1.11.13 Fe’s Update:
(From the latest email from Fe- She’s from Canada, but is a native Filipino. She speaks English as a second language).
“It’s now important to tell you about my second comeback to relay my therapies
to those cancer patients who wants to come at FUDA for treatment . There were 5 of us in the
ambulance service & none of us are rich to afford this therapies . Our life is at stake,& we’ll
do anything to save our lives. I believe that if you have cancer time is essential important &
there’s no time wasting it.I believe w/ all my heart wiat FUDA can threat e w/ my ailment,&
pls. convince who ever e- mails or ask you, time for treatment is a must f they value their
own life'”.
Fe’s back at Fuda, having taken a break for Christmas, after her cryoablation procedures.
Since I’m not a medical person, nor medically trained, it’s difficult for me to explain in medical language everything going on with Fe –so I think I should explain it the way I understand it:
These are the steps it appears Fe went through after she got to Fuda.
Her blood was taken to be cultured and put back after 13 days to boost her immune system before her operation. She was given at least five imaging procedures with ultra sound, MRI and Pet scan to really figure out where she might have a metastasis. It was found in five places, two small one in her bones, but mainly a reoccurrence in her breast and five places in her liver. She was given Heparin treatment since she was Hep positive. She also had Cancer Micro Intervention (CMI), very fine grain particles of chemo medicine put directly into her tumors. All of this was to reduce the size of the tumors and to build her immune system before having her tumors frozen. Her big day finally came a few days before I arrived at Fuda. Cryoablation was given to her breast and liver sites. By the time I got there she was up and around, energetic and cheery. She was wearing a heavy “shield” apron as she had also had some iodine pellets placed internally at her tumor sites to treat the clean margins.
These would remain in her for several months so she traveled back and forth to Canada with them.
During the times Louie and I visited with Fe and Jelly in her room, nurses were constantly coming in and out, checking on her temperature, pulse and urine, checking her IV’s. Fe was getting internal vitamins to help her body cope with all that was going on. She also was having medicine put into a port in her arm that led to a line going up to her arm to her chest. There were a few days she had a bad fever. I never got a clear answer if it was because her immune system was over-loaded or if it was in reaction to one of the drugs she was taking.
Of course there was a concern that the small sites in her bones were not frozen. But earlier, Dr. Xu had showed me slide after slide of these secondary bones sites being gone when they where checked later, after the initial freezing. This is what I think their thinking was with Fe. I’m waiting to find out….. I’m sure, if there still is something there, it will be ablated. I’m sure this is what all the building of the immune system is all about. The thinking seems to be that cancer finally exits the body at the cellular level.
I just finished Dr. Xu’s book, “Nothing But the Truth”, given to all Fuda patients to explain his thinking and experience with treating cancer. It is a very honest and inspiring book, which I’m sure, goes along way to give a patient confidence about their treatment.
When I was in seventh grade a teacher of mine taught us how to alleviate “fear” when he showed us that “knowledge” of what one is afraid of, takes the fear away. He had us study spiders, which we all admitted before hand no one liked and were in fear of. We were required to keep and accurate log of the 20 or so spiders that lived in our area. My classmates and I were famous at our school for our ability to pick a spider up by it’s hind legs and dropping it like a yoyo to carry it around by its web-string. Our friends would ask us to identify what kind of spider they found and what its characteristics were. Soon no one in that school “hated” or were ”afraid” of spiders.
I can see that something like my teachers spider education is going on at Fuda. Patients and their families seem very educated and “empowered” by all the literature, seminars, and patient meetings with doctors, and signage everywhere. The place doesn’t “smell” like fear. There is an attitude that “we are smarter than cancer” and “we will concur this”. Instead of fear, there seems to be a feel of “empowerment” and “we can get through this!” That’s what I felt (for Fe) upon finishing the book. I think I’m going to ask Dr. Xu to write up the case study for Fe’s experience for the last chapter of our book, “They’re Mine and I’m keeping Them”. (He’s an excellent writer).
Stay tuned
