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Day 2

February 25, 2011 By 14 Comments

its been a relatively quiet day today, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by the lack of updates. Here’s a quick update:

  • Charysse was moved out of ICU and into her own room tonight around 5pm PT.
  • She’s reporting that she’s had no visual effects from the surgery. That’s a miracle!
  • She’s already asking if she can go home. At this point, she’ll have to wait until Sunday.
  • Finally, she’s adamently against pictures being posted of her, so you’ll have to settle for a written description: imagine her with one of those stellar hospital gowns, her head wrapped in gauze, add a dose of wit and some pain from the surgery, and that’s what we see

Tomorrow, I head back to be with my family so I’ll be passing the updates back to Charysse, who will be ready to run a marathon, I’m sure.

Goodnight from UCLA
–Kyle

Filed Under: Brain Surgery, Brain Tumor Research

I’ve been thinking…

July 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

I love to write, but I don’t love to write everyday on a blog about random thoughts, daily happenings, etc.  So this site seems to be severely neglected, but my research about these tumors and ways to treat them is quite the contrary.  I am often looking for new news and information that I can arm myself with to fight this tumor.

Yesterday a news article came out about how brain tumor patients can starve their tumor.  I love these news stories.  Knowledge like this is power for any cancer patient.  It’s empowering emotionally, physically and psychologically to know that there is more a cancer patient can do to fight their cancer than just what the oncologist puts out on the table.  If you read the article, you will see that caloric restriction has been shown to be effective in inducing apoptosis in brain cancer cells.  Previous articles have been released about how the ketogenic diet is effective in killing brain tumors, as well, because it elevates ketones in the body.  Caloric restriction kills brain tumor cells because it elevates ketones in the same way.

Something as simple as a lifestyle change can ultimately be the thing that helps save your life.  It’s not all about chemo and radiation.  When you have a brain tumor, the brain is just the window that displays an abnormality that has occurred because of an imbalance happening in the whole body, not just the brain.  Otherwise, the body wouldn’t have allowed the cancer to develop in the first place.  Something like a dietary change can correct the imbalance in the body and reposition the immune system to be able to fight and kill these cancer cells.  If you do chemo and radiation, which certainly can have their place in your treatment, then your immune system and body will be thrown out of balance.  If you take an article like this and apply it at the same time you are doing chemo and radiation, you are not only going to help off-set potential treatment side effects, but you will also weaken the brain cancer cells by not giving them the fuel that they need to survive.

Perfectly logical.

Enormously empowering.

Filed Under: Brain Tumor Research, Cancer Nutrition Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why I’m doing what I’m doing

March 7, 2009 By 1 Comment

This article I’m pasting below came into my inbox today from a newsletter that I receive from the National Brain Tumor Society. Temodar is the chemotherapy that I am currently taking. It’s quite disturbing for me to read things like this, but it makes me even more confident that pursuing multiple ways to kill this tumor is a good idea. Check it out.

THURSDAY, March 5 (HealthDay News) — Temozolomide (Temodar), a standard treatment for brain cancer, may boost the aggressiveness of surviving cancer cells, making tumor recurrence more likely, a new study suggests.The research team, from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, have identified cells in brain tumors called gliomas that have stem cell-like qualities and are able to survive chemotherapy with the help of a particular protein. These surviving cells become drug-resistant, and may be the reason treatment for brain cancer is usually unsuccessful.

The researchers isolated cells from mice and human cancer brain tumors called glioblastomas. Some of these cells appeared to have the ability to renew themselves and resist chemotherapy, the team found, and ABCG2 appears to be a marker for these resistant cells.

Holland’s group also identified how the protein helps tumor cells expel chemotherapy drugs.

“Current treatment for gliomas works for a while and then usually fails,” Holland said. “These findings might be partly the reason for that. There is more than one cell type in these tumors, and they respond differently to the therapy we treat people with.”

For example, the chemotherapy drug temozolomide — which is the standard treatment for gliomas — actually increased the number of drug-resistant cells. Because temozolomide doesn’t target ABCG2, it may render surviving cells more resistant to treatments that do target the ABCG2 protein, Holland theorized.

“Life is complicated; brain tumors are complicated, too,” he said.

Dr. Ronald Benveniste is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Miami School of Medicine. He believes the study has a real upside because it points to new, longer-lasting brain cancer treatments.

“Clinically, what we see with patients with glioblastoma is that after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy with temozolomide, they live longer and a subset of them will actually live a year, two years or even longer. And then pretty much 100% of the patients relapse and no one knows why,” Benveniste said.

This study identifies the mechanism by which this happens, he said. “When you treat mice with temozolomide they develop recurrent diseases even quicker, so temozolomide make the cells that survive act in a more aggressive manner,” Benveniste said.

Filed Under: Brain Tumor Research, Cancer Nutrition Tagged With: