Jeri's Story

It started in October.  A cough that started with a cold didn’t go away.

Jeri went to the doctor’s office and got a prescription for an inhaler to help manage the cough.

While it didn’t reduce the cough a side effect of the inhaler was that it caused Jeri to have heart palpitations.

In October, Jeri went in to the Emergency Room at Queen’s Hospital to get checked for these heart palpitations.

They did an EKG and chest x-rays on that trip to the ER, all negative.

The cough persisted, and Jeri’s cough took a turn for the worse in December, after returning to school from Christmas break.  Her speech was also impacted, her voice modulated in and out from full to weak.

She went in to the ER at Castle Hospital on January 10, where she received various tests, including an x-ray.

This x-ray showed something that was labeled as pulmonary nodules.

January 12, she met with an ENT (Ears, Nose and Throat) Specialist.

He put a camera down her throat and noticed that her left vocal cords were paralyzed.

 

He fast tracked Jeri to get a CT scan of her throat and chest.

He recommended that Jeri stop teaching until the paralysis in her vocal cords went away, as her ability to teach was hampered by her inability to consistently project her voice.

We met with a cardiothorasic surgeon one week later.  He looked at the CT scans and they showed that it appeared that she had stage 4 lung cancer. She didn’t have any of the other symptoms of cancer that they asked about:

No sudden weight loss

No night sweats

No coughing up blood

Just the persistent cough.

They did a biopsy the same day, on January 17, they confirmed that the cells were cancerous.

They speculated that it was lung cancer, and on the 21^st they diagnosed her officially with non small cell (sqamouscell carcinoma) cancer of the lungs.  This is generally known as a type of lung cancer that smokers get, she has not smoked one cigarette in her life.  While this is rare, it is most common that this type of cancer occurs in non smoking young women.

We were diagnosed at the Queens Cancer Center on January 17^th.  Queens has a dedicated and coordinated team that plans traditional treatments for cancer.

They determined that this was a stage 4 cancer as it had started in the left lung and spread to the right lung.  It is a large mass that sits above and behind the upper part of the lungs and wraps around the membrane of the heart.  It is believed that the cancer has not yet penetrated the heart, but it is already affecting its operation due to its presence, Jeri’s heart is pumping at only 80% of a normal heart’s ability to pump blood through the body.

The traditional mainstream treatments for this disease are:

Radiation

Surgery

Chemotherapy

Radiation won’t work well for this area of the body.  The lungs for example, would be permanently damaged by 20% of the force (RADS) required to kill cancer cells.

Surgery is an option that doesn’t make sense as the cancer has penetrated both lungs, this, on top of the fact that it is located in the lungs and on the heart, make it a tough place to cut open.  The bottom line is that the risk would be high and the reward (removing all cancer from the body via surgery) would be low.

Chemotherapy does have a chance to work.  There is a 30%-50% chance that some combination of chemotherapy would create a scenario of remission for Jeri.  These are the odds that were given to us by our chemotherapy oncologist.

Chemotherapy kills all multiplying cells in the body.  The goal is to kill all or most of the cancer cells too.  With low odds of success (70-50% that it will not eliminate the cancer) and the fact that chemotherapy will compromise the immune system, decimating the system that would be most effective at killing cancer through alternative treatment options, Jeri has chosen to explore non traditional means of treatment.

Multiple scans (CT and PET scans) were run to ensure that the cancer had not originated in another part of the body and grown to the lungs.  It had not.  The results show that it most likely started in her left lung and grew from there.  Her cancer has not, to this point metastasized and spread to any other parts of the body, but it is a rather large mass that resembles an octopus with a main circular mass and tendrils that have grown out primarily into the lungs.     

The reason Jeri’s vocal cords are paralyzed, her heart is weaker, she has difficulty breathing deeply and lymphedema (swelling in the extremities due to poor circulation) is all a result of the lung cancer.

Throughout, Jeri has amazed everyone with her vitality, she appears to be less sick that she is (color of skin, weight, energy, etc.).  This changed when her lung filled with fluids and needed to be drained on March 7^th she went to the ER and spent the next 10 days in hospital where they drew out about 5.5 liters of fluid caused her cancer over that period.  Since then she has been on oxygen regularly to ensure that she is getting enough oxygen.

To ensure that Jeri gets better, we have been working with a pulmonary specialist (lung doctor) who has been researching and suggesting alternative treatments. 

He has recommended Intravenous Vitamin C treatments following the protocols of Dr. Riordan out of the Riordan Clinic, along with GcMAF out of a clinic in Japan to eliminate the cancer.  The vitamin C will penetrate the acidic cancer cells and change their Ph to a more basic number, killing them, and the GcMAF injections will reactivate the immune system, getting them more active in attacking and removing the cancer.

While we have health insurance, none of these treatments are covered by it.

We are blessed to have our daily needs for food and shelter covered, but the treatments of Vitamin C are $300 each and would total $3,600 for a month.  This should be needed for 3 months on the high end. The GcMAF is $1,000 monthly and would be expected to run for 6 months. 

We have some savings, and will use this to start these treatments, we need your help to ensure that we can keep them up financially and get Jeri well again. 

She has been a teacher for 9 years and loves what she does, she misses her kids and wants to get back into the classroom and do what she loves.  Please help Jeri get the treatments she needs to get healthly.

Our son Jonah is 7 years old.