Hi and thank you for visiting! My name is George.
My journey started Janurary 2022 when I was diagnosed with stage 3 rectal cancer. This is was a surprise, but not a huge one because of a genetic pre-disposition called Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP). FAP is a hereditary condition that causes one to develop cancer by 35, on average. Usually, when it is known, one would have a complete colectomy around 18 and then subscribe to endoscopic surveillance for the rest of their life.
Anyways, the genetic condition doesn’t really matter once you develop cancer, unless it is a mutation that can be targeted by various therapies. In my case, I didn’t have any targetable mutations, so I was told my only option is classical chemotherapy. Shortly after diagnosis I started a combination of daily oral 5-FU and an IV infusion every 2 weeks.
I’m going to do a seperate post in greater detail, but my experience with traditional chemotherapy and oncology was awful. Needless to say, I stopped the IV after 3 weeks which was halfway through the treatment. I wish I had stopped taking the 5-FU, however I didn’t know any better and continued to take those pills for the entire 6 weeks. About the second round of treatment, I also received a week of raditation.
The results were promising because I was feeling better on the chemo and the primary tumor was reponding to the treatment with a ~30% reduction in mass prior to raditation. Following the completion of treatment, I met with a surgeon to discuss options. Yet again, this requires another post. In short, we couldn’t agree on the surgery, so I decided to push it to the backburner and focus on the family again. I was finally feeling normal and was functioning at 100% without issue.
Fast foward to November 2022, I decided to re-engage treatment because I was starting to feel off. This time I had the benefit of time to research and settled on a (now closed) clinic in North Carolina run by Dr. Rashid Buttar. Unfortunately, I didn’t respond to his treatment. Over the next few months, the cancer started to present itself with intense chronic pain.
At this point, I met with my oncologist who ordered updated scans. It was then that I found out that I still have the primary tumor, but also a new one that was invading some muscle and causing the debilitating pain. He wanted to get on a protocol used mainly in Europe and even mentioned the actor from Black Panther used this same treatment. Needless to say, I was not interested in going back on heavy metal treatment, not to mention the survical chance he gave me. (I won’t be mentioning that because it doesn’t matter) Queue another post!
Fast forward to today and I am receiving treatment at a fantastic clinic called Root Causes. I’m cautiously optomistic that I am responding to the treatment this time and starting to see improvement. On top of that, they have helped set up a protocol to manage my pain and return some normality back to my life.
That’s all for now, but I am excited to share all the modalities and results with you in the coming posts!
God bless – George