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Her video interview on Rumble is HERE.
As you get to know Vera, I know you will enjoy her as much as I did. She is an entirely upbeat person who had a terrible trial by fire. The road to her cure involved more than a decade of painful treatments that damaged her health, but she has been disease-free for twelve years. Vera was sent home to die by her oncologists, but since she had been managing the online patient groups, she knew she had alternatives.
Here is Vera's article about her lymphoma odyssey on her old blog:
How I beat the Reaper
Posted by leavergirl under healing
In 1995, still trying to get pregnant, I was diagnosed with immune system cancer. It was a moment that changed my life. I can still feel the echoes of that shock. I still remember my first oncologist trying to push chemo on me. When I asked for information about the substances he was recommending, his nurse rummaged through dusty closets and came up with nothing. I found a way out of despair by learning all I could to save my life. I learned that Non-Hodgkin's B-cell lymphoma comes in three varieties: slow-growing, intermediate, and fast-growing. The fast ones are often curable but rare. The slow ones are best not to treat right away (that first oncologist was a greedy liar), and respond well to chemo initially, but eventually they'll turn intermediate and kill you. Median survival? 7-9 years. Ugh. One thing I hold against conventional medicine is that it's so damn depressing, the way it presents information to patients.
I spent several years studying both the conventional side — finding more hopeful stats — (thank you, Fox Chase Cancer Center, for making your library so patient-friendly!) and the alternative side. The alternative side is good at giving people hope and pluck. I spent some time experimenting with various concoctions they recommended. And while sifting the dross from the potential gold, which included talking to other lymphoma patients who also had the gumption to experiment, I found two alternative treatments that merited an "A" on my scale. One wasn't of use in lymphoma, which is usually disseminated (metastasized) by definition. That was hyperthermia (which has since made limited inroads into conventional cancer treatment). The other one was Coley's Toxins. I wrote one of the first well-researched internet articles on the toxins. The American Cancer Society had blacklisted Coley's Toxins for many years as a quack treatment and are not conventionally available to this day. They are cheap to make and unpatentable.
My approach, recommended by my next oncologist, was to do "watchful waiting" until the disease progressed. When it did, I availed myself of the various toxic drips they give to cancer patients. By then, they were accompanied by monoclonal antibodies — bioengineered thingies that run through the immune system, gobble up B-cells, and improve the chemo's effectiveness. I also did a rare treatment that gave me a year of remission called Bexxar. But then, in '07, the lymphoma speeded up (underwent cellular transformation) and tried to kill me. I got hit by very harsh chemo and spent that summer doing treatments, transfusions, and Neulasta injections, weak as a newborn chick, wondering if my hair would ever grow back.
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