(Last updated June 2023)

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My name is Ryan Cooke. I have Stage 4 metastatic bowel cancer with a BRAF(V600E) mutation.

In July 2020, I was given 12-14 months to live as a best case scenario - if palliative chemotherapy worked.  I was placed in hospice care. Surgery was said to be impossible. 

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I started an intensive integrative regimen alongside chemotherapy and things began to change quite radically.

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I went onto have this 'impossible' surgery just a year later, and there are currently no active tumors evident in my body. I became one of the lucky few discharged from hospice care back into the world of the living.

It has been, and is, a brutal journey. I live with the debilitating physical and mental side effects of my diagnosis and treatment every day. It's a struggle, and I'm not using this website to paint myself as a superhero, or to sugarcoat the realities of living with cancer. I'm not cured, I'm not naive and I know the future is unclear. However, I'm now fast approaching the two year anniversary of my proposed 'sell by date' and think there's hope to be gleaned from my story.

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I know for certain, I would have bitten the hand off anyone telling me I'd still be alive two years later at the time of my terminal prognosis.