It has been a few days since the meeting with the surgeon. The response has been a bit varied among my family and friends. Surgery certainly makes everything more real. Knowing it is a major operation which carries so many risks brings an entirely different element of worry to the situation, I get that. If the situation with the tumour was more positive and the surgeon was more confident he could do a full removal, the decision to push on with surgery would bring a further level of comfort that it is the best decision. Seeing as this is not the case and that the tumour seems to be surrounding the artery still, it brings much more anxiety for all involved. For me, I will not be conscious for any of the surgery, or even most of the intensive aftercare. It is everyone else who will have to painstakingly sit for hours, waiting for the news of how the surgery has gone, what they managed to do, and if there were any ‘complications’. By the time I’ve found out these details, it’ll likely be days after the operation. I’ll be off in dreamland, so deep under the influence of drugs that I’ll probably be exploring Narnia from my vantage point, riding on a dragon’s back (I’ve never had a dream like this so I’m not sure why I would start now, but it’s nice to dream about the potential of your dreams).

There have been a lot more tears since Tuesday. Perhaps it is a combination of learning what my staging is and having it clearly communicated that a full removal is unlikely. It could still happen if the scan failed to be accurate in its portrayal of the tumour, but he seemed to doubt it would be so wrong. I did do another CT scan at the hospital, so I’m waiting for the surgeon to call me with the results of that. Perhaps he will be more confident of what will be done in surgery once he has reviewed it, assuming the scan is better quality than the last one and offers more insight. Nano-knife is the most likely outcome. A full removal is not out of the question eventually, I believe, but the surgeon didn’t seem willing to discuss such a scenario. I didn’t try, to be fair. He had an air of confidence about him which was tantalising. Every sentence was carefully thought out, every word scrutinised in his head before it left his mouth. These situations are tense; you could tell that he was experienced in dealing with them.

I’m unsure whether he will do some form of partial Whipple no matter what he decides is possible with the tumour. I need to ask him when he calls me about the scan results, but it’s one of those things that I’m unsure whether getting an answer is better for me. It seems easier to just wake up after surgery and face the music then. The outcomes sound so varied depending on what they see during the operation that I doubt I’d get a straight answer anyway. At least I trust this guy to tell me that the answer isn’t easy and I’d believe him if he said as such. The fact that there is a cyst on the other side of the pancreas to the tumour indicates that the surgeon will have to do more than just deal with the tumour. We did ask him if he would be removing the cyst despite what happened with the tumour, and he said that he would. It was funny – his reaction was almost like this was a total afterthought – an irrelevancy in the face of the cancer. “Oh yeah, there is a cyst there too, isn’t there? Yeah, we’ll get that out,” he casually said when the question was put to him by Anna. Surgeons are so casual. They must realise that their job terrifies the other 99.9% of people on planet earth. I’m sure that there’s a smugness that comes with that territory. I’d certainly be smug about it if I were one. He didn’t seem particularly smug at all. After arranging the CT scan on the phone with the radiology department, he said that he needs to get a nurse to put the cannula in. “I can do surgery on you but I can’t cannulate you,” he chuckled – I suspected this was that smugness coming in to play.

One of the things I have changed about my behaviour recently is my diet. Since learning a little about the immune system and how it is constantly fighting ‘bad’ cells being created in your body, I have been much more taken into the idea that your immune system plays a vital role in how your body battles cancer. Before, I thought whether you developed cancer or not was more a thing of luck, with a heavy dose of genetic makeup. The book I am reading seems to suggest that this is not the case. He references a study about fostered children. The study was conducted in New Zealand as apparently they have detailed records about births and biological parents. In the study, they measured the cancer rate among a group of people who were fostered from a young age. If the formation of cancer was more down to genetics, the numbers in people who suffered from cancer would be similar between the focus group and their biological parents, irrespective of whether they were raised by foster parents or not. If the formation of cancer was more down to behavioural patterns rather than genetics (e.g. diet, exercise habits etc), then there would be less significance between children and their biological parents, and more significance in the trends between the foster parents and the children they adopted. The study showed the latter, indicating that the formation of cancer was effected more by behaviour than genetics.

Now, I’m not suggesting this single study proves the point entirely, and more importantly, I have not looked into this study myself and do not plan to. It is enough to convince me that behaviour must be more important than I perhaps anticipated. As a result, I’m trying to avoid processed food as much as possible, based on some scrutiny of these types of foods. Turning over a food packet to look at the ingredients and seeing different types of sulphites listed is a little concerning to me, even with my limited knowledge of sulphites (and believe me, my knowledge is limited). A quick Google tells you that they are only dangerous for a small number of people who have problems with asthma. Does this mean that it is only an immediate risk to these people, though? I can’t imagine digesting a lot of additional sulphites is good for you, never mind the fact that they are added to foods to preserve them. Anything that makes it harder for the world to digest the food (i.e. through the process of bacteria breaking it down), sure means that it is harder for your body to break it down. The more unnatural the ingredient is that you are adding to preserve the food, the more dangerous it would be for your body, I would assume. It makes logical sense to me. The world isn’t always logical, though, so maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here.

Yesterday morning, I decided to Google ‘should you avoid food preserved with sulfites’ to test my theory. I had seen ‘Sulphite Dioxide’ on the back of the packet for some dried apricots and it got me interested. Notice that I did not add ‘if I have cancer’ onto the end of the question; I’m not even getting into that with Google. Searching for anything specific to cancer with Google can lead you to all sorts of dark corners of the internet. It seems to be the most prolific hearsay topic on the planet.

