Living with and beyond cancer

From looking again on the internet, what some internet sites are suggesting is that the food chain nowadays and the processed food, there are so many female hormones in the food chain that they think that this is having an effect on the increased rise of testicular cancer among men. Again those are from mostly American websites who tend to be a little bit more diverse in their thinking. 

 

Now from that, and from generally trying to keep as fit as possible since I was ill, I don't drink milk, I try and avoid cheeses and stuff like that which, because that sort of produce is more farmed with those sort of drugs. In other words they're feeding the cattle lots of female hormones to beef them up to increase the milk supply and stuff like that, which is why I try and avoid milk and cheeses and stuff like that. But again that's only a bit of information that I've got from the website and it's not proven at all. But again if by doing that I might be protecting myself then I think it's very worthwhile doing. Again it's certainly, it makes you look at life very closely after having cancer. I try to weigh up everything you're eating, I try and take as many vitamins and stuff like that. And initially, definitely after the chemotherapy finished and I was starting to feel well again for the first time, I went over the top, I was taking so many vitamins I must've been almost rattling at times, and definitely in recent years I've calmed down a lot now. But again it's because, it's not really worry, to say that I was worrying it sounds terrible, you know, it's hypochondriac almost, but no, it just opens your eyes to the possibility that you might have an illness that you're not going to recover from, and it concentrates you on doing everything you can to make sure that you're going to conquer that illness. So I looked into all sorts of vitamin and mineral supplements and things that were supposed to help and, you know, if you're not in you can't win as it were, you know, if you're not sort of on this regime then it's definitely not going to help you. So I mean I've tried most things. Whether it has helped me in being four years down the line and still clear of cancer or not I suppose I'll never know but…

 

 

Yeah.

 

 

I went to a, he wasn't a Chinese medical practitioner but he specialised in nutritional supplements, much along the same lines as a Chinese medical practitioner would do in terms of herbs and things like that. And he recommended lots of different things to me that, you know, can be helpful, and I did follow that for I would say about a year and a half. I didn't take any milk whatsoever and stuff, soya milk for everything. The different mineral supplements that he recommended I stayed on for about a year and a half or so, and again I don't, I'll never know whether that's why I'm clear of cancer now but certainly it did no harm. It was basically a very, very strong detox diet almost, followed up by heavy vitamin and mineral supplements.

 

Yes, yes I've changed my diet quite considerably. I've stopped having virtually all red meat, eating mostly white meat and fish, eating a lot of green vegetables, taking dietary supplements, such things as green tea, eating things with a lot of anti-oxidants in them, taking supplements like Vitamin C, Vitamin, well Vitamins A, C and E, zinc, selenium, garlic, all of which I've been taking for several years, which I think helps. Again, I've read up a lot of alternative therapy for prostate cancer and I haven't done anything without knowledge, I've done things in an informed way just because somebody says, "Well yes this does you good or that does you good", I haven't just taken their word for it, I've done my own research, and because you can get it from the Internet quite easily I've been able to do quite a bit of research into all the things that I decide to take myself. So…

 

And so I did things like give up alcohol completely, make sure my food was really good. I didn’t take buckets and buckets of additional supplements as some people do. 

 

 

[mm mm]

 

 

Yes, well, I was doing it before to some extent. I mean I had what I think most of my friends regarded as a healthy diet but I consciously, I sometimes had cash flow problems so I would tend to skimp on what I’d spent in the supermarket, perhaps not buy the best quality things and so on, buy good stuff but not the best quality. And I started, I consciously started to buy organic milk, for example and, you know, because it would, you know, have less, I mean whether this is true or not, I don’t know, you know, one of those urban myths, but I figured it might have less sort of hormones and things like that in it, you know, which might not be all that good for me. So I started buying organic things. I started, as I say, I gave up alcohol altogether for two years. I still wouldn’t drink red wine because I know it just doesn’t do for my body anymore because you become very sensitive when you’re so ill, and you can, you know, you can feel your body being affected by different things. 

 

 

No, I don’t think so. I mean the lifestyle is dictated really by the diabetes. I mean a lot of what I do, I mean I do my own cooking. I mean the diet is quite restricted. As far as the cancer is concerned it hasn’t affected that at all. But it is, I do find the biggest problem is gardening and, of course, any activity that involves bending.