Hello all. This is my first post on steemit and what better way to start than by telling you of my current journey in healing cancer naturally without chemotherapy or radiation. In this article I will share with you what I have done and where I am now. In other articles I will provide a ton of information about what I have learned along the way and I will post updates on my progress as I go.
So let me get started. My first sign of anything wrong was around June of 2015. I had just turned 44 at the time. Of course, I wasn't even close to thinking cancer at the time but I did get a very serious case of diarrhea for about two weeks. Eventually things mostly went back to "normal" but I noticed my stool had sort of a reddish-brown color to it and it looked a little glossy. I was going to the doctor about every 6 months to check on my thyroid. At my next appointment in November I brought it up but the doctor didn't seem to be bothered by it.
Over the course of the next couple of months I had more diarrhea in between long bouts of constipation. The constipation was painful and I wanted to go to the doctor but I already had an appointment set up for about a week later in January and decided to take some over the counter medication and wait until then for my next scheduled appointment. I told the doctor what was going on and she thought it was likely diverticulitis and prescribed some very powerful antibiotics. Things seemed to clear up and the pains went away for about a month until the constipation returned.
By the middle of February of 2016 I had already been noticing some strange things going on. For starters, I was hearing weird whooshing noises in my ears whenever I stood up real fast. I also noticed, but didn't think it meant anything, that I had a hard time stopping when brushing my teeth. It felt soooo good for some reason it was hard to make myself stop. But the thing that really made me take notice and get myself back to the doctor ASAP was when I was outside raking up some leaves. I had hardly covered a 10x10 area and was completely out of breath and exhausted. I had to sit down to recover. I knew I wasn't in the greatest of shape back then but this was ridiculous.
I was in the doctor's office a couple of days later. I went over my symptoms with her and she at first thought it was due to my thyroid medication. We did recently up the dosage. I supposed it was possible that could be it. Then she had a nurse come in and give me a breathalyzer, not the kind used by cops but a machine that measures lung capacity. The nurse didn't know what she was doing and had me blow in it a total of 10 times while she tried to figure out what she was doing wrong. By the tenth time I was completely out of breath, as I suspect anyone would be, and the doctor deduced that something was wrong with my lungs and scheduled me for a chest x-ray and sent me on my way. As I was walking out I asked about iron. "That's a good idea", she said. And did a blood draw for iron. In hindsight, I can't believe she didn't think of that first.
In my heart I knew nothing was wrong with my lungs and didn't go in for the x-ray. The following morning a nurse from the doctor's office, not the doctor herself, which I found strange, called me to tell me to go to the ER immediately for a blood transfusion. She said my iron was dangerously low. Due to problems with my insurance, I didn't want to go that route and eventually found a hematologist who could see me right away to discuss any possible options.
The hematologist happened to also be an oncologist but the discussion of cancer had yet to come up. She explained that, although my iron was dangerously low, as long as I didn't overexert myself that I should be fine while receiving iron infusions. So over the next few weeks, I went in for IV iron infusions. About 4 weeks later, my breathing capacity had returned and I was feeling much stronger. But we still didn't know why my iron was low and the hematologist told me at my initial visit that she would schedule me to see a gastroenterologist. The only other symptom I had was strange noises coming from my abdomen. No pain, just strange noises. I thought the GE would help to figure that out.
Over the next few weeks, I had to go into the oncology clinic to receive my iron. Everyone else there was getting chemo. I recall thinking to myself how terrible that was. I knew nothing about cancer at the time but it just didn't seem right to me. The nurses were going over how the patient was going to feel the next few days and to make sure to take the anti-nausea medicine. She reminded them how their immune systems would be destroyed and not to go near anyone for a few days. I recall the nurses treating the bags of chemicals so delicately as if they were hazardous materials. I remember seeing bowls of candy EVERYWHERE where patients could help themselves. I was thinking even then that when nausea is a part of treatment, that nausea is happening for a reason. The body is trying to get rid of this stuff and here they are trying to force it in. It just didn't seem right to me but what did I know?
