Back for round two as the church bells ring in the winter sunshine outside the fabulous Zum Lowen Hotel in Duderstadt – by which all hotels must now be judged.
Diagnosed with stage 4 stomach/esophageal cancer last July and offered 'palliative' treatment in Australia – a round of radiation with chemo to shrink the tumour and stop the bleeding followed by a welcome break in which we busily got the house ready for sale (go on, ask me about real estate agents) then three rounds of non-stop chemotherapy with Xeloda over 60 odd days – by the middle of the third course my hands and feet were extremely 'ouchy' and shedding skin and I had all the energy of a 55 year old bloke who'd been on 60 non-stop days of chemotherapy.
So, thanks to the shared experience of Simon and Kate McRae and their discovery of Biosceptre's work and the brilliant Doctors Neßelhut I abandoned chemo and shuffled off to Duderstadt in Lower Saxony, Germany to embark on a course of immunotherapy with dendritic cells – particularly those primed to target a 'non-functioning' receptor 'nf-P2X7' identified by Julian Barden at Biosceptre.
Put simply, all cells carry the P2X7 receptor which tell the cell when and how to 'die' when its time is up. Cancer cells however have a non-functioning version of this receptor. Bioscepter have identified this and created a treatment which allows cells to reactivate the receptor and cause cancer cell death. Brilliant! and it appears this may well be a generic cancer treatment rather than being specific to a cancer type – to date Biosceptre have identified the marker on more than 20 cancer types. Even more brilliant!
Additionally, Dr Neßelhut and his wonderful team use a combination of approaches to help control and eradicate the cancer cells. These include localised hyperthermia (Oncotherm – also now available in Sydney) combined with Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) (also not yet available in Sydney) our normal cells can pretty well shrug off NDV but cancer cells are weakened or killed by the virus.
They also add Ozone and Zometa treatments all of which have little if any side effects. To date I have had a slight cold which may be from the NDV or may well just be a slight cold.
Since coming off chemo and having fought to get hold of some Dexamethasone (which I have also since quit) my appetite has gone from zero to voracious and I've gained back some 4 kilos and counting – it's a strange world when you find yourself jealous of people's fat.
So this week the second treatment schedule looks like this:
Monday 9-10 Hyperthermia + NDV
Tuesday 9-9.30 Ozone therapy
Wednesday 1.00 Hyperthermia + NDV + Zometa
Thursday 8-9 Hyperthermia + Zometa
Thursday 1.30 DC Vaccine (nf-P2X7)
Friday 9-9.30 Ozone therapy
There will be a third course in a few weeks time followed by a CT scan to see what, if any, effect the treatment has had. Whatever the outcome I do believe my journey may help along the way in proving that immunology is a relevant and effective treatment for cancer and other diseases.
If anyone wants any other information feel free to get in touch.
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