My Healing Journey

It was a cold November afternoon in 2003 at around 5 o’clock, I was sitting in the consulting room of a Urologist. I forget his name, as it is and was, unimportant. He had just removed his rubber glove having subjected me to an indignity when with a dead pan face and no emotion he announced I had prostate cancer.

My blood ran cold and with a quavering voice I tentatively asked him what could be done about it He said ‘Well, we have two options we can either cut it or bum it out”. I suddenly felt this extreme anger and strength, I stood up whilst looking him straight in the eye and said “I can’t do business with you”. Without looking back I walked out of his office and never returned.


Some five years earlier my wife, Sarah, developed cancer which had metastasised from a mole on her leg to multiple brain tumours. Her passing although quite beastly for her was mercifully very quick. After several misdiagnoses spanning some four or five weeks a brain scan revealed the appalling truth, and she was recommended for a course of radiotherapy even though her prognosis was only to live another one or two months.


The radiotherapy burnt her throat to the extent she lost all sense of taste and could barely swallow, she lost all her hair and her dignity went with it as the final insult I have no doubt that treatment gave her not one extra minute of life and destroyed any pleasure she may have gleaned from her last days with her family. She was unable to even enjoy the simple pleasure of her favourite ice cream.


It was a travesty the way she was treated by the Oncologist and I seriously questioned the woman’s motives but was just left with the belief that should I, or any member of my family contract cancer there was no way I would subject either I or them to a very questionable methodology. There had to be another way.

I did not have a goddamn clue what I was going to do as I walked back to my car that dark, drizzly November evening. I just knew what I was not going to do. There was however one total certainty, I had to take ownership of my cancer myself. Completely, utterly and in it’s entirety I had to own it as I was in no doubt that only I could heal myself. The medical profession with all their modern technology and drugs may, if we are lucky, cure us but they can never heal us at the level at which the disease was created, or the level where total healing is achieved. We can only do that ourselves and it was a lesson which was brutally brought back to me some seven years later. But for the moment that is another story in itself.

I spent the next two weeks or so absorbed in the web, Google was not the force on the web it is today. Now you would be drowned in information. Creating lists of possible alternative methods, speaking to men on forums who suffered from the same affliction. In the end getting nowhere so it appeared. Eventually I was drawn to Amazon and all the books which they offered on this delicate subject, and I ordered a mighty pile of them. Having trawled through the majority of them my instinct, my subconscious in other words, drew me to just two books.


One was titled “The Natural Prostate Cure” written by a man called Roger Mason. It embraced a methodology I had never heard of before called Macrobiotics, and a vast number of supplements which would have amounted to some £450 a month. I rang him up in the United States and he was passionate and clearly most knowledgeable on his subject, but as it transpired he owned a supplement company! I moved on.

The other was called “The Cancer Prevention Diet” and was written by the man who has been instrumental in bringing macrobiotics to the western world over the past 50 years and who was to be instrumental in saving my life. His name was Michio Kushi. Michio explained how the foods which we eat for most of our lives, together with our lifestyles cause our cancers but the macrobiotic way he was suggesting, of which a large part mirrored Japanese food, would play a large part in helping us to heal ourselves. So for me is was a healing diet, I was too late at that stage for a preventative diet!

I decided to embark on this road totally and utterly and as a result suffered the most dramatic detoxification process. This occurred approximately a month later when over a period of 48 hours I must have removed any surplus sugars I was carrying in me as I sweated sweet, sickly smelling sweat into a dozen towels, and then for a further 5 weeks or so suffered a fever with gooey discharge from my eyes, nose mouth and stools.


This detoxification of stored fats and proteins subsequently continued at a more gentle rate for the next year, and in the process my weight dropped from 12 stone to 8 stone 10 Ibs! My wonderful macrobiotic counsellors, Daphne Watson in High Wycombe and then when she retired, Chico Varatojo, who runs the Portuguese Macrobiotic Institute in Lisbon, were not in the slightest worried by the fact I couldn’t keep my jeans up. 


