself. What was damaged went out, because damaged is not a gift. Now when I open that door, everything in it is something I want to put on.

Then the kitchen, and this one is not about taste. I looked at what my food was touching and almost all of it was plastic. So it went.

And the bedding. I slept for years on things I had never once thought about, while sleep is the one place the body does its repairs. One year I did not give five thousand euros to my cousin. That year I bought cotton, and proper bedding, and things my skin could sleep against.

“I am not minimal because it is a style. I am minimal because everything you own is either holding you up or quietly taking something from you.”

And it works the other way too. I do not buy anything now without knowing where it is going to live. My kitchen is very small. If there is nowhere to put it, I do not buy it, and I find another way.

Taking the garbage out comes first

This is the rule underneath all of it, and it is the whole reason this series is about stopping rather than starting.

When you renovate a room you do not begin by buying furniture. You begin by taking the garbage out. Until the room is empty there is nowhere for anything good to go.

A body is the same. You cannot add your way out. Every supplement, every therapy, every protocol laid on top of a life that is poisoning you is furniture arriving at a house full of rubbish.

I am not going to call people garbage, as a rule.

But in my case there were people in my life who were exactly that, and pretending otherwise for another ten years would have cost me more than a hand.

The thing I did not do

When my surgeries were finished, the doctor handed me a piece of paper and told me I had to do chemotherapy.

I said no. I said there must be another way. I took tamoxifen instead, for years.

I need to be very careful here, because this is the one paragraph in this series that somebody could read badly. I am not telling you to refuse chemotherapy. I am not telling you that what I did was right, or that it would be right for you. I made that decision for my body, at that moment, with that history, and I have never once told another human being to make it.

What I am telling you is what was missing from that room.

He never explained the side effects of the thing he gave me instead. He knew I was drinking. He knew I was smoking. He handed it to me anyway without a single sentence about what that combination does to a person.

I found out later what I had been carrying for years. Not from him.

Now the part I am most afraid to write

I have to tell you about somebody, because four days ago a woman wrote to me asking how to get hold of ivermectin and fenbendazole for her mother, who had just had liver surgery. If I say nothing, I am part of the problem.

And if you arrived on this page because you were searching for whether ivermectin or fenbendazole cure cancer, then this part is written for you, and I am glad you landed here instead of somewhere that wanted to sell you something.

I am not going to tell you they work. I am not going to tell you they do not. I am going to tell you what happened to a woman I knew.

What happened to her

She had metastatic cervical cancer, she was very underweight, and she had been told there was nothing more to be done.

She had been taking repurposed drugs. Ivermectin. Fenbendazole. The ones everybody is talking about. Somebody had told her they cure cancer.

Nobody had looked at her blood in four and a half years.

When I finally saw her results I told her what I am telling you now. You cannot put things into a body without knowing the state of that body.

Everything you swallow is processed by your liver. Hers was already overwhelmed. Not destroyed. Overwhelmed, which is worse, because it does not announce itself. It was already working far beyond what it had, on the disease, on the treatment, on everything else she was taking. Her enzymes were on the floor.

And her tumour markers were over 160.

You do not hand an organ in that state one more thing to get through. There is a queue, and you are adding to it.

I am not a doctor and I have never pretended to be one. What I did was talk to her about eating, about resting, about moving, and about stopping a litre of ice cream a day while something inside her was feeding on exactly that.

In six weeks her numbers moved. Nutritionally she was better than she had been in years, and in all that time nobody, not her doctors, not the people around her, not herself, had ever told her to eat.

And I was naive, because I believed better numbers meant a better body.

She had bone marrow suppression and a mutation in her marrow that none of us knew about. The chemotherapy years earlier had done the damage. Four years of not caring for her body finished it.

If you do not know what a bone marrow transplant is: they destroy all of your sick marrow, with radiation or with very high dose chemotherapy, and then they give you healthy marrow from a donor. It can only be done to a body strong enough to survive having everything in it killed first.

Hers was not strong enough. She was too anaemic.

She died this year.

I think about her all the time. And I believe that if her nutrition had been looked after across all those years she would not have been that anaemic, and she would have had a body that could take the transplant.

