I last wrote and published something in this Blog a long time ago, almost one year. Unfortunately during the last twelve months my life has continued to be a relentless fight against the same enemy, call it cancer, call it malignant melanoma in my case. Same difference. There are tents of different types of cancer and melanoma is one of them. Make no mistake, whilst melanoma is a cancer of the skin, it is only so because of the cells from which it originates, the melanocytes. Melanoma is extremely aggressive and can spread and metastasise internally to your organs, as it did with me. And agai ..read more

As I continue to write my Blog about my fight with melanoma I realise I am slightly falling into dangerous territory. I don't want to move too much away from telling my story and start providing advice to others who have been sadly hit by the same awful disease as me. First of all because this was never what I set up to do, but also because there are plenty of informative sources out there already. And not least because I am not in any way qualified to provide medical advice to anyone. So when in this post I talk about dietary supplements and changes to diet, I am really talking ..read more

Having cancer is like being at war. It is a constant relentless fight against the enemy. And I have learnt pretty soon that as much as I may have access to the best medical care currently available for melanoma (and unfortunately not every patient does), no one cares about my life as much as I do. I am the one who has the most interest in my own long-term survival, and I will not stop where others tell me to stop. I will not stop at what conventional/mainstream medicine says. How can I accept that nutrition and lifestyle have zero impact on survival (this is what most oncologists will tell yo ..read more

I wish I hadn’t been away from my Blog for so long. That partially defeats the objective of writing a Blog. If anyone is so kind to find the time to read what I write and then finds the time and perseverance (which I can only interpret as affection) to come back and check for updates, I should be considerate enough to provide more reading. Worse still, I have been writing in the meanwhile, quite a bit. Just have not posted it. The reason for not posting I suppose is the same that pushed me to shut down my Facebook account and stop posting on Instagram too: I have been and I am quite poorly and ..read more

I am sitting on the pavement of a busy street, people striding quickly past me in both directions. They take no notice of me. I do not look up, my head and my stare are still. All I see are people’s legs hurrying along their way. I don’t move. I can’t move. My heart is too heavy, my legs are too weak. I know I need help. I try saying something aloud to attract someone's attention, but all I can muster is a whisper that I can hardly hear myself. My voice has abandoned me too. I start weeping, gently for a while, but soon I give in to despair and start sobbing loudly. Yet the passers-by are sti ..read more

1. "A Full Time Job"  Having cancer is like having a job. I am not quite sure who it was who said it and where I read it, but I sure know it is true. Today it was 5pm when I was done with all cancer-related tasks and chores for the day. Taking into account the fatigue that most cancer patients suffer from, and hence the extra time we need to allow for resting during the day, there is very little time left. Here is where my day has gone today: this morning I left my apartment at 10am to go to my counselling session (something I started after my cancer diagnosis). All transport by taxi unfo ..read more

The time after my neck dissection surgery is the time when I started writing this Blog. It was September 2014. I was recovering exceptionally well from the surgery and I was gradually going back to a normal life, I even went on a holiday to Greece, and on the whole I was feeling positive about the situation and confident about my future. Then things started to deteriorate and the worst months of my life so far were around the corner. I actually feel in a better and safer place now in spite of everything I have been through since then. Now at least I know where I stand. But those weeks when I s ..read more

June 2014. The next step in my story is my surgery for excision and biopsy of the swollen lymph node in my neck. This happens a couple of days after the PET scan. My parents go with me at the hospital for what is a relatively minor surgery under general anaesthetic. It is a pretty quick surgical procedure, I am not ‘asleep' for long, and all being well I am supposed to go home in the evening, which I do. It all happens in a day and it’s pretty uneventful. I remember the surgeon coming to the ward in the morning to see me before the surgery, he circles with a pen the area on my neck where the ..read more

So here I am finally picking up my melanoma story at the point where I had left it (post 12), as the events were unfolding in June 2014. Apologies for the backwards and forwards in the story, which are due to the fact that I have been writing at the same time as the situation has been rapidly changing. From my previous posts we already know that things got in fact an awful lot worse than what back in June last year really seemed like the worst-case scenario: that melanoma cancer cells could have spread to a lymph node in my neck.  My parents arrived to London on 19 June 2014 for a week’s ..read more

May 2015. I am finding it difficult to get back to my Blog. I have been thinking about why that may be the case. It's certainly not a matter of finding the time. I wrote most of the Blog so far in September and October last year. That was after recovering from my neck dissection surgery and before progressing to stage 4 cancer. So at that time I was (for a short while) back to work and pretty much back to leading a very full and hectic life, I was back to exercising, to Yoga and even Salsa dancing; back to my social outings with friends, and on the top of it, several cancer-related medical app ..read more