You're most welcome. I've been on this cancer journey with my brother for nine months now. Do NOT give up hope. The doctors use veiled language these days to keep everybody hopeful (decent doctors anyway). They don't use the word cancer, they'll say "metastasis" or "metastasizing disease". They don't say "chemotherapy" if they can avoid it. They say "immunotherapy." They don't say, "your liver has been injured by the immunotherapy", they say, "there's some inflammation in the liver" or "the liver is angry".

But sometimes the doctors know the right thing that can help for the moment. When this first started with my brother, he went from climbing on roofs doing home inspections to entirely paralyzed on his left side literally within a 36-hour span of time. The biggest tumor in his brain is at the brainstem so it had begun to push on nerves and thus he was suddenly dealing with not just cancer in his brain, but life-threatening nerve damage (i.e. stroke symptoms) as well. Within one day of the paralysis starting, he was losing the ability to swallow. They gave him a combination of drugs: mekinist and taflinar (which, scarily enough, can only be taken by mouth so had to be swallowed). Those drugs literally saved his life when he was probably within just 48 hours or so from dying. 2 weeks after he started the drugs, he was walking again (though he had to relearn how to walk after the nerve damage). But then 5 months later the cancer developed immunity to those drugs. That's when he finally started on the fenben, which my Mom and I had been trying to get him to take for months. The progress after that was amazing--as impressive as the original drugs.

My point in telling that part is to let you know that you and your mother have to listen to your own inner guidance (or, as I think of it, that little voice of God talking to us in our hearts). Doctors can be helpful and critical for good outcomes on occasion. They can also--and often are--an impediment you have to work around, often covertly.

What I'm saying is: Don't just hand your outcomes over to a doctor. They don't know everything, by a long shot, though some of them think they do or don't care if they don't. My brother's oncologist is a good guy, but he's also been an impediment on more than one occasion (telling my brother not to take the fenben, for instance).

Do the research. The fact that you're here at GA.win shows you're not afraid to do that. Your research now will likely not just help your Mom, but also dozens of other people that you'll come into contact with from this point forward.

Another book to lread: Cancer and the New Biology of Water by Thomas Cowan, MD. Also, Dr. Thomas Seyfried's Cancer as a Metabolic Disease. These two books will impress upon you how helpful a ketogenic diet will be for your mother in this battle, as well as how truly curable cancer is despite what the medical establishment tells us all.

Hang in there, fren. Our mothers are so often our grounding anchors. In a situation like you're in, the roles shift. It's challenging. I lost my Dad in 2002 when he was 55 to kidney cancer. I wish I knew then what I know now. But I know in retrospect that what my Dad went through prepped me for this situation with my brother. And I know my Dad is right with us watching over us. The ways he's made his presence obvious are stunning. But that's a story for another day. Blessings to you and your mother. My prayers are with your mother and family. Again, hang in there, fren.