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 Shortly after these scans were done, my wife had a seizure, possibly because no scheduled anti seizure medication was given prior to her scans. Later on that night, she had multiple seizures and, as a result, lost her ability to walk and see. The brain MRI showed a tumor located in the basal ganglia region, measuring 5.5cm x 3 cmx 5.5 cm. The neurosurgeon indicated that it was inoperable. Even radiation was dismissed as an option. We left the hospital and tried radiation anyway at an LA clinic. This created a lot of swelling and she ended up again at Brotman Hospital in early March. The emergency room doctors said my wife was dying. She was put on a ventilator and given medications to lower the swelling. Of the entire team of doctors that worked on her, I don’t believe any thought that the treatment would work and she would survive. Later, her admitting doctor gave her less than 30 days to live. We decided to discontinue the radiation, which was close to being complete anyway.
We decided to go to Houston where M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (ranked number one) and the Burzynski Clinic (specializing in brain tumors) are located. We went to the Burzynski Clinic first. They were willing to treat my wife with a type of chemo called antineoplastons but couldn’t because antineoplastons would cause more swelling in the brain to the degree where it would not be feasible to treat her.
We then went to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Perhaps, we thought, they could handle the edema enough so we could return to Burzynski’s or possibly they would have a therapy of their own which would help my wife. They had originally nothing to offer us except to try to address the edema via medications. They had very limited success and I was told she had a few days to a few weeks to live.
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