I’ll be honest. I am aching to see my family. The first week went fairly quickly, but this one is crawling. I almost had myself convinced that it’s actually Wednesday today, rather than Tuesday, but alas….

Treatment is going really well. Like I’ve said before, I really look forward to hanging out with the people at the clinic. It will be sad to leave, but I am so giddy about going. We will be on the Sodium Bicarbonate until this Saturday. Since I fly home Saturday morning, I will take the last treatment from this bag home (There are 4 treatments to a bag), and then finish that Saturday night in the comfort of my own home. Woohoo! Sunday begins DMSO, once again. All of Marvin’s family will be up for Anna’s graduation party on Sunday, so my graduation gift to her will be waiting until after her party to take my DMSO treatment.

We met with the doctor today that is supervising all of our treatments. They combined mine and my dad’s appointments together, even though I’m sure we’ll both be billed separately. We get the same reaction everywhere we go. “Wow, I’ve never had a father-daughter team before”. I just keep telling them that it’s my dad’s sad attempt to try and spend more time with me. Now that is love, eh? Anyways, he was a tad reassuring to me, in that he told me that if he were in my position, he would be doing the same thing. This is coming from a doctor that has his own separate private practice and is supportive of this because he’s seen it work, but is still very cautious about what he says because of the AMA and his medical license. So that was good to hear. At this point, I will be doing another full round of 20 treatments at home, which means I will be doing these treatments until July 20th. I scheduled my next PET scan for July 25th.
My parents will be staying for another week because my dad is getting internal treatments, as well as treatments through his PICC line. Through the internal method, the treatment is then able to hit his cancer directly. I asked if they could please just stick a tube in my right ear so they can administer it directly that way, hitting my brain. For some reason they always just give me a little courtesy laugh and walk away. Weird.

We finished our first set of treatments yesterday and started our second round this morning.  We are now on Sodium Bicarbonate, much to my mom’s relief.  Along with the change in treatment will come a change in our aroma.  Everything is going really well, other than my PICC line refusing to stop bleeding.  I actually look forward to our daily clinic visits.  You become sort of like a family with the people you are getting treated with, because you’re spending a couple of hours in fairly close quarters with them everyday.  The fact that we’re all going through this cancer journey together creates a small bond between us, as well.  It’s actually rather sad when people finish their treatment and leave.  This guy who’s been getting treated for 40 days had his last treatment this morning.  He was fun, and such a source of entertainment, so it was a little sad to see him go.  As quickly as he left, though, another person was there to fill his chair.  I’m tellin ya…this place is hoppin!

We received the results of our PET scans yesterday.  My dad had excellent news, in that even though his PSA is extremely high, his cancer appears to be rather low grade and is confined in the prostate.  We were a little concerned about the possibilty that it had metastasized, but that’s not the case.  My scan showed just a small lesion in the area that we knew it was.  It’s hard to compare an MRI with a PET scan, so we’re not 100% sure that it hasn’t grown since April, but it is still very small, so we take some confidence in that.

Other than getting treated everyday, we’ve just been hanging out.  We’ve done some shopping, of course, and I’m getting some good training in the software that I’m supposed to be testing.  It’s kind of cool because I can shop for a couple of hours, but then go back to the hotel and work, making up the money I just spent.  I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty sweet system.  I’m guessing my husband does, too. 

My boys are being very well taken care of.  Anna, I hear, is doing an amazing job watching Tyler and Trent all day, as well as making dinner for Marvin and the boys.  What a blessing that whole situation is!!  Have I mentioned that before?  I can’t believe we’re already getting into the second week of treatment.  It’s been really good to be here with my parents and to spend time with all of these great people at the clinic, but as you can imagine, I miss my family! 

Well, we finally got through our first day of treatment.  We thought we were going to start yesterday, after our PET scans, but since the glucose they inject into our bodies before the scan doesn’t leave for 24 hours, we had to wait.  The clinic is on the Oral Roberts University campus, in what used to be ORU’s hospital.  This was a little surprising.  This university’s campus is crazy….quite ornate in a semi-creepy way.

ANYWAYS, the treatment went well.  We had some blood drawn first, so they can check red/white blood cell counts, etc… and then we received our first treatment that included high does Vitamin C, DMSO and Laetrile.  For those of you who don’t know, DMSO has a very distinct smell about it, and apparently my dad and I are already mildly emitting that smell.  We can’t smell it, because it’s actually in our bodies, but we can definitely taste it.  I plan on doing 2 full cycles of this treatment, which will be 40 days total, so all I can say is….my poor family.  All for a great cause, though, eh?  Part of the treatment cycle doesn’t include DMSO, so they promised me that they would time it to where I was on that part when flying back home to finish out my treatment there.  That was a HUGE relief.  Tonight we will get our PICC lines inserted.  My dad will appreciate not having to get the treatment through an IV after tonight.  His veins aren’t nearly as cooperative as mine are.  It took them a few times to get him going today.  I think my veins have just finally conceded to cooperate, after about the 1000th time of being poked by a needle.

