Our Family's Odyssey Begins

The Odyssey was an adventure, but not a pleasure trip for old Odysseus. In many ways, it was a trial, and most of the time he did not get what he wanted. In fact, he was stuck in limbo for years at a time. My experience with this disease has been similar.

My odyssey with the disease called cancer began long ago when my parents bought an Encyclopedia of Home Health. This was during the 60s, so the articles were primitive by today's standards, to say the least. One of the first articles I read was on Cancer, as I continued to hear my parents speak in hushed tones of this dreaded disease, which had already struck my grandmother.

This article showed normal cells as nice, friendly little buggers. The cancer cell, though, was a monster. He was big, nasty, scary and mean. He grew many copies of himself. He like to kill the nice cells. He was evil.

This led to an early fear of this disease. Later, as a young adolescent, I continued to fear the consequence of my mother's incessant smoking. My sister and brother also adopted the habit as well. For some reason, possibly because of my phobia concerning cancer, I did not.

The first person in my family to be struck was my father, at the age of 64. He contract malignant cleoma of the inner brain stem, just adjacent to the pituitary. At the time, completely inoperable and terminal. This was 1986. I was 32. My mother was diagnosed on the same day with metastatic breast cancer, which had spread to pretty much every major system in her body. My father never left Wilford Hall Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. My mother lingered for another 10 months after my father died, ultimately succumbing to the disease in 1986 in Lockhart, Texas.

I lost both parents to the disease in less than 1 year as a result.

Now, my wife, Ruth has been diagnosed with multifocal DCIS breast cancer, and has been told she need four major surgeries, including:

1. A sentinel node mapping and biopsy involving removal of the lymph nodes in her arm pit of her right arm.
2. A mastectomy of the right breast.
3. Reconstruction of both breasts.
4. Removal of her ovaries

In addition, she may be recommended to undergo radiation and chemotherapy. The purpose of this blog is to explore the following issues in the context of or personal crisis:

• What are we doing as a society to cause this scourge? How is that in 1900, one out of 29 people was diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime, and now it is 1 in 2 for men and 1 in 3 for women? That's a huge, order of magnitude increase. Is this environmental? Dietary? What is going on here?
  
• How can we stop doing it? Clearly, it seems to me that if the trend line continues, cancer becomes something that every human on the planet will deal with in their lifetime. Can we really withstand that as a society? What can we do as a society to reverse the trend?
  
• Is the standard medical practice reasonable or rational?
• Are there ways to moderate the negative effects of conventional treatment for cancer? For example, will diet, exercise, meditation, etc., help ameliorate the effects of chemotherapy or radiation?
  
• Are there alternatives to standard conventional medicine which are reasonable, less risky, and less costly?
• Are any of these alternatives backed by evidence based medicine?

Like Odysseus, I have no idea where this adventure will take us. We are feeling our way. At the moment, my wife has requested a second opinion from UNC Cancer Center. We felt that Duke's diagnosis was spot on. But their course of treatment recommendations were extreme and they did not offer us any options. Basically, they were calling the shots. We would like an option for a less radical approach to treatment. I will let you know how this goes. Stay tuned.