I thought some of you may want to know what brought us to Seattle for Paul's cancer treatments. So, here goes.
Paul started this journey right before Christmas, 2021. He became ill with, let's just say, gastrointestinal distress. He was not able to come to mom's for our traditional Christmas Eve family gathering. This in itself was a true indicator that something was terribly wrong.
We made an appointment with his general practitioner who immediately decided he needed a CT scan of the abdomen to determine exactly what was going on. Thankfully his GP made this happen or we would still be wondering and waiting. The problem with pancreatic cancer (PC) is that there are usually no symptoms until it has reached Stage IV level. Such was the case with Paul. Stage IV means it has spread to other organ(s) of the body. Paul's had spread to the liver and because of that, he is NOT a candidate for the only known "cure", which is a surgery called the Whipple procedure.
We immediately made an appointment with MD Anderson, having been told by many that MD Anderson is THE place to go if you have cancer. MD Anderson was great. However, they offered no alternative treatments. Standard western medicine was the only protocol they pushed or even considered. After being told that without chemo the average patient life expectancy with this type of cancer was 3 - 4 months and with chemo, 1 -1 1/2 years, we decided to start researching other options. What did we have to lose?
Thanks to a very dear friend and client, I was told about two books that may be beneficial in our quest for answers. He recommended "How to Starve Cancer without Starving Yourself" by Jane McLelland and "Radical Remissions" by Dr. Kelly Turner. What eye openers these books were. They offered alternative protocols to starve and kill cancer. So many success stories have given us the hope we needed to try this option, along with chemo as PC is not a cancer you can wait to see what may or may not work. Time was of the essence. The theory is to throw everything at it to stop the progression and give your immune system the fuel and health it needs to do it's job. I highly recommend these books for anyone with cancer or caring for someone with cancer. Please pass on this information if you or a loved one or friend has been diagnosed with ANY type of cancer.
From Jane's book, we were able to connect with an integrative physician in Houston, Dr. Christine Houser. An integrative physician is a physician that utilizes the alternative methods of healing most physicians do not even consider. Diet, exercise, mind/body connection and multiple supplements and off label drugs are the methods we are incorporating with his chemotherapy. Dr. Houser follows the protocol of Jane's book and is guiding us through this process. She is very well versed in this area and is a cancer survivor herself. We meet with her via zoom and email and could not do this without her. She highly recommended we go to Seattle to start chemo with Dr. Ben Chue. He administers what is known as low dose, metronomic chemo. There are not many oncologists that will administer chemo this way. There is evidence that low dose chemo lessens the side effects and is actually less harmful to your body as well as more effective at stopping the tumor growth.
Paul is doing everything they ask and we are hopeful this will give us many, many more years of quality life with our beloved husband, father, grandfather, son and brother. Are we sure we can achieve that? Only God knows for sure but we intend to make every day count by giving it our all.
We will NEVER give up and we will NEVER lose faith!
All of you have been so supportive and caring. For that I am eternally grateful. You may or may not know that Paul passed away yesterday with family surrounding him. He was so brave and fought the good fight. But, the monster within his body was just to much to combat.
We will be forever grateful to all of you for keeping up with his journey and giving your support.
His memorial service is at 10 o’clock Friday morning at our church, First United Methodist Church. We hope you will be able to come celebrate Paul’s life.
We never gave up and we never lost faith. God just had better plans for Paul.
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