In the last few weeks and months, I have been attempting to find an organisation to take me on, take on my story and help me spread the good news on the benefits of my balanced daily lifestyle, of eating better and moving more. I have based it on a diet designed with the benefit of hindsight of my own experience and mistakes, followed by a deep dive into the mass of most excellent information on diet available on the world wide web, which I coupled with the exercise plan I designed with the benefit of my own experience of exercise through my treatment of brain surgery, radiotherapy and 12 monthly cycles of chemotherapy, founded on my experience of physical training from a 20 year military career that also saw an 18 month dalliance in an international level athletic career, along with another deep dive into the mass of most excellent information on exercise available.
My balanced daily lifestyle was different in that it wasn’t a diet, and it wasn’t an exercise regime. It was both, and not a series of suggestions and recommendations from individual fields that were often frightened of spooking the target audience, us, so holding back on the true scale of what must be done to actually achieve the benefits diet or exercise may offer. Equally I was not majoring in a particular area in order to sell something and make a living. I had put my waders on and waded through the mass of information out there. Tried it and realised it didn’t work, so tried something different and realised that didn’t work, so tried something else and realised that I couldn’t afford that, so tried something else until, through a process of trial and error, and deep research, assisted by my brilliant and encouraging medical team, I stumbled upon a combination of fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, nuts, protein, calcium and carbohydrate sources in certain quantities eaten every day within a certain timescale that, when combined with daily levels of exercise starting at a minimum of 2 x 20 minute brisk walks every single day that reinforced my brilliant medical treatment, led to a healing that my oncologist and other experts consulted in second, third and fourth opinions had all agreed was impossible. I had beaten a terminal brain tumour through my balanced daily lifestyle and wanted to help improve the lives and life chances of so many more people by sharing this information with as many people as possible. But in order to do that I needed dieticians and experts on exercise in ill health to agree this lifestyle as the way forward in support to modern medical treatment.
In addition, as I tried to find a convincing set of facts that would reinforce my belief and win the support of those that I needed help from, to help me raise awareness of the benefits of my balanced daily lifestyle to as wide an audience as possible, I started to realise that perhaps, just perhaps, that this particular combination of fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, nuts, protein, calcium and carbohydrate sources eaten every day in certain quantities within a certain timescale and combined with daily levels of exercise starting at a minimum of 2 x 20 minute brisk walks every single day would not just help improve the outcomes of cancer treatment towards a possible healing, but could actually help improve the outcomes of treatment for a number of diseases and ailments such as depression, brain health, arthritis, diabetes, circulatory problems, musculoskeletal problems, cardiovascular problems, respiratory problems, skin problems, high blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity. All these diseases and conditions, and many more, run rife through modern society and if we can potentially improve treatment outcomes, perhaps even achieve a healing with my balanced daily lifestyle followed in reinforcement to the wonders of modern medicine, then surely the more people I can get to start to follow my balanced daily lifestyle, the more lives and life chances I can start to improve. But the more I tried the more I realised that I cannot do it on my own.
This link will take you to a PDF of my ready reckoner on my balanced daily lifestyle.
Read it and start to implement it for a healthier and disease free life.
More detail and evidence to support my findings can be found under the Beat Your Beast Button at the top of this page.
As time passed with meetings, presentations, more meetings, emails and letters I learned and realised many valuable lessons.
Firstly – That while enthusiasm and determination coupled with a belief and will to truly make a difference to as many people as possible are noble aptitudes to have, they must be tempered and the blinkers removed. That you must know your audience, what their reason for their attendance is and what they wish to gain from it. You must know what they can offer you, what you need from them, and how your involvement might help them in their own efforts. And when you know all that, be enthused yes, but be pithy, be to the point and succinct. Drive the point home fast.
Secondly – The first lessons learned in the experience of the last few weeks and months revealed something far more troubling, for I knew all that. Over 20 years as an Army Officer, I was trained in the art of presentation and negotiation and the importance of knowing your audience and being succinct and to the point to get your point across. But I have forgotten all that. I have discovered that 18 months of brain focused treatment of brain surgery, followed by brain focused radiotherapy, followed by 12 monthly cycles of brain focused chemotherapy, coupled with increasing numbers of brain-damaging epileptic seizures which have had to be suppressed by over-dosing, under medical supervision, on fog inducing anti-seizure medication, on top of a massive brain tumour that was trying to switch off my cognitive and motor function have left their mark. The result has been that while the brain tumour that threatened to turn off my cognitive and motor function before turning the lights off, has been beaten, my tumour and treatment has left a deep scar that will need continuing levels of hard work to heal. My cognitive function is severely depressed. I am no longer the person that I once was just 4 years ago. The treatment has changed me. I am still the same Archie: the same character with the same values and standards; the same moral compass. I have managed to get my motor function back and am quite sure that I could pass once again the Infantry fitness tests, but I no longer have the same capabilities that I once had. My cognitive function has been impaired.
I struggle to be able to focus on any one thing for more than a couple of minutes. I haven’t been able to find the time to actually read and finish a book because I lose the thread of the argument or story halfway down the page so I have to go back to start again and again and again until I get it and manage to finish that particular page 15 minutes later. I lose the thread of a conversation so have to stop and ask what it was I was talking about to be brought back onto the point I was trying to make. If I don’t stop and just try and muddle through it, I will meander aimlessly for far longer than I should ever be allowed to talk for. I will start one thing and then forget what I had started, so will often stop and stand and stare into nothing deep in thought, trying to get my mind back on to the task in hand. I can never remember the thing that I had to remember. I carry notebooks but never remember to write things down, and when I do remember to write something down I forget what it was I was supposed to be writing. I can’t do two things at once. I can’t even butter my toast and hold a conversation at the same time without something going wrong. I have to put each and every action into a closet. One thing and only one thing at a time. I need to build up my communication skills; my ability to enter into a discussion with someone, rather than enter into a conversation which is really all about the point I want to get across. After a meeting or social event of any duration beyond an hour I will leave emotionally and physically drained, often at the point of seizure. I have almost no computing endurance, I get very fuzzy, disorientated and physically exhausted after just 30 minutes behind a computer. I get very fuzzy, disorientated and physically exhausted in any busy environment. Just to write this short post required a 4.61 mile walk, a 550 metres swim with the resultant wandering around the flat trying to find all the stuff I needed to go swimming, which was all in places I should have known well, and a further 3.22 mile walk just to ground the mind and feel normal again after each burst of writing activity. At the moment I become disorientated litter picking in an area with large quantities of litter. As I scan the complex terrain trying to decide which piece of litter to pick first and then try and coordinate the getting of the litter into the bag my eyes blur over, the fog rolls in to the mind and just the business of remaining standing, a function performed by the brain after I lost my inner ear to the Cholesteatoma, becomes a challenge in itself. I start to miss the piece of litter I was trying to pick, or I drop it as I moved it towards the bag, or I release it into the bag only to find that I have missed the bag altogether. Or I would be trying to fit too much into the bag and spinning around on myself re-collecting bits that had fallen out of the bag each time I tried to walk. In fact, simple and very basic decisions become a real challenge in the fog of confusion, while all the time trying to hold back the boiling anger simmering and welling up inside me out of frustration at my incompetence. In a supermarket, due to the complexity and multitude of decisions needing to be made while trying to find a product on busy supermarket shelves, especially if there are a lot of people in the shop forcing me to have to make simple decisions too quickly, I get disorientated, confused and my left and rights and ups and downs and yes and no become completely confused along with trolley driving, making life in a busy shop almost impossible and often leading to epileptic auras and seizures. Twice in the last couple of weeks I have been found in Tesco, once trying to find a spice and the other time trying to find double cream. I was lost in myself as I stood gazing at the shelf but seeing nothing but a confusion of colours and shapes. The brain appeared to simply misfire in the complexity and leave me hanging on for future cognitive activity. On both occasions all it took was an assistant coming close, touching my arm to attract my attention and talk to me. That would wake me up and snap me out of it enough to be able to refer back to my list, work through the fog of confusion to work out what it was I was looking for and ask the assistant to help me find it. Apparently I looked like a really old man stood in a trance with slightly wobbly legs hanging on to the trolley for support. My mind would even show me dark shadows skittering away under shelves and around corners. Occasionally my mind would re-enact gruesome murders or scenes that might never have happened, using faceless people I know not, and creatures I know not, but often the dementors from Harry Potter films. As I walk past aisles in the supermarket I would sometimes catch a glimpse of this horrific scene and want to move past quickly, not wanting to look back down the aisle for fear of what I might see or, as I pass a shop window on the street another horrific scene that requires me to move past quickly trying to ignore what I had glimpsed. They would not happen all the time. Not even that often, but clearly I still have a lot of healing and calming to do to bring some discipline and a sense of reality back to the mind.
This problem does of course transpose across to a busy working environment, so I would fail even in a busy restaurant or warehouse or office environment in which too much was happening in a small space and period of time. My brain would misfire and I would be lost, vacant, and a liability. I cannot drive a motor vehicle or a boat as I had to hand in my licences once I developed epilepsy. I cannot serve at tables, I cannot stack shelves, I cannot be a delivery rider for Deliveroo as I would be a danger to myself and other road users while trying to navigate through the rabbit warren of the smaller city streets on busy roads after dark with all those moving lights and a brain that is getting lost in the confusion of it all. I cannot work in an office. I cannot sing or act or play golf. I don’t fit the requirements for the BBC to help me spread the good word and was supporting the wrong charities. I don’t fit the requirements for any TV station, radio station or indeed national newspaper to help me spread the good word. In fact I do not appear to fit in any box when it comes to strengthening my argument for and raising awareness of the benefits of my balanced daily lifestyle, nor do I fit in any future employment box right now.
So I have a new challenge. I have a new beast to beat. I had not finished my resettlement when diagnosed with the brain tumour just 9 months after leaving the Army so had no job to return to on being healed. While I am in character, values and standards the same man I always was with the same moral compass, I have a completely different and much lighter suite of capabilities. I am physically active and find physical activity, even if just walking, remarkably grounding when in trouble, whether through seizure or cognitive malfunction. I do seem to be able to read a map much better than I was post-surgery and even managed to take Allie, my daughter Heather, and a friend, Callum, on an 8.1 mile walk over Black Mount and White Hill in the Pentlands last week. There was only one footpath right towards the end, yet I managed to navigate us successfully up to the cairns and on to each hill with pin point precision. So I can still use a map and a compass in the countryside and hills. It is just in the city that I become disorientated. I can still talk and talk well. As long as I have had time to prepare it and write myself some detailed notes as a firm handrail on which to hold, I can deliver a pretty good and perhaps powerful speech. It exhausts me after each speech but the more I do it the stronger I will become. I feed on positivity like a leech and it gives me great strength, so if I can find a job that would pay me well to walk and talk, I would be doing really well. However, I do not sense such an opportunity exists so I have to work on other options. I have to work hard on my cognitive endurance and discipline. Work on my ability to perform more than one function at any one time for an increasingly sustained period of time. I have to discover what capabilities I do have and try and fine tune them towards further employment. I have to find out what box it is that I am supposed to fit into. If, as I am sure it will, all continues to go well for me in my treatment, I have just over two years before the NHS can declare me healed and fit for work. That gives me two years to try and get my message to as many people as possible that to eat better in specific ways and move more in specific ways, in other words follow my balanced daily lifestyle, can help prevent the development of disease. And if you were unlucky enough to develop a disease or condition, that to follow my balanced daily lifestyle in support to the marvels of modern medicine, could well significantly improve your predicted outcomes, and maybe even achieve a complete healing. But I need help to carry my message far. I need not to conduct another period of resettlement but instead to conduct a period of reinvention. I know my weaknesses but I can work on those and improve them while also trying to find and strengthen my strengths. Then I need to keep my eyes, ears and mind open to try and find the box that I might well fit into. I miss a team within a busy working environment and truly want to try and improve the lives and life chances of as many people as I can. I can do that in two ways. I can continue to seek out sponsorship for the 5 charities of the challenge for me to take on activities designed to help me retrain my brain and work on and strengthen my weaknesses while reinforcing my strengths towards future employment. I can also seek out an organisation that has the will, capabilities and desire to put me in harness as I attempt to retrain myself and help me to get my message to eat better and move more to as many people as possible while also helping me to prepare for and adjust to a new life in civilian and cognitively healthy employment. So this new voyage of discovery with Allie, as I attempt to strengthen my weakened cognitive function, mental discipline and endurance towards new life, will carry with it many challenges day to day as I chart my journey, but will never be mundane.
I have been blessed by Allie coming to marry me despite knowing my failings, blessed by Allie supporting me and encouraging me with such understanding every step of the way. It must be so frustrating for her having to repeat herself and with such patience answering exactly the same question several times over, while emotionally draining to watch a grown man, her husband, be so tormented by his shortcomings and frustrations that tears well in his eyes as he sits quietly, wondering what it was he was supposed to be doing. So please pray for us both and for success on this new leg of our challenge to Beat the Beast and consider sponsoring me for the 5 wonderful charities I support with a standing order using the form and instructions found under the Sponsor Archie button at the top of the page.
I can and will beat the beast of my cognitive weakness and drifting fog. It will take time and a lot of hard work but I will do it in many different and imaginative ways and in the meantime encourage as many people as I can to start to use my balanced daily lifestyle in order to improve the lives and life chances of as many people as I can, for as long as ever I can.
Thank you
Yours aye Archie
Deo Juvante
Together we will beat the beast!