A journey of reconciliation

"Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. "
- Psalms 23

Friday 27 May 2011

RADIOTHERAPY

Dad was prescribed his one and only radiotherapy course.
Each day he has to report to the centre for a 5-10min radiotherapy session. No pain, no difficulty.
However, it is giving him a not so good appetite. Otherwise things seemed to be going fine.
Onco has asked him to take some chemo drug to increase the sensitivity of the cancer cells.
We decided to drop that. do not want him to feel any further physical discomfort,. Onco could not assure us that it would help, or how much it would help anyway.



He'll also have to follow up with radio onco each week. I discovered that the follow-ups was almost merely to help dad manage the side effects.I think mainstream medicine is pathetic when it comes to cancer management.

Sunday 8 May 2011

CT SCANS, PETS scans and Radiotherapy

Dad is planning to start radiotherapy soon and the oncos have scheduled a series of scans.
It is amazing how little infomation the doctors are giving from the (i quote minister) '$8 package). They send you through the factory line. If you don't ask any questions, they send you through the factory line silently; you may well be contributing to the statistic of the 5-yr survival with 5 percent.

There r a number of tests you have to do before u start on radiotherapy.
The simulation has a shelf -life of about 3 weeks, so do not embark on it unless u are 100% sure you have decided to start your radiotherapy within the 3-week time frame (we were not told on this).  A few dots may be marked as tattoo to help radiographer position the equipment during future treatment.You have to fast about 4 h before.  Procedure takes about 45 min.

2) PET scan
some 'spots turn up in the CT scan. Another way to better ascertain the nature of these 'spots' is to do a PET scan. Sometimes u can get better info. The idea behind it is to see if the pancreatic cancerous cells had/had not spread. This will affect the dose of radiation treatment that may be given. (S$1500 non-medisave deductible for a subsidized patient)

You have to fast 6 h before the scan.  Before scan, you have to be injected and 2 cups of drinks have to be downed. then you have to wait for an hour before they can scan you. Guess what, dad fasted, got injected, drank 2 cups of whatever, waited for 45 min just to be told that the machine generating the dye is not working for that day. Scan aborted. talking about much ado for nothing.

3) Renal scan (kidney)
This kinds of help to minimise the effect of radio on the kidneys, they know where the kidneys are and can target the treatment better. We were told it will take half a day. In actual fact, the actual procedure goes like this -
Arrive and inject. Once injection is done, you can go anywhere for the next 3 hours. The scan will only be carried out (30min procedure thereabouts) after 3 h has passed.

Maybe it is the post-election flu. I just wonder how far S$8 can go in reality.
As a subsidized patient, dad is really getting a lot of subsidy; the medical costs are VERY high so we still end up having to pay quite abit!
Thank God there is such a thing as MEDISAVE, so one had savings o use for medical purposes.
and yet there r many restrictions about using it. Max for scan is $600 per yr for Medisave claim. 1 PET scan alredy cost S$1500. Within a period of 3 months, from diagnosis till now, dad has gone through 2 CT scan, 1 CT simulation, 1 PET scan and 1 renal scan. You get the picture. Mr George Yeo is well-liked. WP wins the GRC. Part of it is related to my dad and his scans.

I wonder how all the uncles and aunties i met at the NCC (whenever i went with dad) afford all these.

Mum told me of a one of her friend who had cancer but cannot afford treatment. She is relying on donation of free paracetamol supply as pain control measure from her peers who visit polyclinics for follow ups and asked for subsidized paracetemol prescription.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

From Dr Mercola's website on Kelley's enzyme therapy

Appended from Dr Mercola's website

The "Impossible" Recoveries of Dr. Kelley's Cancer Patients

After going through thousands of Kelley's records, Dr. Gonzalez put together a monograph, divided into three sections:
  1. Kelley’s theory
  2. 50 cases of appropriately-diagnosed lethal cancer patients still alive five to 15 years after diagnosis, whose long-term survival was attributed to Kelley’s program
  3. Patients Kelley had treated with pancreatic cancer between the years 1974 and 1982
According to Dr. Good, the president of Sloan-Kettering who had become Gonzalez' mentor, if Kelley could produce even one patient with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer who was alive 5-10 years later, it would be remarkable. They ultimately tracked down 22 of Kelley's cases. Ten of them met him once and didn't do the program after being dissuaded by family members or doctors who thought Kelley was a quack.
          The average survival for that group was about 60 days.
A second group of seven patients who did the therapy partially and incompletely (again, dissuaded by well-intentioned but misguided family members or doctors), had an average survival of 300 days.
The third group consisting of five patients, who were appropriately diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and who completed the full program, had an average survival of eight and a half years! In Dr. Gonzalez' words, this was "just unheard of in medicine."
One of those patients included a woman diagnosed by the Mayo Clinic with stage four pancreatic cancer who had been given six months to live. She'd learned about Kelley's program through a local health food store. She completed his treatment and is still alive today, 29 years later...........(full article here)