John | Matamata, Waikato

“I’ve had many challenges, but the biggest challenge of all, was being diagnosed in October 2018 with malignant melanoma. Bit of a shock and out of the blue, but like everything in my life, I just took it in my stride, and accepted it.

In fact, when I was diagnosed, I just broke out into a big grin, and said, oh at least it wasn’t old age that was getting me down. From then onwards, I dealt with all the questions and the discussion about what was in front of me, I’ve got to admit openly, on the way home in the car from seeing the specialist, I parked up the car somewhere, and had my tears and got it out of my system, and then got on with dealing with it.

The exciting part about this story was the new drug, Keytruda, it’s not chemotherapy, it’s an immunotherapy. It’s a new drug that has a two-fold effect. It stimulates your own immune system to attack the cancer, and it also flicks a little DNA switch, if you like, on the cancer that stops it from protecting itself from your own immune system. So, it makes it more vulnerable to the treatment. That whole process involved travelling to Hamilton from Matamata every three weeks, spending at least an hour for the treatment process, having Keytruda infused through my blood veins. Fortunately, unlike a lot of people, I didn’t have any side effects at all, and the whole process was quite friendly and comfortable, and not the challenge that I thought it might have been. It’s about 18 months on from there now, and instead of doing that treatment every three weeks, they’ve now doubled the dose, and extended from three weeks to every six weeks. So, that’s less time in a vehicle, less time travelling to Hamilton and the first six week period was just a breeze. But the last six week period was the first time I’ve had any side effects to deal with. All of a sudden, my immune system started attacking my wrists and joints. Sore arm muscles, and I started losing a bit of weight for the first time, ah but that’s been dealt with now, and I’m now regaining weight again. Probably the best part about this process is that I’ve maintained my fitness. I’m still able to do my fast walks. I can walk at seven kilometres an hour, I haven’t lost any fitness at all, life’s been great. Friends and family were all very upset in the beginning, but all very supportive. Life just continued as normal and I’m one of the lucky ones.

I have learned a lot and one of the things I’ve really learned a lot about is the things that affect our body, or create illnesses whether it’s heart problems, stroke, cancers, diabetes. When I got diagnosed, I’ve always been a great reader and I had a week of being at home, and not being all that active. I’ve got a Kindle, and I’ve always got a selection of books that recommended reading on it, and one of the books was called The China Study, which I’d bought or downloaded, thinking it was all about reforming the money system, which I’m involved in. But it turned out, when I started reading it, it was all about diet and nutrition and there was about a big study in China that involved 3500 people and a minor study in America as well, by the same researchers, of about 350 people. It was all about a whole food plant-based diet, and the benefits of eating that sort of food. I was only about half way through the book, and I’d made a decision that I was going to do this, and I was going to change my diet. Every morning for decades, I was brought up on a dairy farm, bacon and eggs for breakfast, I love my meat, loved my dairy. But overnight, I just made a decision, based on that book, to change my whole way of eating, and I’ve never looked back. The sort of person that I am, I don’t just dive into things willy-nilly. I started taking the blood samples and I always kept a record of all my blood stats for decades after going to doctors for various reasons, and so I’ve monitored my progress. Two and a half weeks after I started the diet, I had all my blood work done. The benefits were dramatic, even after two and a half weeks. Cholesterol levels down, inflammation levels down. Even at the stage, I hadn’t even started my treatment and my inflammation levels went from about 12.3 or something down to 2.2. And my blood work continues to improve, despite still fighting the battle of  melanoma. The five lesions in my neck have gone, thanks to the diet and also reinforced quite strongly with the Keytruda treatment and I’m now down to having to deal with a lesion on my liver which was 62mm at its longest point in the first place, and the last scan I had about three and a half months ago was down to 20x14mm. So, that’s what I’m concentrating on, maintaining my walking, maintaining my diet, enjoying life, having fun, not getting bogged down with any worries about the future. Just enjoying every day as it comes, and enjoying the people around me, my family, and getting the simple pleasures out of life.”