Background Afflictions
My main cancer motivating this
research is a locally advanced advanced basal cell
carcinoma (BCC) that has advanced to the bone.
I've had it over 35 years starting from a simple BCC
in the scalp above the ear.
After many severe sunburns while
growing up, I experienced my first skin cancers
after a year in the Tonga Islands in 1977. Even
though I swam with a t-shirt, not much was known
about sunscreens back then. On my back, on each
shoulder, two large BCC arose as well as a dark mole
in the middle of my back. I also had a little place
that itched in the scalp above my right ear, but
that was nothing.
I visited Fiji on semester break from
teaching and went to a hospital where they could do
a biopsy on the mole. It turned out to be a
melanoma. The doctor said he had removed it all so
there was nothing to be concerned about. When I
returned to Tonga, the Peace Corps doctor was
concerned and asked that the biopsy be sent to NIH
where it would be evaluated. They decided that I
should fly back to Washington, DC for further
surgery. They removed all three of the lesions as
well as lymph nodes in my groin. After nine days in
the hospital I left with a suction pump in my groin
to remove the continuing flow of lymph. After a week
infection set in and I had to return to the hospital
for 11 more days. After a month and a half of
recovery I made it back to Tonga.
That was not as big a health crisis as
I had when I got amoebic dysentery trekking in Nepal
in 1972. I took medicine for it, but amoeba remained
and in six months made it to my liver giving me
amoebic hepatitis in India. I spent two weeks in a
medical clinic. My digestive system was wrecked and
I was reduced to almost a skeleton. In early 1973 I
had a physical exam at a small city in India. The
amoeba were gone, but after looking at the sugar and
bile in the urine, and the mucus, blood, and
parasite ova in the stool, the doctor, an Italian
nun, said that I had better leave India soon or I
wouldn't get out alive.
It took almost four years to recover
enough to hold down a full-time job. During that
period I spent over a year in Greece including ten
days in a hospital. The motility of my digestive
tract was very slow. I had to walk a lot to keep
food moving. In December of 1975 I found some hot
mineral springs in Ngawha Springs, New Zealand that
had a reputation for healing various ailments. I
spent five weeks there in the pools and my digestive
system toned up enough to take a job as a laborer at
a construction site for six weeks. Not long after
that I entered the Peace Corps where I began my skin
cancer saga.
After Tonga I went to Hawaii to work
resettling Indochinese refugees in Honolulu. (Friend
Tom was resettling them in The Philippines,
Thailand, and worked later with the UN in
Cambodia.). Once a month I would attend a cancer
support group called Make Today Count. That
was one the highlights of my time there. The large
house I managed and lived in with up to 47 refugees
from Vietnam and Laos had an air of suffering about
it from the plight of the refugees. Make Today
Count was a welcome, upbeat break from this.
Make Today Count consisted of
people with cancer (or other life threatening
diseases), people who had recovered from cancer,
widows/widowers, and an occasional nurse or social
worker. Only once did a doctor come to give a talk.
It was a place where it was natural to meet member
friends and give them a big hug, make jokes about
cancer, and share grief over loss. About then I read
On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Death_and_Dying
and Life after Life by Dr. Raymond
Moody
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/experts03.html
Being able to face death as a natural
part of life facilitates health.
I moved from Hawaii to Albuquerque and
went back to school. While there I became a member
of and later the coordinator for CanSurmount,
short for Cancer Surmount. It was quite different
from Make Today Count. A doctor or
hospital would contact us about a new patient with
cancer and we would try to send someone to the
hospital to visit them who had had a similar cancer
and/or a similar treatment so they could discuss it.
They could also meet a survivor. We would sometimes
have meetings, but it was not the warm socializing
like Make Today Count.
I digress. Years later the little spot
in my scalp continued to grow and itch, and through
some slight misdiagnoses and slightly wrong
treatments, it was removed three times,
incompletely.
Fifteen years ago I found Mohs
surgery. After four levels of cuts, part of the
scalp and one-third of my ear were removed. The ear
was then reconstructed. This lasted for ten years
until the BCC resurfaced. Four more levels were
removed leaving a larger bald area. During this
interim period a couple of squamous cell carcinomas
and more BCC's were removed using Mohs.
Five more years passed and the BCC
reappeared in early 2012. Four levels of Mohs lead
to the skull. That was drilled, scraped, and
reconstructed in four hours by the same surgeon who
reconstructed the ear. It was like a work of art in
that the scalp was rotated eliminating the hole and
bald spot while leaving sort of a gully down the
back of the head that mostly filled in over time.
The Mohs surgeon and the reconstructive surgeon were
outstanding.
I've read that on the first try about
95% of BCC's are removed (about 99% for Mohs). If
that fails, on the second try about 85% of BCC's are
removed. If it takes three or four tries, about 50%
are removed. By the time it is the sixth try,
perhaps there is a 90% chance that BCC cells remain
to grow. So with a locally advanced BCC that entered
the bone, it was now time for me to act in terms of
diet, supplements, and exercise to stimulate the
immune system as much as possible.
At age 71, the survival rate for
cancer is lower. And the immune system of an
older person cannot stand up well against the toxic
effects of chemotherapy, radiation, and other such
treatments. So I investigate alternative
medicine. Even if alternative medicine offered
no greater longevity, at least one would not feel
terrible from the toxic side-effects of such
mainstream treatments as chemotherapy and
radiation. Now after trying various
supplements, diet change, hot mineral springs in
Ngawha Springs, New Zealand, etc., over the past
year, things are going well and I'm feeling pretty
good.
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