Over the next couple of weeks, as I was waiting to hear from the gastroenterologist, my wife heard about and forced us to watch The Truth About Cancer video series by Ty Bollinger. WHAT AN EYE OPENER! I had learned so much and thought if I ever got cancer I sure as hell was not going conventional. Yet, although I secretly had a tumor growing inside me, I was in denial that that would be me.
About two weeks after finishing my iron infusions, I got a call from the GE and the soonest they could schedule to see me was about two weeks later. Two weeks later I saw the doctor and after about 10 minutes he told me I needed to schedule a colonoscopy and endoscopy. The procedure was scheduled about 3 weeks later, May 18. From the time the doctor called me to tell me my iron was dangerously low to the time I got a colonoscopy to figure out why, over 3 months had passed. Looking back on it, this angers me because what happened next was ridiculous.
After the procedure, the doctor informed me I had a mass blocking most of my colon. He said the opening through it was about the diameter of a pencil. All stool that passed through my colon had to fit through that tiny hole. He showed me a really disgusting picture of it. It looked like one of those tiny donut gems lodged perpendicularly in the colon with a tiny hole in the center. He said there was a chance it was not malignant but he had taken a biopsy and would let me know. I still clung to hope that I was not going to be a cancer patient. Unfortunately, the following day, my worst fears had come true. The doctor called to tell me that it was indeed malignant. He recommended a colorectal surgeon to me and I called to schedule an appointment.
They got me scheduled for the very next day. THE NEXT DAY. It took over 3 months from the time I found out something was wrong to finding out it was cancer and now, all of a sudden, we're on the fast track. On the same call, I hadn't even met the surgeon yet and they already had me scheduled for surgery in 3 days. Thank God I was having insurance issues which slowed things down a bit and gave my wife and me time to think. I did go in the following day for a CT scan, though.
The next thing I did was call Hope4Cancer in Mexico. They told me that I would have to travel to Mexico and stay there for three weeks. The cost was pretty high too and I just couldn't afford it. I had a job at the time and no vacation time so I would have to lose my income as well. It just wasn't an option for me then.
My sister in California found out and sent me a bunch of information from a doctor's office she goes to near her house that also treats cancer naturally. I looked into it and, lo and behold, it was many of the very same doctors from The Truth About Cancer video series. She said they were five minutes from her house and I could stay with her as long as I needed. I called them up and rushed a consultation with Dr. Bita for some advice before my appointment with the surgeon.
In my consultation she told me she thought surgery was the best choice for me based on my circumstances. I told her I really wanted to avoid that if at all possible and she said that as long as I was able to pass gas and stool that I was fine. She said that I needed to go on a liquid diet immediately to aid in passing stool and to cease all intake of any type of sugar to slow the growth of the tumor.
My wife and I went to see the surgeon the next day and I learned that not only did I have the primary tumor in the colon but I also had a lesion in the liver. I didn't have time to worry about the liver right then and there so we discussed my surgery. The doctor scared me. He kept giving me different scenarios based on what he'd find in there but he made it seem that he was leaning towards taking out my ENTIRE colon, even though I insisted that I'd like to keep as much of it as I could. He made it seem like one of those "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission" type of things and I was really getting nervous. Finally I asked him if I needed my colon and he shrugged and nonchalantly said, "Not really. You'll have to go to the bathroom 7 to 10 times per day but that's it". Seven to ten times per day??? That was not something that I really wanted to live the rest of my life with. I had a job with over a one hour commute. I wouldn't be able to make that drive. I'd be in diapers for life. He also wanted to put in a colostomy bag, not something I really wanted if I could avoid it.
I decided I wasn't going out like that. If surgery was my only option, so be it, but it didn't seem like I was at that point yet and I was going to fight to keep ALL of my organs. I called The Cancer Center for Healing in Irvine, CA and scheduled my appointments for the following three weeks.
While there I received treatments of hyperbaric oxygen, PEMF, ozone, IV vitamin C, IV glutathione, IV sodium bicarbonate (yes baking soda), eVOX, and probably a few other things I can't even remember now. I also took advantage of their dentist there and had all the mercury fillings in my teeth removed. After all I had learned about natural cancer treatments, I was so sure I was going to knock this thing out in no time. I thought I might even have it reduced to nothing by Christmas. What a great present that would be.
I met with the nutritionist to discuss proper nutrition for cancer patients and found out that I couldn't eat ANYTHING. Even if I successfully reduced the tumors, my diet would be forever changed. I have to admit that when I first learned I had cancer and learning what I had from watching The Truth About Cancer, the most daunting thing wasn't that I had cancer but that my relationship with food was over. See, me and food, we go way back, over 45 years. I never thought I ate THAT bad but I knew I didn't eat that good either. But the convenience of being able to just "pick something up" on my way home from work was over. From now on, we'd have to plan and cook all of our meals. And the ability to just eat whatever sounded good at the time, a burger, a burrito, some pizza, a hot dog, french fries, Olive Garden, that was over too. No more sodas. No more stopping at Mickey D's on the way to work for a bacon biscuit sandwich and some hash browns, washed down by an ice cold Coke. No more candy bars or chips from the vending machine if I happened to get hungry midday. From now on, that relationship was indefinitely put on hold and it sucked. It still does, as a matter of fact but I'm slowly getting used to it. Some things it turns out were much easier to give up than I thought they'd be. Soda and juice were surprisingly easy to switch to water. Alcohol was a piece of cake for me to give up. Pork wasn't too hard to give up but now that I have, I've noticed just how common it is. But I'll tell you, the one thing that hurts more than anything is bread, any type of bread. Sure I'm able to eat a little bit of gluten free bread but hardly enough to make a sandwich with because of the carbs. I'll have a lot more to say about diet and nutrition but for now, let me get back to the cancer part of the story.
Unfortunately, because it was a tumor in the colon, the only way to know if it was growing or shrinking was either by CT scan, which I didn't want to do again because of the excessive radiation, or by actually physically seeing it through colonoscopy. So I scheduled another colonoscopy after I returned to my home in TX, excited to see the results. I thought maybe there'd be a chance that the opening was a millimeter or two larger than before and I'd be screaming hallelujah! from the rooftops. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The colonoscopy, done by a different doctor this time, looked pretty much the same. I was feeling pretty let down at this point.
Undeterred, I went on. I was taking all kinds of supplements by now: curcumin, quercetin, AHCC, boswellia, milk thistle, and many, many more. I was taking them morning and night, about 60 pills per day. I was still on the liquid diet and losing energy from that. And I was feeling a little bit ill each day from all the pills I was taking but not terribly ill as if I was on chemo or anything like that.
I persisted, though and decided I was going to use the tumor in the liver as my measuring stick for success. About a month later I went in for an ultrasound and measured the tumor in the liver. I wasn't comparing apples to apples when comparing this to the CT results but it appeared it was getting larger. I wasn't pleased with this at all. In fact, I wanted to cry. I thought I was doing everything right and yet it kept on growing.
Over the coming months I added daily regimens of coffee and garlic enemas, ozone rectal insufflation, Bio-Mat hyperthermia and various new supplements. I had spent many thousands of dollars on new equipment and was spending close to $1,000 per month on supplements. Yet every time I got a new test, things looked slightly worse. Each time I wanted to cry, yet I persisted.
Then around September I noticed that the strange noises in my belly appeared to have gone away. I was so hopeful that this meant progress. Surely the opening through the tumor must be getting larger and the tumor shrinking. I had my next phone appointment with my doctor to go over my test results on Wed. Oct. 5. She said it didn't look like my numbers were getting any better but the news about my abdomen noises was encouraging.
That very night, after I had hung up with Dr. Bita, I found out why they had stopped and it wasn't because things were getting better. It was because they were getting worse. The colon had completely closed up and was blowing up like a balloon. By now it had reached near breaking point and the pains started. Intense, paralyzing pain came and went about every 5 minutes. This wasn't the first time I felt this pain so all the next day I still had hope that I'd get one of those bellowing noises from my gut and everything would start moving again. I told my wife that if it wasn't better by Friday, we'd be calling the surgeon.
On Friday, we did have to call the surgeon and I scheduled an immediate appointment. He had me rush to get a new CT scan and showed me that my colon was severely distended, blown up like a balloon from the small intestine all the way to where the tumor was on the descending part of the colon. There was no saving it. The entire balloon had to come out. By that afternoon I was checked into the hospital preparing for early morning surgery. Things went so fast I can hardly remember them.
The following week after the surgery was hell. I was in the hospital recovering for 7 days and nights. I couldn't eat. The doctor explained that my small intestine, which was now connected to a new part of the large intestine had to learn to work together. And, even though I wasn't eating, the stomach never stopped producing. The acids in the stomach kept filling up but couldn't drain downward anymore while the colon was retraining. I was constantly nauseous and vomiting. The pain from the incision made vomiting even more excruciating. After I think the second or third day, they removed my catheter which forced me to constantly have to get up to relieve myself of all the saline they kept pumping into me. All the while, the nurses kept pushing me to get up and walk around and I really didn't want to. It all hurt so bad. What's worse is that I refused morphine. I learned that morphine destroys the immune system and I knew I needed mine now more than ever. They tried some different pain killers but none of them worked. I had to tough through it all. It was a very, very long 7 days.
Finally I was sent home and for the first time, I was able to eat just a little bit of food. By now, with the liquid diet and not eating from the surgery, I had lost almost 60 lbs. and I was weak. The good news is that I didn't have to worry about the tumor in my colon anymore and I could eat anything that I needed to. The bad news was that I still had that damn tumor in my liver.
I took a break from all my supplements for several weeks while I recovered. I was hopeful that now that my overall tumor load had been reduced that I might start making gains on the liver. Unfortunately, once again, I have to report that was not the case. The tumor in the liver continued to slowly grow and each new bit of bad news made me want to cry.
I had to see my surgeon for my 8 week follow up and he told me that in his opinion I would be a good candidate for a liver resection surgery. I was really contemplating this option. But he did also give me the first bit of any kind of good news I received since the whole thing began. He said that he gave my removed colon to the pathologist who found, I think it was 72 lymph nodes, and only 1 showed signs of cancer. I didn't exactly know what this meant but he said that was truly remarkable. I figured that all the treatments I had been doing must have been doing some good after all, even if not reversing the tumor. At least it wasn't spreading. I learned that the liver is an extremely fast growing organ. After a resection, it can completely regrow itself in a matter of a few weeks. In this environment, tumors can also grow very, very rapidly so the fact that the tumor was growing as slow as it was and wasn't spreading I took to be a very good sign that gave me the fuel to keep on going.
At my next phone appointment with Dr. Bita, I relayed to her what the surgeon said and she told me that a liver resection was a virtual death sentence. She said after that it would only be a matter of time before the cancer returned and it would do so with a vengeance. So now that was off the table. The good news is that my colon was functioning about as good as one could expect. I am pleased to say I was not running to the bathroom 7 to 10 times per day. But as I was feeling better and better, recovering from the surgery, I began to notice sensation around where the tumor was in my liver. I felt it whenever I bent over in certain directions as if the tumor was pushing up against my ribs. Over the next couple of months, this started getting more and more a little bit painful. I knew if it continued I would eventually get to a crisis point like I did with my colon and I did not want that. I think I would rather die than to have to go through that all over again.
Around mid-January of 2017, Dr. Bita told me about a procedure called cryo-ablation. This is where the tumor is frozen until it dies, sort of like how liquid nitrogen will kill a wart. It sounded worth a try to me and I scheduled an appointment with the surgeon for this procedure. This meant I would have to go back to California. She informed me of her plan, first she would embolize the tumor. This is where she goes in and places coils inside all the veins leading to the tumor and cuts off the blood supply. This would cause the tumor to shrink to a better size for the cryo-ablation. Then about 6 weeks later, I would return to California for the cryo. The surgeries would create tiny incisions and I would be out of the hospital in a matter of hours. Things didn't go that way. I told her of the impending end of my contract at work and how I might be out of a job and insurance. So she took it upon herself to embolize AND perform cryo-ablation on half of the tumor during the same procedure. After I woke up she informed me of what she had done. She said she had never attempted that on a tumor of that size before but based on my circumstances she thought it was the right thing to do.
