Author of untold inspiration.
Available for book signings and guest speaking engagements.
"An autobiography unlike anything else published."
(Jon Corbett, CEO, JAK Media, 2022)
Nominated for the New York Book Fair Awards 2023
Me and My Shadow - memoir of a cancer survivor, is a brutally honest account of one teenager's struggle to
understand and deal with the most feared diagnosis known to society: cancer.
At 18 years of age, John Walker Pattison was thrust onto a roller coaster ride of emotional turbulence; his
innocence was cruelly stripped from him, and his fate was woven into the tapestry of life.
After years of failed chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments that ravaged his physical frame and almost
destroyed his psychological stability - his parents were told that he would not survive. Yet, today, he is one of the longest-surviving cancer patients in the UK.
Eight years after his unexpected recovery, the news that all parents fear, his daughter is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. Yet like her father, she too would defy the odds and go on to become an international swimmer.
Pattison turned his life full circle and became a cancer nurse specialist at the same hospital that made his diagnosis decades earlier. He prescribes chemotherapy and cares for individuals with the same cancers experienced by both him and his daughter.
Throughout his journey, Pattison's inspirations were the space rock legends Hawkwind. He would get to play on stage with his heroes at Donnington Festival in 2007.
More significantly, he found solace throughout his cancer journey in the history and spirituality of the Lakota Sioux Nation. In 2018, he would spend time on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the indigenous people of South Dakota. The same people who, unknowingly, supported him through life's greatest challenge: cancer.
Available worldwide from all usual outlets from 31st October 2022.
New website featuring all of my work and future publications:
