Jason Connelly has metastatic melanoma. Ellen Rigby has stage-four breast cancer. And Terry Barter has multiple myeloma. Not long agone each of these noncurable cancers would have meant a death sentence. But advances in treatment ar not only keeping each patient alive, they are allowing the three to live full lives.
Jason Connelly
Six years ago, Jason Connelly was diagnosed with early-stage melanoma and had a small ontogenesis removed from his back. Doctors at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said his cancer was gone. But four years later it returned as thousands of tiny tumors in his abdomen. For most citizenry the genus Cancer would have killed them.
"When you're in that situation, you're faced with deuce choices," Jason recalls. "You can either deal with it and attack it, or you can let it kill you."
He chose to attack it, opting for a toxic treatment called high-dose interleukin-2. It is so potentially deadly it has to be given in the intensive care unit of a hospital. After six months of what he describes as sin, Jason's genus Cancer was gone.
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"When you make up that transition between being sick and not existence sick, it's like beingness on a train going 80 miles an hr that all of a sudden stops. And you go fast-flying off the train," Jason said of finding out he was in remission.
Jason started a blog called Fighting in Texas, where he shares his experiences with cancer.
When his genus Cancer returned, Jason made a promise to his then 2-year-old logos: "I am going to live to see him get marital." Jacob is now four and the reason Jason gets up every morning.
Ellen Rigby
In 2001, when Ellen Rigby base out she had chest cancer, it had already spread to her liver. But the type of cancer she has, oestrogen receptor positive and HER-2 positive bosom cancer, gave her doctors treatment options beyond traditional chemotherapy and radiation.
"The key with metastatic disease is to superintend the disease and balance the efficacy of the treatment with the quality of your life. The treatment can be very toxic," explained Ellen.
The toxic treatment is a case of chemotherapy, which Ellen has been taking on and off for six-spot years. But right now her doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York are giving her a internal secretion therapy, Faslodex, and a targeted therapy called Herceptin. Both have virtually no side effects.
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