Late last night I Googled my way to www.cancerguide.org, a website that includes oodles of research and information that was created by Steve Dunn, a “long-term survivor of widely metastatic kidney cancer.”
I told Brock about the site because he’s also a fan of Factual Information and I thought he’d appreciate that Steve read the original research reports, not just the abstracts. That’s the sort of thing he admires. After reading the site together for a bit, we both resolved to talk to our oncologist about clinical trials (again) at our appointment next Thursday. I’m also intrigued by vaccine therapy. (I can barely understand the medical lingo, so maybe that’s what we’re already doing.)
Steve’s website and personal story got to me. He was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer at age 32 in 1989. He lived for another 16 years, before dying in 2005 — but not of cancer.
Brock’s odds are terrible: his cancer is extremely aggressive. Two years is a generous prognosis. I’ve spent weeks trying to make peace with the idea of him dying, because that’s the most likely outcome. BUT ……… it’s tempting to think that he can be an outlier, just like Steve.
Flush with unfamiliar hope, I Googled more about different foods and how they (might) affect tumour growth, probably because I’ve been spending lots of time with my dad lately and he’s big on food being medicine. It was already 11:45pm ish by this time so I didn’t read too much, but I made a list of foods that I could start having handy in the fridge, if Brock decides he wants to go that route: grapes, salmon, brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy), berries, tomatoes, artichokes, turmeric. Oh, and green tea. Japanese, specifically. I’ve started to feel like a big homeopathic hippy. But it does feel good to let a little bit of hope in, no matter how unrealistic.
(by Maggie Callanan), from the hospice library. There’s a bit in there about pain control, and about how palliative care offers many more options than a typical doctor’s T3 prescription, and I realized that Brock has more options now that he has terminal cancer. For example, he’s always had trouble falling asleep, because of that busy brain of his, and maybe he never wanted to use sleeping pills because they’re addictive, or because they’d cause him to sleep in the next morning. But fuck it, why not now? He needs all the rest he can get, to help his body fend off these monster tumours. So why not have a cache of pills and if he’s still lying restless at 1am he can pop one?