So hear me, and hear what I am not saying.

I am not telling you what to take. I am not telling you what not to take. I am not giving doses and I am not telling anybody where to get anything.

I am telling you to find out what condition your liver is in before you put anything into it. Get your blood done. Take whatever you are considering to somebody who will look at those results first.

Most people being treated for cancer have no idea that almost everything they swallow goes through the liver, and that the same organ is already working overtime on the treatment.

The honest version of the other side

Do I think blueberry juice is going to hurt you? No. It is full of antioxidants, and if it does anything at all it will help.

That is the test I use. Does this thing have a realistic way of harming me, and do I know enough about my own body to tell?

Food, sleep, sunlight, movement, stillness, taking the poison out of your house. Those are on one side of that line. Drugs a stranger on the internet told you cure cancer, going into a body nobody has measured, are on the other.

And when I did go looking, I went looking properly. Scientific, holistic, integrative, all of it, for years. And I kept finding other people doing the same simple things who were also free of disease. That is not proof and I am not offering it as proof. It is why I kept going.

What my own blood says now

I can read my own results, because I built myself the means to do it.

My tumour markers are very low, and they sit a long way inside the normal range.

They have moved up a little, and I know exactly why, because I can read them. The mistletoe therapy I take is meant to provoke a controlled amount of inflammation, so that the immune system answers it and wakes up. The number moving a little is the therapy doing the thing it is there to do.

That is the whole difference between a number that frightens you and a number you understand. It is the same number.

And the number does not stand on its own. Together with the imaging it says the same thing, which is that there is no active cancer in my body. It has been saying that for twenty two months, through the side effects of the radiation, and in December it will be two years.

The woman I told you about was over a hundred and sixty.

I am not putting the two of us next to each other to say I did it better than she did. I am putting us next to each other because it is the whole argument. Two bodies in completely different states, being handed the same advice by the same voices online, by people who had never seen either number.

And I can feel it, too. After sixteen years you know the difference between a body with something active in it and a body without. No machine told me that first.

I never did it alone

People ask me one question more than any other. How do you do this. How do you do all of this on your own.

For years I said I do not know. I just do it.

I know now.

I never did it alone.

Somebody was over me the whole time, watching, and making the road while I was already walking on it.

It was not my ex mother in law. It was not the cousin who was draining my bank account. It was not the person who knew I had cancer and offered me drugs anyway.

It was God, and He has been making this path the entire time.

And that is why the thing I am building is called what it is called.

I did not set out to build a product. I am an engineer. I was already pulling my own blood results apart and tracking my own health, with a raw implementation, plain APIs, and AI doing the reading alongside me. It was a tool for exactly one person and that person was me.

In July I decided to give it an interface. And the moment it had a face, I started thinking about what would happen if it could do the same thing for somebody who is not me.

It makes me sad that it is not online yet. It makes me sad that the three hundred people waiting for it have been waiting a long time, and I know they are nowhere near the only people who need it. But I would rather hand them something finished than something fast.

It does not promise to cure you. It does not promise to get you out of cancer. It is not something you swallow. It puts your own file in front of you in words you can read, and it keeps you grounded and disciplined on the days you cannot do that by yourself.

Much of it will be free. Some of it will be a subscription, and I will be straight with you about why. This runs on AI, AI is not cheap, and I would rather charge honestly for a tool than sell anybody a bottle of hope.

“It is called My NEDPath because it was, and it still is, my own path to no evidence of disease.”

The part I had not accounted for

What I had not accounted for is that I was still inside the horror movie.

My horror story was not finished when I was finally cancer free. It was not finished while I still had ten working fingers.

The person who was supposed to be looking after my health did not tell me how serious my condition was, and did not send me to the place that could have dealt with it. My hand became paralysed while I was in his care, and nothing was done about it.

And here is the part that is with me every day. Writing this costs me my hand. My company costs me my hand. This product costs me my hand.

I have made my peace with that.

I always find my way. Not because I am bigger than cancer, because cancer never took my hand. Not because I am bigger than anything.

