the-truth-about-cancer

The Truth About Cancer
Stage IV Invasive Breast Cancer Survivor
26 Years
Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez: One of my first patients is a wonderful lady.
She lives in New Jersey. She came to me--I’ll never forget—December
3 rd , 1987. She’s so memorable. I remember the day. I’d only been in
practice a couple months. She had stage IV breast cancer—very
interesting story. In 1985 she developed a mass in her right breast, the
breast turns red, the doctor thinks its mastitis which is an infected
breast, puts her on antibiotics, doesn’t get better, gives her more
antibiotics, doesn’t get better.
The breast gets bigger, redder, looks nasty so he sends her to a
surgeon, biopsy’s it, comes back inflammatory breast cancer. As
physicians know inflammatory breast cancer is the most aggressive type
of breast cancer there is. It’s virtually incurable by standard approaches.
It was huge at that point. So big that when she was sent to the surgeon
for surgery, he said it was too big. I can’t operate on you. What you
need to do is have radiation first to shrink it down. She goes through five
weeks of radiation; the tumor shrinks down enough so the surgeon said
I’ll try to take it out. Takes it out. It was eight centimeters, which for a
breast cancer after radiation is huge. But more importantly 17 of 17
lymph nodes were involved with cancer. All the lymph nodes that were
evaluated had cancer, which as a dire prognosis. The way it works in
cancer medicine whenever you have more than nine lymph nodes
involved it’s a death sentence. They did a bone scan but they didn’t see
anything in the bone. But when you have 17 out of 17 lymph nodes
positive you’re dealing with deadly disease.
Her oncologist decides that they’re going to give her aggressive
chemotherapy, a triple agent regimen, very aggressive. In those days it
was the standard for metastatic disease—CMF, cytoxin, and
methotrexate - those were the three drugs that were developed in Italy.
They tell her that this won’t cure her but it might prolong her life. So she
starts doing it. Two years into August 1987 she develops pain in her
sternum. They do a bone scan. She’s got multiple lesions in her ribs
consistent with metastatic—there’s a huge tumor in her sternum. They
do an x-ray that confirms the tumor. The guy, the oncologist, honest
guy, throws his hands in the air and says nothing else we can do. Now
I’d only been in practice two months. It’s not like I had this kind of
international reputation. I was like as well known as dog poop. No one
The Quest for The Cures Page 228