The first article I clicked on was one titled 5 Food Additives You Should Avoid. According to this list, and after doing more reading around, it seems that sulphite dioxide has a low toxicity for humans in most cases, so is generally regarded as safe. As I stated previously, though, I’m sure it isn’t completely inconsequential eating it in a lot of your food, but anyway. The thing in the article which got my attention more was food additive number 1 in the list – Sodium nitrates. Want to know why? Because it states that they increase your risk of pancreatic or colorectal cancers. If there is one way to grab my attention, it is by throwing around the name of my beloved cancer. Pancreatic. Dancreatic. Dan’s Dancreas. Dan’s Dancreactic Dancer. Anyway…

Apparently, sodium nitrates are mainly added to meat to stop it from discolouring. That should make them extremely low risk for me, an individual who does not and has not eaten meat since 2016. Perhaps this is another cruel irony of the world, like when a non-smoker gets lung cancer. During the digestion process, toxic chemicals are released due to the sodium nitrates being broken down by stomach acid. It is them which pose a threat to humans according to the limited research I did on the web. Rather than always researching other people’s research, I thought I’d conduct my own. I headed down to the kitchen, opened the fridge and found a packet of bacon. It had come from Waitrose, one of the more expensive supermarkets here in the UK. I turned the packet over and read the ingredients. Just like that, I completed my study. Sodium Nitrate. Confirmed – it is indeed added to meat. Study complete. Science is so easy. You probably thought I was somehow going to confirm that the breaking down of sodium nitrates in the stomach releases deadly toxins didn’t you? I’m not that good – go speak to a real life scientist if you want real research.

It just feels like a minefield trying to investigate diet further. Information seems so inconsistent and you wonder how things get approved for use if they truly are so bad for you. What is true, apparently, is that cancer rates in the west are much higher than in the east, and it would make sense to me that the key difference between us is diet. We have been eating highly processed foods for longer in the West, with the quick growth of fast food since chains like McDonald’s grew in popularity. Now processed food is everywhere and considered very normal. We look at things like butter as being intrinsically bad, despite us being able to comprehend how butter is made. Look at the back of a margarine tub and try to figure out what on earth the ingredients are in it – half of them sound like they belong on the back of a toothpaste packet or something. Do we really feel better eating that just because it is lower in calories? Fats are very useful to us humans, we seem to forget that fact. My body struggles to process them now and I have to take supplements constantly to ensure they are being absorbed by my body. What I’m trying to say is that you should revel in the fact that your body can absorb fats naturally (if it can) and utilise it by eating full fat butter, damn it! I do it now more than ever and it is a beautiful luxury.

Sometimes I find myself pondering whether knowledge is power or not. Do I find myself feeling empowered by it or intimidated by it? The question never feels more applicable than when trying to research diet and cancer. My new thing is to mercilessly avoid food with preservatives in it, where possible. All of a sudden, I am not eating any crisps, baked goods from the shop or heavily processed chocolate bars; those of you who know me personally will understand what a huge deal that is for me. If I want something sweet, I try and bake something quickly. For example, I’ll bake apricot and walnut bars to have at breakfast, alongside fruit. I’ve started making my own mayonnaise instead of having it out of a bottle; the home-made stuff is much more yellow than white – it’s strange when you have only just started making it yourself. It really does taste lovely when fresh and you can mix up how much mustard you put in it, which is nice. The next step is to learn to make loafs of wholemeal bread but I’m building myself up to that. It’ll probably take me a morning to get into it as dough is not something I have worked with so far. Rivetting stuff, dear reader, I know. This blog is probably your guilty pleasure these days with such innane ramblings about diet and food, if you even try to have any pleasure from it. At least it isn’t all cancer cancer cancer; it also makes you feel guilty about enjoying the foods you’d normally mindlessly eat.

Yet, this obsession with avoiding preservates is probably just a new scheme to feel in control of the diagnosis. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t assist in the fight against cancer too, but plenty of people have spent their entire life eating terribly, not having a care in the world about how many preservatives are in their bacon sandwich, yet don’t develop cancer. It is difficult to reconcile that, as I believe I’ve lived a fairly healthy life so far and still managed to get cancer. The fact that I likely ran 100km with the beginnings of cancer brewing in my pancreas is almost comical to me at this point. It was after I had originally got to the doctor’s complaining of stomach issues. The result of that was multiple scans at the hospital, but with no meaningful results. Their conclusion was that I had a strange form of constipation; it never convinced me. I guess when your tumour is 3.2cm at its largest, it is difficult to see with conventional scans. You have to step up to the expensive PET scan which they weren’t willing to do at the time. They don’t tend to assume that an otherwise healthy adult in their late 20’s would have pancreatic cancer; I know that from the first few weeks when trying to be diagnosed – “It’s probably pancreatitis but we can’t rule out cancer, although it’s very unlikely to be that.” I can’t remember how many times I heard words to that effect, but it was a lot.

So, here I am. Dan with the Dancreatic Dancer trying to research diet in an attempt to stop the Dancer getting the better of the Dan. Maybe the fight against preservatives will provide a useful distraction over the next few weeks, until the surgery day comes. Making everything from scratch is certainly time consuming. I’m getting used to the yellow coloured mayonnaise now, anyway.