“Cancer never took my hand.”

Because I understood that I do not do this alone. Because I believe in God. And because I am not the same person I was sixteen years ago.

So if you ask me what I did to get suddenly cancer free

Somebody wrote, on the internet, that I got here suddenly. I want that word to sit on this page and be exactly as ironic as it sounds.

Suddenly no evidence of disease is a series of horror stories, and if I tried to put them in three posts they would never fit. So I am going to keep writing them, because every single one of those experiences is what got me to the place of stopping something that was hurting me, and then taking the next thing out, and the next, until I was completely empty of the things that were hurting me. And only then did I start filling myself with the things that heal me.

And this part is going to be hard to write, because it is mine. This is my list and this is my process, and it went all the way to being completely alone.

I need just me and my dog in this world. And it is me, my dog, and God looking after the two of us.

If sixteen years ago somebody had shown me how simple the path was, I would have cried those tears then. I would have made those lists then. I would have done every single one of them as fast as I could, and I would have put the same energy and the same passion I spent on other people's lives, other people's projects and other people's things into my own life and my own recovery.

And then I would not have had to survive. I would not have had to endure sixteen years of terror that somebody summarised in a video. That somebody reduced to a suddenly.

Because in this healing and cancer influencer world, people are angry. Or not even angry. Delusional enough to believe that it is a good idea to be famous online because you have cancer.

I do not want to be famous because I have cancer.

I want to be known because I stopped. I want to be known because I took something out of being sick for basically half of my life, and turned it into something that has a purpose.

“I do not want to be known for having cancer. I want to be known for what I stopped.”

There were only ever two choices

Every single thing I stopped doing, I stopped because it was already killing me.

So there were two choices, and there were never three. Stop, or carry on helping myself die early.

That is all any of this has ever been. Either you stop doing this, or you die.

“Either you stop doing this, or you die. That is the whole list.”

And that is why I do not stand here and tell you what I did.

I tell you what I do not do anymore.

Before you go

You probably have in front of you right now the list of the things that are hurting you.

I want you to know that writing this has not been easy for me. To be able to tell you what I stopped, I had to go back and stand inside all of it again. Every single word carried me back to that woman, and it hurt.

I have felt the pain of every word on this page. I had to put it down and take breaks, because reading my own story back to myself left me overwhelmed and sad.

But I will say it again. If there is one person who reads this all the way to the end, and takes one thing out of their life because of it, and their story turns out better than mine did, then every word of it was worth writing.

You wrote down what is hurting you. One page, one question. If you have not done that yet, it is the worksheet at the end of part one, it is free, and it asks you for nothing.

This one goes further, and it is waiting for you here: What I am taking out, and when. Take that list, work out which of them you can actually take out and in what order, and turn it into a plan instead of a confession. Free, like everything else here, and it asks you for nothing.

“Take the garbage out first. Then we talk about what to plant.”

Friday

Friday is 16 October. Four years to the day.

The night I stopped, and the morning the building started. This is where the stopping began.

And the thing nobody believes when I tell them, which is that I stopped both on the same day and my body never once fought me for it.

And then I am going to start telling you about the other half of it. The things that helped me clean my liver. And the things I had already been doing for years without having the faintest idea they were helping me.

Fasting is the one that still makes me laugh. I fasted constantly, for years, because that was simply how I lived. I had no idea what it was doing in there. I knew nothing about a body clearing out its old cells and building new ones. I was a professional faster long before I knew there was a word for it, and I still am.

I am going to show you my maintenance plan. What I took, and took seriously, last year. And how I used the radiation as a bridge, and then went to work on my immune system so that this does not come back.

Twenty two months so far. I am completely certain I am going to reach December cancer free.

On the 31st of January 2023 I was told that I was going to die. Not as a possibility, and not one day. Definitely, and very soon. Months at the most. That was supposed to be the end of it.

And I am completely certain that when the 31st of January comes around again, that date is going up on the chalkboard in my kitchen and I am going to write NED next to it. Again.

Because I do not hand my fate to other people anymore. I stopped letting other people write the days of my story.

“I stopped letting other people write the days of my story.”