Going Gerson on the Norfolk Coast
When I was first diagnosed with nodular melanoma nine months ago, I immediately saw it as a death sentence. From the very beginning, I had googled obsessively and developed symptoms I’d read about soon after: everything from painful or possibly swollen lymph nodes to new irregular black patches on my skin. Of course, I knew some or all of these symptoms might be psychosomatic or benign, but I utterly convinced myself I was already either stage 3 (nodal involvement) or stage 4 (distant skin metastasis) and likely to die soon. A month later, a melanoma surgeon in Davao took a large swathe of skin away from my shoulder and biopsied two other black patches and a lump (all confirmed as benign) and told me I was only stage 2A and everything would probably be okay - 95% sure he said - and I should just stay out of the sun (or use loads of sunscreen) and hope for the best. Out of extreme caution, he recommended a PET scan but nothing else (he was unable to do a sentinel node lymph biopsy). I ...