My Story Part 4

Head and Neck Cancer Survivor -My Story Part 4

I can not give the name of the clinic or doctors where I had the low dose radiation and hyperthermia treatments. I will tell you that they told me I should get down there right away, that week. They told me that I would be there  6-8 weeks and could rent an apartment from them across the street.

So, I got the OK from the insurance company and drove the 16 hours to get there. I met the radiology oncologist and told me that I would be there for 3-5 months. I felt that I had been misled but what could I do. What I should have done is get back in my car and headed home but they played on my concerns about the side effects of conventional treatment. They told me that the side effects from their treatment would be temporary and that they could definitely cure me. So I stayed. Silly me.

The apartment was a three bedroom to be shared with other patients all paying $1000 a month each. The whole operation seemed very unprofessional, but I was committed now and started treatments five days a week. Whenever there was a holiday or the equipment had broken down everyone groaned.
I got to know other patients in the waiting room who had been there for over a year. It could get discouraging.

About two weeks into the process I started having terrible mouth sores and because of the steroids they gave I couldn't sleep. I was miserable. My digestive tract was a mess also. I couldn't eat anything solid so I ordered a Vitamix and what a blessing that has been. My meals were liquid, but I still had constipation badly. I was losing weight and strength.

I took a week off to recuperate and meet my family for a much needed vacation. Things leveled out somewhat during that week. I still had the mouth sores and thrush, but not quite as intense. So, the long sad trip back to the clinic and what I hoped was a only eight more weeks of treatment.

As my mouth healed I was able to eat some solid foods again but they had to be soft, baked potatoes and the like. I could not put anything in my mouth that was spicy or minty or too hot. The thrush magnified it but the problem was primarily from the radiation.

My wife, in speaking with the dentist back home told him about what I was going through and the dentist asked if I had gone through any pretreatment dental evaluation? Well, nobody had said anything about seeing a dentist, certainly not the clinic I was getting treated in. Besides my treatment, there was no communication at all about  nutrition or about what to expect or what to do when something happened. As I went along and spoke with other patients I started learning things to ask. My wonderful wife is a great questioner, but as for me; not so much. Do not trust these people, ask lots and lots of questions. Go home, study, write down questions. The internet has a lot of helpful information from others who have been through it. Ask, ask, ask, then ask some more. Doctors are busy and they can make that very evident but it's your life we're messing with here.

my story prt 3

I am a sucker for ice cream and for a year and a half I did not have even one teaspoon. Green food was my replacement. Yuck, nothing like the taste of blue green algae and wheat grass to fix you right up. Actually, later in this story I'll tell you how I overcame the sweets thing.

Wow, a year and a half of working with my naturopath and the P.E.T. scan comes back negative. Overjoyed, elated, what can I say. I was told that I needed to stay on my program to make sure it didn't return. I was a good boy for awhile. Then as time goes by I started slipping into some old bad habits, like eating things I had missed; ice cream being one.

I'm feeling pretty good. I'm living life and not thinking very much about cancer and the emotions it had brought. I continue to take my energy food but I really don't check my Ph very often. I'm not using the frequency device. What for? The dang cancer is gone, right? Then around January of 2009 I go to a conference up in McCall, ID and while I was there I felt my neck and to my horror their was another lump on my neck.

How could this be. I thought they took out all the lymph glands on the left side of my neck last time around. Do they grow back or something? To say the least I was a little unnerved. Of course, my first thoughts were cancer. The voice of my naturopath came back to me about being careful because the cancer can come back. Microscopic bits can be left skulking around that the P.E.T. scan won't pick up.
A note here: P.E.T. scans can be fooled both ways. There are false positives also. If you have just finished a regimen of radiation or have an area of inflammation/infection  these can throw off a false positive. You will need to wait a few weeks to make sure, particularly since the insurance companies are a bit strict on how often you can have a P.E.T. scan due to the high cost.

My P.E.T. scan came back showing the cancer had returned in the same location - left side base of my tongue. I had started doing my program again as soon as I felt the lump. When conferring with my nautropath we hit it strong and added a few other modalities to the mix. But after a year of this the next scan showed the tumor had grown although it had not spread to other areas. We decided we needed something else because what worked before wasn't working now.

I still didn't want the typical surgery, radiation and chemo regimen. Of course my ENT doctor was almost pleading with me. Research turned up a clinic that was supposedly having great results with a combination of low dose radiation and hyperthermia. There was a company that had been doing it for many years and the doctor was supposed to be a pioneer in the technology. Should I or shouldn't I? How do you make a decision on something like this?

My story part 2

There all sorts of philosophies dealing with  how to cure this body that has run amok. Of course the guidelines followed by your typical American Medical Association approved physician is to cut, poison (chemo), and radiate. Outside that we are looking at anything from voodoo to snake oil.

