Patricia Daly

My story

It was an ordinary morning in the office of

the Bank of Ireland on a warm summers
day in July 2008. Almost ordinary, Id say,
because I had this odd flickering in the
corner of my right eye that seemed to be
determined to stay there, day and night,
even when I closed my eyes. Initially I didnt
give it much thought, but because Id had
some temporary loss of vision for a good
while the previous evening, I finally decided
to pick up the phone and call an optician.
When I described my symptoms to the
assistant who answered, I was told to make
my way to their practice immediately. I got
a bit concerned because in Ireland, it can
sometimes take forever to get a doctors,
consultants or any appointment.
I left work and cycled over to the optician.
Then everything happened very quickly. As
soon as the optician looked at the back of
my dilated eye, I knew something wasnt
right. Apparently, I had a detached retina
that needed to be operated on immediately,
which is why I was referred to one of the
top ophthalmic surgeons in the country. A
few hours later, I sat on a chair enduring
more gruesome eye tests. Finally, I was

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told that yes, I did indeed have a detached

retina, but that wasnt all. It was detached
because a large tumour was growing
underneath it a melanoma.
To be honest, at the time I was not very well
versed in medical language and I didnt
realise straight away that I was dealing
with a cancer diagnosis. I guess it was a
mix of denial and ignorance.
Because my type of tumour was still very
rare in Ireland at the time, I had to get
treatment abroad. We travelled to Liverpool
in the UK three weeks later, where I went
through eye surgery twice within four days
and had radiotherapy.
One of the key moments during this time
and probably one of the key moments in
my life was when I asked my consultant
if there was anything I could do to recover
from surgery and treatment, to feel better
and to protect myself from a possible
relapse. He looked at me with a mix of
slight bemusement, pity and impatience.
No, theres nothing you can do apart from
taking it easy for a little while and then get
back to your old life.

Now, this answer totally piqued my

curiosity. Did I really want to go back to the
same lifestyle that had got me where I was
now, with cancer at the age of 28? Dont get
me wrong I was never filled with guilt and
I never beat myself up that I had brought
cancer upon myself or anything like that
but deep down I knew that it was time for a
change.
This is when my journey started, a journey
of learning more about myself and of
researching everything that had to do with
cancer, nutrition, the mindbody link and
other lifestyle aspects. So in a way, I thank my
consultant for his answer because ultimately
it pushed me into taking action myself.
Just four weeks after finishing my
treatments, I started to study nutritional
therapy. Initially this was with a view
to supporting myself, but very quickly I
realised that my life really had been turned
upside down. I tried to go back to work in
the bank about two weeks after returning
from the UK, with disastrous results.
Working on a computer screen for longer
than 15 minutes proved to be impossible
and resulted in vomiting and headaches.
I had to seriously think about a new job
that would take the pressure off my eyes
and an office job didnt seem to be the right
choice any more. Thats when I started
to study even harder by recording all
the study material so that I wouldnt put
any strain on my eye because I felt that
becoming a nutritional therapist wasnt
just a way to help myself, it was also an
amazing opportunity to build a new career
that I was genuinely passionate about.
About eight months after my treatments,
I got pregnant and a beautiful baby girl
was born in November 2009. My life was
great: a new baby, a loving partner, we had

just moved house and I had a new career

perspective. But then my old symptoms
returned; my baby was just two months
old when I went for check-ups. I voiced my
concerns over the flickering in my eye, the
floaters and the fatigue, but the scans were
clear and I thought it was probably just the
tiredness that motherhood brings.
I left the hospital with a bad feeling that
something was terribly wrong. At that
stage, I was so in tune with my body that
I knew I could trust myself more than a
scan. And four months later, my worst
nightmare came true: another set of scans
confirmed that the tumour had doubled in
size and was growing aggressively. I was
shocked and a lot more shaken than when I
had initially been diagnosed.
More surgery and strong external
radiotherapy had to be performed
immediately. I was told that because the
tumour had moved so close to the optic nerve,
I would lose the sight in my right eye within
12 to 18 months of finishing treatments.
I went through radiotherapy while feeding
my six-month-old baby and everything
felt like defeat. Although I had worked
hard, educated myself and had made a lot
of lifestyle changes, I found myself in the
same place as I had been 18 months before,
but this time with a baby in tow.
I felt that I had done everything I could,
including dietary adjustments. My diet was
full of healthy whole grains, lots of fruit and
vegetables, juices and smoothies; I ate oily
fish and hardly any meat; and I had replaced
all sugars in my treats with dried fruit.
In April 2012, when my second baby was
eight months old, I was struggling with
a lot of side effects from the radiotherapy
and surgery. I had developed radiotherapyrelated retinopathy and there was lots of

