{"id":537,"date":"2011-09-11T04:52:37","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T08:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=537"},"modified":"2011-09-11T04:52:37","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T08:52:37","slug":"a-new-clinic-a-lot-of-blood-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/?p=537","title":{"rendered":"A NEW CLINIC, A LOT OF BLOOD & DECISIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past two weeks has seen some of the worst days of my life. \u00a0We were not too happy at Bio Care when they said that Lennie needed surgery. \u00a0I did not have a good\u00a0rapport\u00a0with the doctor that was assigned to Lennie as he seemed to ‘Americanized’ with wanting to prescribe pills. \u00a0We could not have a lot of the treatments that we had hoped to get since any of the ones that dealt with heat exasperated his hemorrhoids. \u00a0So, on a sudden whim we packed up and left. \u00a0I wanted to go back to Dr Alvarez at Stella Maris, but we both knew that this time Lennie needed to be in a facility and not as an outpatient. \u00a0We went to a couple of clinics and ended up at ‘Hope4Cancer’ which is down the coast about 25 minutes, near the Bullring which sad to say, they still have monthly bull fights at. \u00a0This is also one of the most expensive clinics in Tijuana at $28,500 for a two week stay. \u00a0Included in the price are a lot of supplements, a two-month supply of IVs which they will teach me how to do and some equipment for the sonophotodynamic therapy that is done here. \u00a0Hope4Cancer is one of 3 clinics in the world that uses sonophotodynamic therapy. \u00a0There is one in China and the other is the Dove Clinic in England. \u00a0There are several doctors here and each patient has the benefit of all of their combined knowledge. \u00a0There are many meetings where they discuss each patients particular type of cancer and what combination of treatments will work best. \u00a0Truthfully we are now both going broke from Lennie’s treatments over the past year. \u00a0Savings are wiped out. \u00a0Mortgages have not been paid. \u00a0Money has been borrowed. \u00a0This is the sad reality of living in the US with no health insurance. \u00a0And I have to tell you now that about 1\/4 of the people at both clinics are from Canada. \u00a0Canadians who have<\/em> health insurance, but are considered incurable.<\/p>\n

On our first day here Lennie had a thermal probe hyperthermia treatment. \u00a0He had two of these treatments at Bio Care and had said that they were painful. \u00a0This one did not hurt, but the next day huge clots started falling out of his rectum. \u00a0Clots that looked like an entire package of raw liver. \u00a0In fact, Lennie was so scared because he actually thought that one of his organs was falling out! \u00a0The doctors were pretty worried as well. \u00a0That was when they decided that they too believed that surgery was the answer. \u00a0I was worried sick about him for days. \u00a0The doctors started preparing him for surgery with several transfusions and a couple of bags of plasma. \u00a0Disynone and vitamin K to stop the bleeding. \u00a0Constant IV solutions of pain medications, anti-biotics, nutrients, Poly MVP, and a fairly new treatment called Salicinium. \u00a0Salicinium is about 10,000 times as potent as Laetrile. \u00a0Instead of killing the cancer cells from the inside, Salicinium works by cutting off the cancerous tumor’s food supply of sugar, thus starving it. \u00a0An ultrasound which measures the tumor’s activity with the surrounding blood supply, is taken upon arrival here and again before you leave. \u00a0The last woman who left – a terminal case of breast that had metastasized to her liver, lungs and bone, showed a 60% decrease in tumor activity. \u00a0The success rate here with patients is approximately 70%, which is way better than the 3% national average of terminal patients. \u00a0As I have said before, most of the patients that come to any of the Tijuana cancer clinics are stage IV and have usually exhausted the conventional route or been told the doctors ‘got it all’, only to have it return a year or two later.<\/p>\n

Lennie had arrived here in a wheelchair 1 month ago as he was weak with both anemia and chronic diarrhea. \u00a0Although the diarrhea has lessened, it has not gone. \u00a0This is due to the discovery through another colonoscopy that the main tumor has grown while we were only dealing with his diarrhea over the past 5 months. \u00a0The tumor is now blocking 90% of his colon. \u00a0It has also metastasized to his liver. \u00a0There is no good news.<\/p>\n

So lets start with some of the other bad news: \u00a0I had really thought that maybe the tumor had gotten smaller with the huge blood clots that had come out, so I pushed and pushed to get another MRI before any surgery. \u00a0What they found was that the tumor has invaded so much surrounding tissue that it cannot be surgically removed. \u00a0Next the internal medicine doctor, Dr Santamaria, did an EKG and found that Lennie has an arrythmia (an irregular heartbeat) and therefore cannot even have surgery! \u00a0I never wanted him to have surgery at all, but now there seemed to be no choice. \u00a0Lennie found out today that with chiropractic manipulation of the T3, T4 and T5 vertebrae that the arrythmia can be fixed. \u00a0One of the doctors had a chiropractor come in and work on him and the next EKG showed both irregular and borderline. \u00a0That was because Lennie had the technician do it 5 times, hoping for a better report each time. \u00a0They said that they would like to run it again in 30 minutes to see if the adjustment had helped. \u00a0Believe it or not Lennie actually talked the guy into repeating it over and over – 11 times – while he laid on his back, his left side, his right side, knees up, etc. \u00a0I could hardly hold in my laughter, watching these contortions while he was hooked up to the machine, and the stoic patience of the technician. \u00a0At one point Lennie made the guy wait for 4 minutes while he pressed a pair of scissors that was lying near by into the reflexology points on two of his fingers, hoping that this would change the reading. \u00a0Out of these new 11 readings he got 9 abnormal and 2 borderline. \u00a0He pulled the 2 borderline results out of the stack and decided that these two were the ones to show to the doctor. \u00a0I told him that this was his life that he was playing with and made him put one back and substitute it for an abnormal one.<\/p>\n

The news that he may not be able to have surgery now has sent him into another downward spiral. \u00a0The only up side to all of this is that right now he is looking pretty good, but let’s not forget all those transfusions.<\/p>\n

Once again it is Sunday – the day of the week that I plot his progress by. \u00a0Last Sunday Lennie’s daughter and I managed to get him across the street and down to the boardwalk that runs alongside the beach. \u00a0I could barely get him back up the stairs to the street level and across to the clinic. \u00a0Today I will walk him there again to see how his stamina has improved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past two weeks has seen some of the worst days of my life. \u00a0We were not too happy at Bio Care when they said that Lennie needed surgery. \u00a0I did not have a good\u00a0rapport\u00a0with the doctor that was assigned to Lennie as he seemed to ‘Americanized’ with wanting to prescribe pills. \u00a0We could not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-lennie-and-kathryn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":545,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonartist.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}