Cancer is a real money maker. When you think that 1 in 3 females and 1 in 2 males will develop some form of cancer in their lifetimes that is a massive amount of people. When you consider the costs involved it's huge. Of course some cancers are more expensive to treat than others. Head and neck is expensive to treat but the follow up treatments to treat the side effects can be even more so.

Alternative medicine can be very expensive also with the kicker that it is usually not covered by insurance. So all of it is coming out of your pocket. There are so many different types of treatment that it is mind numbing. Which one is right for you? When you start researching you'll see that it seems that all these websites claim they have the answer and why you can trust them.

First, let me say that there is no "Silver Bullet", no one therapy that is the "Cure for All Diseases" as one book is titled. I would recommend, if you decide to go the natural or alternative route, that you speak to people who have gone through that therapy and been cured. Also, keep in mind different cancers have different causalities. Mine turned out to be caused by a virus, HPV (of which there are different forms).

No matter which type of cancer you have, I think it is prudent to have a naturopath or someone with a lot of experience with working with cancer patients to help you. As part of your treatment you need to have someone to monitor you as to how your body is performing as your treatment progresses. Some cancers are slow and some are very aggressive. Time is your enemy. You don't have enough of it to be "trying" a bunch of different therapies or money to be doing multiple therapies which could can be offsetting and dangerous, one therapy can cancel another.

There are plenty of stories of people that have gone down to Mexico to clinics that promised so much and either lost a lot of money and did not cure them or who died down there. This is not to say that there are stories of people getting cured.

In 2005 when I had my first round of cancer I worked with the naturopath who worked on a multiple front attack by building up the organs that were weak with specific supplements, herbs and tinctures. My body was not processing protein well so we addressed that as well as getting the Ph where it needed to be and monitoring it multiple times throughout the day at home. Getting proper nutrition and adding energy food through a green food, that promotes good Ph and gives the body lots of good greens, etc. We also used a frequency device that I used to reduce the tumor that the doctors told me could not be reduced.

Later in 2006, we had another P.E.T. scan and it showed that the tumor had not spread and even had reduced some. So we stepped up the program and spent more time on the frequency device and by Christmas 2006 another P.E.T. scan did not show any tumor on my tongue or traces of cancer anywhere in my body.

Neck and Head Cancer Survivor My Story

A number of people, especially my wife, have been wanting me to write about my experience with head and neck cancer and a long and interesting road it has been.  In 2005 a bump appeared on my left neck. Being a man I ignored it for awhile and then Barbara, my beautiful wife, finally convinced me to go see a doctor.

The doctor told me that they had been seeing a lot of that lately that was from the flu. I had flu symptoms right before the lump appeared. She said since it moved easily that she wasn't too concerned and that we should just keep an eye on it.

This was in March, 2005. Finally in late May we went to an Ear, Nose, Throat  doctor and he did a biopsy. A week later the results were inconclusive so we got to do the biopsy again which again turned up inconclusive. The doc scheduled surgery to see what was going on. The result was squamous cell carcinoma but the problem is that this type of cancer does not originate in the lymph gland. We needed to find where it was originating from. They next scheduled a P.E.T. scan. So they load me up with a type of sugar that has a radio isotope attached.

Cancer loves sugar. When they look at the pictures they can see where cancer uptakes the sugar and shows up as a hot spot from the radio isotopes. The hot spot turned out to be at the base of my tongue, inoperable because it is too close to the epiglottis.

The next step was to see the oncologist who took my case before the board and they came back with a recommendation to do surgery on neck to make sure they got it all and chemo and radiation. Of course at this time Barbara and I were in shock every since the diagnosis.

It's funny how sometimes life prepares you for things that will come along later in life whether good or not so good. I started reading about alternative medicine and health in general years ago. So I was predisposed to want to go that route especially when I heard the possible side effects of the treatments. Radiation and chemo play havoc with our bodies. The ones that scared me right away were the immediate pain from mouth sores and burns, nausea, fatigue and etc. The long term effects of not being able to swallow, even water, so being on a feeding tube, damage to tongue and maybe not being able to speak, loss of teeth and even the whole jaw. Yes, big baby that I am, these scared the hoot out of me.

I opted to go the "natural" route. I, at first, worked with a nurse who was in natural medicine and started a liver and kidney cleanse. By the time that was over I was clean. I had also lost a bunch of weight and was feeling pretty weak.

All this time, of course, I was studying about options on the internet. There are so many whacks and cracks out there that it's scary. Several people I came across at this time recommended a naturopathic doctor locally who has helped lots of people. My experience with naturopaths in the past had not been favorable but my first impression with this one was remarkable. They were not into labeling but in finding out what the body is doing and addressing those issues so that the body can heal itself.

I will not name the doctor I worked with or the credentials because in our country the medical industry and government, in the eyes of some, to protect the public and in the view of others as the controlling everything to their profit have attacked and shut down both good and bad practitioners.
Later, I'll get into more of the ins and outs of alternative therapies.