Their only concern was my holding to the process of correct practice in my macrobiotic diet and remedy drinks as the discharge continued. It took me an entire year not to feel “sick” and to actually feel I was getting better. It would some time later I would understand why it took an entire cycle of seasons to release the build up of toxins accumulated over my lifetime.

It was to be nearly two years after I embarked on my macrobiotic journey that I was standing in Chico’s consulting rooms in Lisbon opposite him and Michio Kushi. Michio looked me straight in the eyes and said “You are now clear of the cancer, but it is most important that you are still very strict with your diet”. He then told me how I could widen my diet. It was May 2005. Western medical tests confirmed his prognosis.


Practicing the macrobiotic way has never been easy given that modem life is instant, artificial and yes, convenient and I was no exception to that trap, and maybe it was that I had broadened my diet too much in the intervening years, and so it was in December 2010 this was all brought back home to me with a vengeance. I had just been to have my annual prostate cancer test and even though that had shown up negative the Doctor advised it would be a sensible precautionary measure to have the other blood test just as insurance. The results showed my antigen reading had gone from a moderate reading of 26 at which it had hovered for the previous 3 years to a staggering 232! It was shock horror as this could only mean one thing and that was that the cancer had returned.


So much for expensive so called state of the art tests which I had been taking every year for 4 years. I dived straight back into the Cancer prevention Diet and reconnected with my menus and cancer regime. It was back to basics. Meanwhile my Doctor had organised for me to have a biopsy on my prostate and also a bone and MRI scan as it was most likely with that level of reading the cancer had metasasised to other parts of the body in particular the bones. The results were dreadful, full blown prostate cancer, which had spread to the seminal vesicle and bone. It couldn’t have been much worse with a life expectancy prognosis of between 3 and 5 years.


A real mental low point which had to be addressed if I was to emerge out the other end in one piece. From the date of the test to the time I was referred to the urologist was some 6 weeks, and he again looked at me with a face of doom and basically told me there was little he could do other that put me on a course of hormone therapy. I told him that before I would consider that I wanted another PSA test as it was now 2 months since the original one. The test revealed the level had dropped from 232 to 149.1 was on the
way back!

Whilst this melodrama was unfolding I had seriously questioned myself on why the cancer had come back or was it that it had in essence never really been totally healed and thus never gone away. Had I really not nailed it the first time, and if so which part of the jigsaw had I missed. In the intervening years I had done much work on myself from a spiritual mind and body perspective. I had studied Vipassana meditation with Burgs the Buddhist monk, and also I had studied and qualified in hypnotherapy with my good friend Michael Carroll, founder of the NLP Academy, and so it was during a meditation one day the solution came to me, and it was so obvious.


This had all come back to bite me because on a subconscious level I had not given the subconscious permission to let go of the cancer and so therefore how on earth could it take control and heal both itself and the body. Q.E.D! A quick call to Michael who kindly arranged a hypnosis session in quick time and under a deep hypnosis the subconscious agreed to heal the cancer within 60 days. 2 months to day on the 14th June a PSA test revealed the reading had dropped to 4.2 from 149! Medically there was disbelief, as this was quite unknown in medical circles.


Another session with Michael to galvanise the subconscious into taking on a new life, living like a man in his twenties with the wisdom of the 70 year old. And so it was on the 1st August 2011 the 2 monthly PSA test revealed a level of 2! That was just 6 months since the original diagnosis. I have not as yet been back for the check scans as I am not too keen on being refilled with radioactive garbage, particularly as my macrobiotic counsellor has told me it was most unlikely the test could detect cancer in any event.


Whether or not I do so in the future will very much depend on the outcome of the conversation I will have with my subconscious. The work will continue for the time being until such time the total cleaning and clearing on both levels is completed It is undoubtedly a journey, but an exciting one, and just so long as I continue to feel and have the energy of a man one third of my age, I am happy to leave my destiny in God’s hands and just chew my rice, drink my tea and wear my clothes! Happy days, and thank God for the power of the mind and good food.