The word from above..

You'll have to excuse me I'm in lots of pain. I have run out of paracetamol and therefore have been unable to keep to my back pain control regime.
The Doctors don't seem to believe that such a basic painkiller could be so effective, and have in their wisdom given me 800mg of ibuprofen, it ain't helping I can tell you that much.

Lets go back a few hours.. I had my meeting with the two senior Doctors and they gave me some news that was at first disappointing but then once we talked it through could well be the best news I've had in years.

Dr Kopic does not believe that I should have high dose chemo with stem cell support.
He said that at this stage he does not think I have refractory disease, but rather the previous treatments have been almost successful but not quite. What we need is a chemotherapy regime that is tailored to my specific cancer cell type. (Treatment in NZ was just a case of using what they have always done)

The blood test from Greece could take a week or two to show up which drugs will work best.
To back that up, and also get an idea of the state of my bone marrow, I had a bone marrow biopsy performed today. They insisted on giving me a general to do it, I told them that I'd had three before with no pain management. They said that was crazy. However Dr Kopic started the procedure before I went under, so I did suffer that horrible pain from the reamer for a short time.

I awoke completely confused, I hate that.. no idea of time, place or situation.
The biopsy will also help decide on what drugs will have the least affect on my rather fragile marrow and also show if I have bone involvement.

When I got the PET scan CD from Pacific Radiology last week I couldn't help but boot it up and take a look at the images. It's a fantastic thing to be able to "fly" down through thousands of images of your own body and see what all the fuss is about. One thing that I noticed on just a couple of the images was an area of activity in my pelvis. It was just a faint glow of green and yellow.
Myself being a layman I just assumed that the experts at Pacific had seen it and thought nothing of it. However Dr Kopic also saw it when he reviewed the images and is concerned enough to send the marrow from my pelvis off for testing for HL involvement. That's a complication I don't want to consider right now.

OK so we don't do High dose and SCT, what does that mean to me? My Instant thought was I've wasted my time. Gone through all this for nothing. All that hassle to get my stem cells here.
I fired several questions at Dr Kopic who answered in German and let Dr D translate.
He said this is good news. High dose would leave me with a lifetime of health problems and severely affect my overall well being.
Finding the right low dose chemo gives us the opportunity to finally beat these last few remaining tumours. We would combine that with Dendritic cell vaccines and possible antibody therapy depending on those blood results. All of this, if successful would afford me a quality of life similar to what I have previously enjoyed. (If I could just undo the radiation damage! grr)

Ok so the next thought is am I in the right place? This all costs a lot of money. Why not go home for this. Well remember Wgtn has given up on me, they offered only palliative chemo and more radiation. Leonardis are saying this is treatable and are very confidant. They say that with my stem cells in frozen storage here, we still have all our options open for the future.

No other treatment center in the world is going to give patient specific, targeted treatment at a level such as they are doing for me.

Oddly this brings me to what I did for lunch.. Sarah asked me this morning if I had met any of the other patients. I said I hadn't even seen any other patients, but that I had been avoiding the restaurant at meal times and having room service. The staff said there are 15 other patients here at the moment.

So Sarah suggested I have lunch with the others today. I sat alone for most of the time, but then a German woman in her 50's wandered in and sat down at her table across the room from me.
I was not brave enough to try and make conversation, fearing that she only spoke German and I would just end up looking silly.
Then just as I was about to leave, in perfect English she asked if I had only just arrived.
We talked across the room for a while and then I asked if I could sit with her.
Zelinder introduced herself and asked how I came to be here at the Klinik.

I told her my story and she was shocked by what she heard. She said "you have come to the right place". "I have been fighting non-Hodgkins Lymphoma for ten years, I have been to America, been involved in clinical trials that nearly killed me, only this place has had any success.
Twice I have been told to go home to die, twice the doctors here have proved them wrong"

She apologized for her poor English, for her to say so would be akin to the Pope apologising for his poor Latin. She spoke with no accent and with a huge vocabulary. Zelinder assured me that no where else in the world would I receive better treatment. I got the impression that she was a woman of considerable means. Yes I'm in the right place, any reservations I may have had have evaporated.

My back pain has almost resolved, just feels like an everyday back-ache now, I guess the Doctors just might know a thing or two. (Mental note 1x 800mg Ibuprofen is 4x Nurofen.)

I told the doctors that I believed that high dose vitamin C was responsible for the lymphoma on my neck completley resolving last march before radiation treatment began. I also said that the 9000mg I am currently taking each day in tablet form is responsible for the huge improvement in my health in the last month or so since reintroducing it again.

Unlike the doctors in NZ who would have rubbished the idea and given me a patronising smirk, The doctors here have started me on a 7500mg IV of vitamin C. If you get the chance do some reading on the subject, there have been some incredible stories of people being cured of all sorts of ailments including cancer by taking this vitamin in large quantities. Make sure you take the calcium Ascorbate version though.