Tim Baker - Patting the Shark: A surfers journey learning to live well with cancer

Tim Baker was living the dream. A bestselling and award-winning surf writer with a beautiful family, a lifetime of exotic travel and a home within walking distance to quality waves.

That all changed on 7 July 2015 when he was diagnosed, out of the blue, with incurable stage four metastatic prostate cancer. So began a descent into the debilitating world of aggressive cancer treatments and a fight for survival as brutal as any big wave hold-down.

Tim writes candidly and with a raw vulnerability about this perilous journey through conventional treatments. Patting the Shark also documents Tims search for effective, evidence-based therapies to mitigate the devastating side effects of treatment and maintain mind, body and spirit. Happily, surfing provided one of his most powerful forms of therapy.

This is a story about facing your mortality, staring down your fears, and working out what really matters in life, when so many elements of your identity are stripped away. It offers hope, comfort and empathy for anyone facing a cancer diagnosis, as well as for their loved ones.

This is no ordinary man-gets-cancer-finds-hope story. Its a raw and unflinching revelation of our fallibility and weakness in the face of nature. Its at once an inoculation against false positivism, but a tonic for realists who may need assurance that life goes on, though death may beckon. Its a book youll find hard to stop reading.

Anne Savage, CEO, Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia

W HEN I FIRST CONNECTED with Tim, I was struck by the aura of a man with something to say, about something much bigger than could readily be grasped.

On the surface, his is no ordinary success story. An award-winning author and journalist, he has also carved a career as the worlds best-known anthropologist of surfing culture, having penned titles including The Rip Curl Story , Occy , High Surf , Bustin Down the Door , Surf for Your Life , Australias Century of Surf and Surfari . While his bibliography suggests a full-time occupation in long-form writing, Tim is also the former editor of Tracks , Surfing Life and Slow Living magazines, and a two-time winner of the Surfing Australia Hall of Fame Culture Award. The entrancing childrens book The Surfer and the Mermaid is also the product of Tims creative energy, and has been harnessed for stage play and performed to sell-out audiences.

In surfing lexicon, hes a literary wave-riding guru.

But below the wave, where souls seldom find the freedom to arch, hes a man coming to terms with advanced prostate cancer.

When Tim recounts the day of his diagnosis, in July 2015, you can almost visualise a man being dropped to surf Cape Fear, without a leash. He eloquently describes the rising wave of panic, the anxiety of uncertainty, the paralysis of shock, and the anger of abandonment by a health system that in his experience was beset by fragmented care, systemically uninterested in what patients think.

His story hands a mirror to those of us who labour within the healthcare arena, reminding us of what we already know, but struggle to change. Faced with a grim diagnosis, Tim pivots from the perspective of a man who has worn an unconventional path in life, approaching his diagnosis and treatment with open-mindedness and a sceptical, inquiring mind.

He writes openly about the impact of prostate cancer treatment on all aspects of his life, and considers an alternative clinical reality, where prescriptions embrace lifestyle and complementary therapies that can satisfy the evidence benchmarks of scientific rigour. He concedes he is unqualified beyond his own experience, and writes of worrying that some may accuse him of being anti-science, while gently pleading for necessary consideration of strategies that might help us realise a higher quality of life throughout the challenges of cancer treatment.

If we accept that the beginning point for all medical and scientific wisdom is knowing simply that we dont know all the answers, then Tims solitary quest can be read as a deep embrace of the scientific method. Indeed, he concedes, with raw honesty, that his own mortality depends on it.

Tims experience reveals a man in search of the ultimate wave, balancing the acceptance of what is with the hope of what may be.

Professor Suzanne Chambers, AO, PhD, FCHP
Centre for Research Excellence in
Prostate Cancer Survivorship

I KNOW HOW IT feels to pick up a book like this, in the bewildering days or weeks or months after you or someone you love has received a cancer diagnosis, in a desperate search for answers, hope, guidance. So, Ill cut straight to the chase.

This is not a book about how to cure cancer. Im not a doctor and Im not qualified to give medical advice. I have, however, lived with stage four metastatic prostate cancer for seven years and Im still fit, active and healthy still surfing, writing, being a dad and husband, with a full and rich life. This book is primarily about maintaining quality of life, managing the ravages of cancer treatments and their often-devastating side effects, and facing this mortal threat with some semblance of equanimity.

I also know the crippling sense of overwhelm from information overload, the bewildering blizzard of medical advice, treatment options, dubious folk remedies and whacky and expensive alternative therapies, which the newly diagnosed cancer patient can all too easily become lost in.

So, allow me to synthesise what Ive learnt over the past seven years about cancer self-care into one short, handy mantra:

Remember to take your M.E.D.S.

Meditation. Exercise. Diet. Sleep.

These have become the pillars of my self-care, in no way intended to replace, but rather to complement, conventional treatments. Meditation is the foundation of this approach. The ability to cultivate a clear and calm mind, to find a place of inner peace and stillness you can access at any time, is critical to managing the stress and uncertainty of a cancer diagnosis. Exercise is increasingly being recognised as a vital element of cancer care with numerous benefits, from alleviating stress, fatigue and depression to enhancing cardiovascular health and bone strength. Diet is something most oncologists dont talk about, chiefly because they receive little or no training in nutrition, but the virtues of a predominantly plant-based diet have been validated in numerous studies. And quality sleep is now well established as one of the most fundamental determinants of good health. If I can tick each of these boxes each day, I feel like I am on the right path and in my healing zone.

To this you can add whatever lifestyle strategies work for you and personalise your cancer self-care from a metaphorical spice rack of therapies. Music, art, immersion in nature, social support, a good psychologist, birdwatching, gardening, nude sunbathing, swing dancing, whatever floats your boat.