There are some things we can only experience for ourselves.
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, while the chemotherapy I had obediently taken for three months had done nothing. I was not expected to live.
Good fortune led me to Robert Nagourney, MD, an oncologist who does chemosensitivity testing on samples of patients' tumors. 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. Five months after diagnosis and two months on the new treatment, my chest metastases were "melting away."
I had no assurance that the army of kidney cancer cells wouldn't be coming back tomorrow. I may have been living on borrowed time. So I chose to use it to begin telling my story.
Because 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.
Two months ago, I underwent a nephrectomy/tumorectomy (consisting of a six hour procedure to remove my huge tumor and right kidney). Followed by one week of recovery. Two weeks ago, on July 2011, my follow-up CT/PET was entirely negative - tumor gone, nodes gone, chest clear. It put a smile on everyone's face: the surgeon, my local oncologist Gary Cecchi, MD, the oncology nurses and me, of course.
It's hard to believe that one year ago, I was on the brink of death with a diagnosis of Stage 4 renal cell cancer, a diagnosis carrying a 5 percent chance of a 5-year survival. Dr. Cecchi, has now declared me "in remission." I'm almost back to normal, building muscles back, swimming and even taking an Aikido Martial Arts class.
The public needs to know about the chemosensitivity tests I had and about the handful of physicians, like Dr. Nagourney, who are saving lives with personalized cancer therapy every day.
My story is here to give hope to patients who are almost certainly demoralized by the conventional attitudes toward renal clear cell carcinoma: chemo doesn't work!? When it's done right it does. And Dr. Nagourney made sure it was done right on me.
Read more about Dr. Freidberg and others patients, in their own words, on the
Rational Therapeutics website.
