There are some things we can only experience for ourselves. |
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Just three months after getting his assay results, Dr. Friedberg and his dog Buddy hit the slopes.
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Very few who have not had cancer would believe how little is known about treatment and how ineffective most of it is. As this becomes evident, we are dying. It is too late for most.
In my case, my chest was ravaged by metastatic kidney cancer. My red blood cells were mysteriously gone, the chemotherapy I had taken for three months had done nothing. I was not expected to live.
Good fortune led me to Robert Nagourney, MD. Just in the nick of time I made a "pilgrimage" to his office in Long Beach, California. The test, or "functional profile" of my tumor, led to a recommendation for a combination of three conventional anti-cancer drugs. However, none are drugs of choice for kidney cancer; none of them would have been used as "standard" therapy.
Within two weeks, my chest x-ray was clearing and my blood count was improving. I was feeling better. As of this writing, five months after diagnosis and two months on the new treatment, my chest metastases are "melting away."
I have no assurance that the army of kidney cancer cells, won't come back tomorrow. I may be living on borrowed time. I am choosing to use it to tell my story. Even though I'm a physician, I suspect my encounter with cancer is not that different from the experience of others.
Except, perhaps, for the outcome.
John Friedberg, MD
Board Certified Neurologist
Read more about patients and families whose lives have been touched by Rational Therapeutics.
