Going Gerson on the Norfolk Coast
Nine months ago, when I was first diagnosed with nodular melanoma (January 2023), 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 these symptoms might be psychosomatic or benign, but I had utterly convinced myself I was already either stage 3 (nodal involvement) or stage 4 (distant skin metastasis) and likely to die soon. A month after diagnosis (February 2023), 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 una...