something's going on- in distress

Nana b

tanstaafl said:

surgery, adding adjuvants, going beyond customary
My personal experience has been better with the surgeons, I still haven't found the "magic" oncologist that could or would help outside their narrow confines. This doesn't mean that all surgeons are agreeable all the time. My wife and I spent substantial effort finding highly rated surgeons to go beyond common practices of doing nothing.

Two thoughts on chemo and surgery
1. Chemo (without Avastin) before and after surgery. Commonly the surgeons want 3 weeks fallow before surgery, 2 weeks after for more chemo. In asia there have been a series of papers where ordinary patients got another oral 5FU immunochemotherapy, up to within 3-4 hours of surgery, and did fine. Other asian papers show immunochemo through surgery or starting the day after. Immunochemo is low dose 5FU, IV or oral, cimetidine and PSK.

We've deep into tissue and wound healing nutrients like, glutamine, IV vitamin C, glucosamine, vitamin K2 along with minerals. My wife sped out of the hospital after 2nd surgery, despite a large gash, on chemo.

Achieving satisfactory post-op wound healing may be more problematic with US style heavy chemo.

2. Not all "chemo" has to conflict with clotting.
Our surgeon requested an INR value approaching 1 and a test for thromboplasmin before surgery. My wife's INR was 1.0, possibly 1.00 at surgery. We used vitamin K2 perioperatively for both surgeries at 45 mg and ca 85 mg per day respectively, and 7-15 days off blood thinners like vitamin E, aspirin and fish oil.
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Chemo, Plan B
A recent set of cytotoxicity tests, on viable tumor cells from congolmerated treated para-aortic lymph nodes, show that my wife is relatively resistant to fluorouracil, oxaliplatin, irinotecan and gemcitabine singlely and in all but one combination: GEM+OXI+5FU was listed as moderately effective. I was able to arrange some additional tests run with several uncommon adjuvants, including menaquinone, aka vitamin K3, and menaquinone-4, aka a version of vitamin K2 abbreviated as MK4. The MK4 form of vitamin K2 is used as a supplement for osteoporosis at 45 mg (45,000 mcg). MK4-K2 has been used in some places for liver cancer, also an adenocarcinoma, typically at 45 mg per day orally up to 90-135 mg, limited by nausea.

A combination 5FU, vitamin C, and MK4/vitamin K2 was reported as the most successful test series of all for my wife's tumor cells from the second surgery. A surprise for all.

My wife has taken a low dose oral fluorouracil prodrug containing an extra adjuvant metabolite, along with cimetidine, high doses of lipoic acid, coQ10 and IV vitamin C for over a year. She even took this chemo up to 24 hours before 2nd surgery and 24 hours after 2nd surgery, per some foreign studies across two decades. She took osteoporosis treatment levels of MK-4 once on and once off last year, now on permanently. After a chemo reduction or break last year before leucovorin was available, dx misreported as "stage III", these treatments did not stop the growth of the long enlarged para aortic cluster during the last several months before the second surgery. However, the second set of surgeons were amazed that she had previously necrosed the mesenteric invasion prior to first surgery, and silently carried a enlarged malignant para-aortic node cluster, misreported as missing or negative, for over a year after diagnosis without general metastasis.

Although we have no further information on combinations of chemo like GEM+5FU, GOLFIG or FOLFOX with MK4/K2-lipoic-coQ10, along with the host of other nutrients, we could be forced to choose heavier combinations in the future if or when the micromets finally emerge. The big question may be MK4/K2, coQ10, lipoic acid, etc as adjuvants to which heavy chemo combination.

Update
Lisa is still in the hospital, but she is fine. They are running tests and hopes to be able to update everyone tomorrow. Tonight is her son's graduation from HS and she is not sure if she will be able to make it.

Please keep her in your thoughts today. For those that pray, group prayer is powerful!

Kathleen808

Raquel
Raquel,
Thanks for the update. I hope and pray she made it to the graduation. I also hope they are helping with the pain.

Lisa,
As always you are in my prayers.

Aloha,
Kathleen

lisa42

I'm home!
Hey Everyone,

I'm home from the hospital! Will get to see my son's graduation tomorrow (Friday) night- so glad about that. I posted another thread with my update on what happened in the hospital, so I won't write it all out again here. Just wanted to say thank you to all of you who showed concern for me and thank you for well wishes and prayers. You are all so wonderful- this site really is like a family.

Hugs,
Lisa