As one of the UK's longest-surviving cancer patients in the UK, John Walker Pattison wrote the New York Book Festival award-winning book, Me and My Shadow – memoirs of a Cancer Survivor, to deliver a chronicle of incredible inspiration. Pattison was diagnosed with cancer at the age of eighteen and despite repeated treatment failures and his unexpected recovery, only eight years later, his four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukaemia. The immature adolescent, who, by his admission, wasted his school years, went on to become a cancer nurse specialist at the very hospital that made his diagnosis almost fifty years earlier. But, Me and My Shadow – memoirs of a cancer survivor is far more than just a story of overcoming the odds as Pattison tells us about his inspiration during those difficult times – the Lakota Sioux Nation. In 2018, he travelled to South Dakota and spent a week on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Pattison retired in 2021 due to ongoing health problems as a consequence of the salubrious chemotherapy he received in the seventies. Today, he is once again fighting another cancer battle but remains philosophical. The crucial hinge in his life is his beautiful wife, June. ‘Nothing is as important as family’ he says.