After that the tumor swelled. If it hurt before, it really hurt now. I was in intense pain from the pressure for about 4 weeks. No sooner did the pain start to subside than I found myself back in California for round 2 where she performed cryo on the remaining tumor. Just before heading to California, I got one more CT scan to make absolutely sure there were no other tumors to take care of. As long as I was going to be under I wanted to make sure we got them all then and there. The CT report made no note of any other lesions. I went home after the surgery hopeful that this was the end, that the tumor was now dead and would get slowly cleaned up by my immune system. The swelling was much less painful this time and I took that as a good sign that things were getting better.
The surgery was at the end of Mar. 2017 and Dr. Bita told me to wait about 6 weeks before getting my next ultrasound to give it time to shrink. That put me in mid-May and the ultrasound was definitely not better this time. In fact, it looked a whole lot worse. It showed two new lesions in the liver and one in the gall bladder. It seems all the cryo-ablation did was piss off the tumor and it was doing all it could to survive. I was devastated. I really wanted to cry now.
I knew I needed to make a change or do something different. I was out of work and my new job contract was supposed to start in about a month. I remembered Hope4Cancer in Mexico and what it would cost. It turns out that I had some Bitcoin saved and its price had been skyrocketing over the past year. I now had more than enough to pay for a trip to Cancun. I made a call and learned that the clinic now offered Rigvir. This is a virus I had learned about that seeks out and destroys cancer cells, while leaving the rest of the body alone and the body leaves it alone. I have read many great stories about this type of treatment. It seemed like fate to me that that was what I was supposed to do. A week later I was on a plane to Mexico.
My first day out of three weeks at the clinic was May 31, 2017. On the first day we did an ultrasound and some bloodwork for a baseline. The next three weeks was a pretty solid regimen of hyperbaric oxygen, full body hyperthermia, local hyperthermia, coffee enemas, SPDT, PEMF, lymphatic massage, IV vitamin C, IV vitamin B-17, acupuncture, and finally ozonation and ultraviolet barbardment of the blood. We didn't start the Rigvir shots until the final 3 days.
I got new bloodwork and ultrasound near the end of my stay and on my last day the doctor went over the results. My bloodwork showed slight improvement in iron (for the first time in over a year I was not anemic), slight improvement in immune system function, and fairly significant reduction in tumor markers. The ultrasound showed slight growth in some dimensions and slight reduction in other dimensions in the tumors in the liver and significant reduction in the tumor in the gall bladder. It's hard to say how much progress there was because a tumor under attack can swell so did it grow or shrink, I don't know. Most importantly, all vascular movement to the large tumor had ceased. Doctors in the US never mentioned vascular movement. I didn't even know you could see that on an ultrasound. To me this all sounded positive. Even if it wasn't a huge gain, it was a positive gain, the first time I had any positive gain since beginning my treatments a year earlier. I'll take it. All of this was without the benefit of the Rigvir, which I am very optimistic will provide even more rapid gains.
That's the end of the story for now. The rest has yet to be written. Looking back on it, I have to wonder where the positive change came from. While at the clinic the emotional aspect of healing was addressed several times. I met with a wonderful doctor there, Dr. Leslie Gomez, who was able to help me figure out that for my own healing, I needed to teach. During her acupuncture session I decided I was going to share my cancer healing journey and everything I had learned with whomever wanted to hear it. I believe this gave my life purpose, something that had been missing for many years just "working a job" and sitting behind a computer all day. I truly believe that this revelation was the spark to my finally starting healing. I now understand how the mind has control over the body and that until the emotional aspects are healed, the body cannot heal. I am continuing to look more into the emotional side of healing in the meantime.
The past year hasn't been easy on me or my family but if I had to do it all again, I can positively say I still would not opt for conventional treatments. I would never submit to chemo and radiation. If I go, I am going to go out fighting and that means putting my body to work to heal, not poisoning, burning, and damaging it more. But now I can honestly say that I do not think about death as a possibility. Overall, other than the recovery from surgery, I've felt pretty darn good and feel great today. I do not look or feel like a "cancer patient". I am strong and active and happy. Now I have a mission and death isn't even an option anymore.