We won’t find out the results of our PET scans until the end of the week, probably.  They just did a brain scan on me, but my dad had a full body scan to make sure that his cancer hasn’t metastasized anywhere else.  That poor guy was on the scanner yesterday for an hour and a half.  I was getting tired of sitting still after about 5 minutes, but only had to be on the scanner for 20 minutes total.  I guess that’s one of the good things about brain cancer.  It doesn’t metastasize anywhere else.  Yeah, that’s right….call me Ozzy Optomist.

I spoke with a family last week who has a little boy getting treated at this clinic for a brain tumor, as well.  I met their little boy today, as well as a little 5 year old girl.  It is just absolutely heartbreaking to see these little kids coming in, dealing with something that no child should ever have to go through.  These parents are just amazing.  The dad of that boy told me last week that he can’t even imagine how I felt when I was first diagnosed.  I told him that it had to have been a million times worse to hear that your 2 year old son has a brain tumor.  I can’t even imagine how much grace I would have to have to be able to go through a journey like that.  He has an inoperable astrocytoma, which is the same tumor as mine, but his is a grade 1.  He is through his first cycle of treatment and will be going through a second cycle at home.  His name is Curtis, if you would please pray for him.  I sat there watching him get treated, trying not to cry.  He is just a little bit older than Trent is, and his older brother Trent is the same age as Tyler, so I had a hard time not putting myself in their shoes.  Trent and I chatted about snakes for quite awhile, though, so that helped to get my mind on other things…such as reptiles.  The little girl that was being treated was the most beautiful little girl, who was just starting to grow her hair back from being treated with chemo.  Her name is Esther and she has neuroblastoma.  She is cancer free from her treatment, but they are following up with this treatment to try and mop up any remaining cancer cells.  Her cancer is similar to mine with a very high rate of recurrence, so please pray for her, as well.  Here is a GREAT story, though.  There was a girl that just got done being treated at the clinic for a Glioblastoma, which is grade 4 of my tumor.  She is my age and had a 1 inch sized residual tumor that was inoperable.  She’s back at home and it’s GONE!!!!  She’s doing another cyle to make sure that everything has been mopped up, but that is just crazy exciting.

It’s nice to have finally started treatment so that we can now get into a daily routine.  It was a little bit surreal arriving at our hotel on Sunday, thinking about how this was going to be my home for the next 2 weeks.  I was having a hard time yesterday, thinking about being away from my kids and husband for so long, but the sun is shining today and we are on our way to getting healthy.  I’m excited! 

I have been trying to post a blog for over a week now.  My browser kept kicking me off when I would try and create a new post, so I finely conceded to use IE (I normally use Mozilla), and I can finally post!  We had such a great, relaxing time in Maui.  It seems like we’ve been home for months, already, but yet I can’t believe I’m leaving this weekend, already, for Oklahoma.  

I’m going to go ahead and paste an email that was sent to us by the clinic, explaining the treatment that we will be receiving.  A lot of you have been asking for specific information about what we’re doing exactly, so here it is:

For the first four days they are given formula A, which consists of high dose vitamin C+B17 (formerly known as Laetrile) in combination with a full dosage of DMSO, to carry it into the malignancy better. Then on day 5, they are switched off to formula B, which consists of sodium bicarbonate in D5W. The patient usually has a Herxheiber reaction during this time, which is your hard evidence that the treatment is hitting the target. At the end of the 8 days on formula B, we switch the patient off onto formula C, which consists of DMSO bound with sterile dextrose, which acts as the “bait” for any malignancy which might be remaining. They finish out their round of 20 treatments on the DMSO/dextrose formula.

We have been successfully treating prostate cancer, as well asglioblastoma multiforme and astrocytoma, for over ten years and counting. Although DMSO is our primary chemotherapy agent(natural, non-toxic, yet powerfully effective) we also have incorporated Dr.Simoncini’s Sodium Bicarbonate, as well. DMSO,being highly alkaline and fungicidal, is a potent cancer killer by itself, as well as being a great carrier solvent, which will bind with and deliver anything of a similar molecular structure. Thousands of patients have received it, going back over 30 years, in many published clinical trials. Yet you will never hear about it, because it is a natural, botanically derived substance which is unpatentable, and therefore in direct competition with costly chemotherapy chemicals which are the standard of mainstream medicine. Despite all the evidence for efficacy of DMSO as an effective nontoxic chemotherapy agent, the FDAhas never approved it for that purpose. Because of DMSO’s special properties as a carrier solvent, it can bind with any other substance of a similar molecular structure and carry it across the cell membrane, right into the tumor.  When it is given intravenously, it crosses out of the circulation and totally saturates the soft tissues and even penetrates the blood/brain barrier, which is why it is so effective against brain malignancies. It will gently and painlessly eradicate a brain tumor without causing any collateral damage to nearby healthy structures, unlike surgery. And because it can also penetrate deep into the bone marrow, it is effective against myeloma and late stage prostate cancer, which typically goes into the deep pelvic bones.