Spontaneous remissions in cancer may not be as rare as we think.

This is the first blog I’ve written where I’ve really questioned writing it. I’ve always said if this blog helps one person then it’s worth it and plus I can get a few things that are spinning around in my head to calm down a bit. Getting diagnosed with Cancer is hard to describe, it’s like life at the very moment you are told those terrifying words ” I’m sorry Mr Woodward but you have got cancer” goes on hold, it’s like a button has been pressed on the remote control of life and it stays that way for quite a while. It’s even worse when after several weeks of trying your best to bury your head in the sand as I did that you then are told it’s aggressive and has metastasised into your bones. Up untill that point I had never heard of words like metastatic and metastasis. From that moment nothing is clear, the world is a fog a haze of confusion and so you just accept everything that’s given and told to you after all they are the experts and at this point you know nothing.

You accept pills and treatments because that’s what you are expected to do. I’m not saying in any way that it’s wrong it’s just normal thats all. If my doctor told me to do anything I would do it, if she told me to jump through a ring of burning fire I would do it because I know nothing else. Life at this stage is out of your hands and in the hands of doctors nurses pills tablets machines and needles. You have cancer and at this point cancer certainly has you.

You don’t question or at least I didn’t, you are just grateful that someone is taking charge of the situation and you shuffle from one place to another, one machine after another and loads of tablets and pills become your daily diet. Then one day you go home. At first this is even more terrifying because no one is there 24/7 to answer your calls for help, you feel lost and alone the comfort of hospital gone. Then you slowly go back to some resemblance of normality, gradually picking yourself up off the floor, but nothing is normal really when you have those cancer cells invading your body , you can’t stop the worry, it’s there 24 hours a day. What are they doing now are they multiplying, taking a holiday, dying or just waiting, my god it’s scary.

Then after more months, in my case I’ve settled into little routines , I take my meds at certain times of the day, I have blood tests at certain times of the month and I have hormone injections at certain times of the month, this is my normality. There are many types of cancers and I guess many different regimes of treating them but overall I’m sure most of us go through similar checks and routines of pills and treatments. I’ve also been lucky to go back to work so these are included in my work routines too.

In the case of prostate cancer, I’m expected to keep this routine up forever, the tablets the injections the life saving little brown tablets that at the moment are saying to my cancer, hold it right there you are not going anywhere. The cancer nods it’s head or at least it would if it had one, and waits. It waits patiently untill those three little brown pills suddenly don’t become so effective. Prostate cancer is like carrying a ticking time bomb inside of you, one that just sits there biding it’s time, like a dormant volcano that for years appears dead rather than asleep. There will come a time when the bomb goes off, the volcano inside of me erupts. This the fear we face. It’s a feeling of helplessness and one of lack of control. But gradually I’ve come to the conclusion there is much more we can do to ensure that we diffuse that bomb and that the volcano becomes extinct, no life just dead. This is our hope and it can happen.

My belief for a while has been that I need to do far more than just take the meds and accept my fate. Is my fate in my hands, yes I believe it is. Taking the meds is just part of it all. I’ve been studying spontaneous remissions, this is where a person is one moment dying of cancer and the next quite simply isn’t, the incredible stories that are out there to be discovered and anyone reading this should take heart. The general consensus in most medical study is that spontaneous remissions are only apparent in approx one in every one hundred thousand cancer patients, that’s pretty poor odds if it were true, and research I’ve done online and books I’ve read say that this figure that’s generally just accepted but is not accurate and in fact there are far more stories coming out about spontaneous remissions, or miracles if you like. Are they miracles, well they are unexplainable in medical terms and yet these miracles happen to people who seem to have a lot of things in common. Call them miracles, but there seems to be no doubt that these people perhaps unkowingly all shared things that somehow caused the miracle to happen. People who were condemned to an early death were given a reprieve by the hangman, cancer just went away and didn’t come back. Could I and you do the same thing, nothing is impossible and during my next few blogs I’m going to give my thoughts on what I’ve found out, what I believe and what I’m going to and have been doing for a while. I cant just give up and wait for the drugs to no longer work that would be a waste of life. I’m no doctor or medic or anything else except for a human being that likes helping other human beings, I have a lot of knowledge about the way humans work and I’m curious and I want to live a lot longer than is normal for a human being in my condition and I believe without any shadow of doubt that I will and maybe you will too. My next blog will be looking at the first of eight factors that seem common in spontaneous remissions, this is the power of belief, and then sharing my thoughts with you. These eight factors appear to be common in most of the lucky ones that were dying of cancer, were given no hope and for some reason turned it around defying the odds and medical understanding. This is what keeps me going, this is what fuels and powers me in my quest to find that elusive chance and be one of the lucky ones. It inspires me to never give up, after all I’ve got a wife and two beautifull young children to fight for. Every time I see them it recharges my powerpack of determination, every smile they make every word they say makes me just long for more and this is my goal to defy the odds and win the lottery of life.

Take care

Love Woody ❤️