Crossroads

I have learnt a great deal about my cancer in the past two months. I know that it is extremely aggressive, growing at 15% per month on average. I know that a mutation affecting the PI3K pathway makes attempts to treat it with dietary changes futile, and MDR1 gene expression means it has multi drug resistance, meaning that chemo is not overly effective and neither is high dose vitamin C.

The last MRI has shown that I have about 15% of healthy liver left. The human body needs a minimum if 14% to meet its basic metabolic needs. It does not take a genius to work out that with a 15% monthly growth, my skin and eyes will be turning a nice shade of yellow within a month or so.

I am not giving up. I have ramped up my treatments, and am looking into other hardcore liver therapies, even a liver transplant. As you can see I have two very good reasons for not giving up.

At the same time I am re-evaluating my priorities and am heading home next week. I’ll take a few days off from treatments and take the kids camping. Always wanted to do that, but they were too young at first and then there just never seemed to be enough time. Problem is I don’t even own a tent, so have lots of shopping to do first. Hopefully the kids will like it as much as I did when I was growing up and hopefully it will leave a lasting childhood memory for them. Should be fun. My secondary aim is to turn them into mini pyromaniacs. (Don’t ask, its a family thing. We like our bonfires.)

For me this month is critical and I have to get the liver mets under control, so I am ramping up my treatments. This month I will have:

2 Removab cycles
Chemoembolization with Vogl
13 local hyperthermia sessions
Newcastle Disease Virus
Dendritic Cell Vaccine primed with NDV
Thyroid potentiation therapy
Gamma-Delta cell stimulation with zometa.
Lots of daily IVs mostly for liver support and detox.

This is all the old stuff, new for this month:

20x Dichloroacetate (DCA) IVs
Dendritic Cell Vaccine primed with a tumour antigen
Donor Gamma-Delta cell transfusion
Phoenix Tears
IPT

and in a few weeks I will also try 2-deoxy-d-glucose, just need time to organize it.
I am throwing in a few herbs like dandylion root just for good measure, a few new supplements like ginistein, artemisinin and quercetin.
I may also go back on to Avastin.

Normally I would not do so much at the same time, but I am out of time.

At the same time I pursuing several liver directed therapies. I like the Alpps procedure, but I fear that I have not enough liver left for the surgery, but have contacted three liver surgeons to get their opinion. I see no reason why they can’t put me onto a liver dialysis machine till the resected liver segment regenerates. Just thinking out of the box. Typically these are used to keep people alive while waiting for a liver transplant.

Singapore is probably the only place where I am likely to get a new liver, so started to make some enquiries there. This is my plan Y.

Finally an update on my infected port. I used it for about two weeks and I thought I had the battle won, but it got worse again. I’ll spare you the details, I can just tell you that the catheter leading from the port into the vein is light blue in colour. I should NOT know this! I can’t afford the time to get it out now. It will just have to do.