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swelling in the eye. On top of everything

else, I had to learn to adjust to major sight
loss. My consultant told me that I was at
risk of developing more serious conditions
and eventually losing my eye itself, not just
the sight. The one option I had was to try
Avastin injections to stop excessive blood
vessel growth, and if that didnt work, wed
have to consider removing the eyeball.
But I wasnt prepared to give up just yet. I
asked for a grace period of a few weeks and
went back to researching more frantically
than ever. And this is when I came across
the emerging concept of cancer as a
metabolic disease. I read studies conducted
by a German researcher, Dr Johannes Coy,
showing that most cancer cells rely heavily
on glucose for generating energy and
promoting growth. The suggested therapy
to cut off this constant supply of sugar to
the tumour was a radical dietary change:
adopting a so-called ketogenic diet.

Admittedly, at the beginning it felt really

odd to eat that much fat after being lowfat for all my life, especially saturated
animal fat; thank goodness this myth has
been largely debunked, along with many
others. For me, turning the food pyramid
upside down (with the very top chopped
off, of course) was radical, but the results
were astonishing. At my next check-up a
few weeks later, my consultant said that the
inside of my eye looked like the calm after
a big storm. My eyesight had also started to
come back. He said that if this development
continued, I might move myself out of the
danger zone and could possibly save my eye.
Ever since then, my eye has been stable.
Five years after treatment, I still have
my eyesight and Ive regained my health
in general. My energy is great and my
digestion and hormones have finally
settled, which makes my skin glow. And
my tumour hasnt grown back.

It sounded very counterintuitive to me

initially: I had to start cutting down on
carbohydrates. Im not just talking about
white pasta, bread, rice, cakes and biscuits.
This also included whole and gluten-free
grains like my beloved millet, quinoa
or buckwheat. To compensate, I had to
increase my fat intake drastically to 7580%
of total daily calorie intake. I started to eat
avocados, olives, oily fish, duck and other
fatty meats, and treats made with coconut
oil and cacao butter. Getting my head
around it wasnt easy in the initial stages,
even though I was almost a fully qualified
nutritional therapist at that stage.

In the past two years, Ive guided

many cancer patients through the
implementation of a ketogenic diet.
The nutrition world is changing fast,
governments are finally starting to change
their food pyramids and oncologists are
now getting interested in how nutrition
can support their work.

I had nothing to lose. According to studies,

it was safe to follow a diet that had been
used for epileptic patients for a long time,
and if it didnt have any effects, at least
I could reassure myself that I had tried
everything to save my eye.

Im a big fan of using evidence-based

information and I research everything before
making recommendations. But there is one
big lesson that Ive learned on my journey:
despite all the modern technology and
science, we mustnt forget our own inner

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Although research into nutrition is and will

remain challenging, Im hopeful that we
will get more and more clear on how to use
food as an invaluable tool in the support
of cancer patients and people affected by
chronic illness in general.

wisdom and intuition. I will never forget

the day when all my scans were clear but
my inner voice told me that my tumour was
growing again. A client of mine who had
a similar experience couldnt have said it
better: My oncologist is a body of knowledge,
but I have knowledge of my body.
It is now my greatest passion and
privilege to support and guide clients on
how to safely combine science with their
own intuition and experience so they can
become as healthy as possible, whether or
not they are living with cancer. And it is
my hope that this book will inspire many of
you to become as healthy as you can be, too.
Patricia Daly 2016

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