'I was told I had cancer and that I must expect to die soon. Almost eight years later I still do my job and enjoy life. I have not had conventional treatment. Did my cancer simply disappear? Did I do nothing? Far from it. A number of things happened, some by accident, most by design.'
Michael Gearin-Tosh was diagnosed with cancer when he was fifty-four. 'Living Proof' is the story of his quest to overcome illness, but this is certainly no passive cancer patient following doctor's orders.
With fun, seriousness, urgency, affection and gentle satire, Michael tells what happened from the moment of diagnosis. It is a story of three passionately concerned women, also a visitor from Russia who was a captain in the Soviet Army. And, of course, doctors and consultants.
Consultants urged immediate treatment. Michael refused. Intuitively, not on the basis of reason. But as days passed, Michael fell back on his habits as a scholar of literature. He probed words and looked behind medical phrases. He tried to relate what each doctor said - and did not say - to the doctor's own temperament.
The more he thought and asked questions, the more he refused to be hurried to treatment, conventional or unconventional.
The delay was a high risk gamble. In time, however, Michael Gearin-Tosh found unexpected guides in memory and in authors he loved from Shakespeare to Chekhov, Jean Renoir, Arthur Miller and Vaclav Havel.
Always, too, there is the presence of his three women friends, each with her own very individual angle - and one of the friends is a doctor. They challenge. They challenge him. They challenge medical advice. They challenge each other. On no occasion, do they speak with one voice.
'Living Proof' is not a "how-to" book, but a celebration of human existence and friendship, a story of how a man learns to steer, in his own way, between conflicting advice, between depression and seemingly inescapable rationalism, between the medicine he rejects and the doctors he honours.
The book continues with an essay 'Why Living Proof?' in which the author asks some general questions about cancer and how differences of temperament relate to medical attitudes and choices of treatment. There are also comments on the book by Professor Sir David Weatherall FRS of Oxford University and Professor Robert A Kyle of the Mayo Clinic, USA - and a reply by Michael Gearin-Tosh.
The final part of the book is by Carmen Wheatley. It is a more technical medical case history of Michael Gearin-Tosh: 'The Case Of the .005% Survivor'.
