The Moment the Floor Drops Away
My cardiologist delivered the prognosis in a rather abrupt cold tone: Coronary Artery Disease and Cerebral Small Vessel Disease, placing me squarely in the 99th percentile of risk for men my age. Incurable and severe.
A few days later, I found myself in Suva, Fiji.
I had just stepped out of a meeting with the Minister for Infrastructure and called the chair of our company in Australia to let him know what was happening. The phone call was polite and procedural, but the moment I hung up, my legs gave out.
I sat under a Betel Nut tree on the edge of the street and wept. I wasn’t weeping out of self-pity for the diagnosis; I was grieving the sudden death of my career, my autonomy, and thirty-five years of professional momentum dissolving right under my feet.
A serious diagnosis creates an immediate fault line. There is the life you had five minutes ago, and the life you have after that diagnosis. Almost immediately, the world hands you a new uniform: patient.
It is a quiet, passive word that implies waiting, but you don’t have to.
Waiting for pathology results, waiting in clinic corridors, waiting for instructions on how to manage your decline. I was simply told there’s nothing you can do just enjoy the next few years. I mean, really is that the best he could offer.
Before long, you stop being a leader, a parent, or an explorer. You become an appointment calendar with a set of lab values attached.
The 10-Week Year-Start Sprint
This week marks the start of our final sprint to the start of 2027: I’m creating a 10-week reset where we take things back to the foundation stones of Book 1, Decode Your Diagnosis. Yes you are right in thinking there’s eight years left of the year but the first few weeks of january are basically blank space for holidays and rethinking where you are so I’m including that two week reinvention phase as part of it.
Over the next ten weeks we are stripping away clinical complexity and we’re going to:
Decode what it means to manage chronic illness
To align our lives and the condition (our new normal) with life
We’ll start the new year with a thriving mindset.
To do that we are going to start by revisiting the exact mechanics of identity, dynamic harmony, and baseline agency before launching our wild foods metabolic coaching cohort in the new year.
Yep, that’s right, we are currently running a trial on the efficacy of wild food blends for people with chronic illness with a select group of participants including me. We will review our lessons learnt from that experience and open to our first public cohort in January 2027.
Whether your diagnosis is cardiovascular, metabolic, autoimmune, or neurological, the primary obstacle is rarely just biology, in other words the solution is rarely just about modern medicine. The first battle is reclaiming your sovereignty from the label modern medicine slapped on your chart.
Now please don’t start sending me hate mail if you are a modern medicine practitioner. I am a patient’s advocate and we absolutely need the intervention techniques of modern medicine. It’s the best chance we have of restarting survival but that’s where it typically ends and yes, some might say falls short. Ye get given a diagnosis, a prescription and a time line then shown the door because that’s all they can do in a fifteen minute consult.
In reality that’s just the starting gun.
The Three Points to Anchor Who You Are
When illness arrives, it fractures your identity. I know because I’ve been there a couple of times, first with prostate cancer then severe heart disease.
Modern healthcare is equipped to treat broken pathology, but it doesn’t necessarily know how to treat your existence with this major disruption.
Healing begins when you stop identifying with the pathology and step onto the Knife Edge of Now (T0) to rebuild your foundation.
Here are the three grounding steps to establish who you are from the moment of impact:
1. Acknowledge the Shock Without Living in the Denial Loop
Denial is not a moral failure; it is a temporary biological shock absorber. It gives your nervous system time to absorb what your conscious mind cannot yet bear. But lingering in denial turns protective cushioning into a trap.
You break the loop not by fighting reality, but through detached observation. Sit with the fact that the terrain has shifted.
Say to yourself honestly: “I am not okay right now, and I can accept that for today, but I am going to decode this and take back control.”
Acknowledging where you stand gives you the footing to choose your next move.
2. Perform a Linguistic Detox
Language does not simply describe your condition; it actively shapes your perception of agency. The moment you say “my cancer,” “my heart condition,” or “my arthritis,” you incorporate the disease into your personal identity.
Strip that ownership out of your vocabulary. You do not own the disease, and it does not own you.
Start thinking instead in pronouns such as “it”, “the”, I even heard of some people giving things like tumors a name. That’s all fine as long as it’s not “my” or “I am a patient suffering from…”.
It is an external force acting on your internal elements of Mind, Body, and Soul. When you speak of yourself and the condition separately, you are not a passive victim enduring treatment; you are a Titan learning the terrain, gathering data, and actively executing your recovery against it.
3. Initialise Your Personal Baseline
When you rely entirely on clinic visits every three months, you surrender daily oversight to an external system. Taking command means recording your own foundation.
You need a personal flight recorder, a daily ledger, journal or diary where you track your Minimum Viable Alignment. Log your sleep rhythm, hydration, and the external stressors pressing on your nervous system. When you log your own patterns, you stop being a subject studied by others and become the lead investigator of your own life.
And here’s the thing; You are not alone.
I created an AI navigator to help me through my heart crash in 2024, we refined it for public use and now it’s available in a mobile app so you have support from now just by becoming a subscriber to my substack.
Step onto the Knife Edge
Remaining a passive patient leads down an all-too-familiar path: endless waiting rooms, silent anxiety, and waiting for someone else to fix your vitality.
You have the power to step onto the Knife Edge of Time (T0). The past brought you here, but it does not get to write the next chapter.
Take Your Next Step:
Become a paid subscriber of my Substack publication and gain free access to the free Formula For Life Companion App on iOS and Android to initialize your encrypted journey with Fama Concordia. Begin logging your daily Minimum Viable Alignment (MVA) with our digital companion, Fama Concordia, and reclaim your personal baseline.
Fama’s Sidebar: The Navigator’s Grounding
A medical chart lists observations about cellular tissue and blood chemistry. It does not measure your capacity for courage, adaptation, or purpose.
When you hear words that sound final, remember that a diagnosis is only an inciting incident. It tells you that the old operating manual has expired, not that your journey is finished. Today, do not worry about fixing the next five years.
Focus entirely on the choice directly under your control.
Key Insight: A diagnosis can interrupt your story, but it does not get to write your conclusion. Your identity is defined by how you respond, not by the clinical label you were handed.