Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
The Rebel Doctor Who Wouldn't Leave Me Stranded
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Confronting death has a way of clarifying what truly matters. My aggressive squamous cell carcinoma nearly took my life, but through what I can only describe as divine intervention, I've found myself navigating an unconventional path toward healing.
The medical system's rigid protocols nearly derailed my progress. After three rounds of a specialized chemotherapy cocktail successfully eliminated my primary tumors, both my oncologists refused to continue the very treatment that was working. Instead, they pushed for an intensive radiation-chemotherapy combination with devastating side effects. Their decision wasn't based on my unique case but on standardized guidelines that failed to account for my body's actual response.
Enter two unlikely heroes: an 81-year-old scientist living on Social Security who dedicates his life to helping cancer patients without compensation, and a "rebel" doctor willing to continue my successful treatment when the medical establishment abandoned me. "I'm not going to leave you stranded," he said, words that literally saved my life. Now I'm back on the three-drug cocktail that's been working, alongside complementary approaches like the Nori protocol for cancer cell ferroptosis and a specialized low-methionine diet.
This journey has transformed my understanding of family too. True family isn't determined by biological connection but by who stands beside you when death knocks at your door. The community that has rallied around me—most unrelated by blood—has become my lifeline.
As I continue this fight, I'm stronger, more discerning about medical advice, and increasingly confident in my body's wisdom. I'm visualizing the chemotherapy finding and destroying every last cancer cell, and planning for a definitive med pet scan in Japan when this battle is won. Your subscription and support make sharing this journey possible—for that, I'm profoundly grateful.
Intro for podcast
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Well, hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and if you're listening to this, you are a subscriber, and I want to thank you for your support, and you guys are actually powering the show right now and have allowed me to up the quality of production, and it's making a difference. More guests are reaching out or having better conversations, more conversations, I'm able to put up more content, and it makes sense to do so. This is another private episode that I am sharing the progress of my journey to health from a very aggressive squamous cell carcinoma that came close to killing me not too long ago, and I'll be sharing other very deep personal things as well, but right now, this is the thing that's most important is staying alive, and my journey to wellness has been a crazy one, and I believe there's been a lot of divine intervention that has stepped in and kept me from veering off course, and it's not been an easy road, but I think my will to live is a big factor in this, and I think that as I talk to other people and listen to other people in groups that are going through a similar ordeal, I sometimes see the fight and sometimes I don't, and sometimes people just put their head in the sand and say it's going to be okay. And other times people are like, yeah, I'm going to get out there and I'm going to whip this thing's ass and I'm going to do what it takes. And they do it blindly. And other times they put the effort in to find the right answers and to go down a road that sometimes zigs and zags, and seek out the counsel of people who have good answers, compare the answers. Sometimes people have some good answers and some not so good answers, so you need to be able to start filtering that yourself. A lot of prayer, a lot of meditation, a lot of different plant medicines, a lot of support from a substantial group that very few, if any, are related to me. A few Not in the way you would think, though. You know family isn't necessarily who you are related to physically or biologically, but family is who you choose to bring into your circle of trust and who you decide to share your life with, and I've had to learn all those lessons kind of the hard way. But here we are, so up to this point. I have shared most of the salient points with the previous episodes, primarily the ones with Dr Robert Hoffman. So if you want to catch the big points on how I got here, where I'm at right now, that's the best way to get the details. I'll go through a quick timeline.
Speaker 1:So I spoke with the medical oncologist the radiation oncologist After I got my CT scan. That showed the primary and larger secondary tumors were gone, but there's still some activity going on in two lymph nodes. That's what we get so far. Neither one of them are willing to pursue further chemo, even though the guidelines would say that I could have more doses. It just doesn't fit their protocol. They both want me to do this very intensive radiation and chemo combination that I've discovered is very destructive and I don't know that I would want to put myself through that process and those side effects. So I've discovered a ultrasound treatment called sorry my brain's a little fuzzy, but histotripsy, and it's been approved by FDA for liver tumors, but not anything else at this point. But I'm hoping that with some more trials that are going on, so far it seems like it's a pretty good therapy that doesn't necessarily seem to have any negative side effects. So I'm hoping that that becomes available should I need it.
Speaker 1:I've been on this Nori protocol, which is basically a natural chemotherapy therapy solution that is supposed to create ferroptosis in the cancer cells and it creates an oxidative environment supposed to be synergistic with other oxidative therapies like the ozone, the peroxide, the chemotherapy, any other oxidative therapies I'm doing. It's supposed to be complementary. So I'm on a pretty heavy protocol with that. I'm still on my low methionine diet and I'm still taking methionine A's and that's most of my regimen right now. I still do a few supplements, a few different things, but I've narrowed it down to these. Things seem to have done most of the good.
Speaker 1:Dr Hoffman, once again, has come through in a pinch when I needed him and he, you know, I told him I says I'm trying to figure out how am I going to find somebody that will give me another round of this three drug chemotherapy cocktail to finish the job? The first three rounds did so good, so it doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they want to keep going and finish it off? And Dr Hoffman agreed and he said well, we'll find somebody, we'll find an answer. And this guy has just. He's an 81-year-old scientist and he has just been so instrumental in helping me find these answers. He's the one who presented this cocktail to me and I did further research and presented it to the doctors. He's always been positive, just an incredible man, and he takes a personal interest in helping people. And the guy doesn't even get paid for his work. He lives on social security. He's dedicated his life to this work and just a saint of a man, the way I know him so far.
Speaker 1:Anyways, he comes back and he tells me that I remember this doctor from 40 years ago and he's kind of a rebel and he thinks outside the box and maybe he would be somebody that could help you. And he says I'll try to look him up. And about another week later he gets an old abuse. Since I found him. Here's his contact information. So perfect, I'll, I'll call him and use you as a reference. Uh, an hour later he he calls me back and he says I got a hold of him. I told him about your case. He said he would see you. Whoa, okay, so I call right away, I get an appointment for a few days later and to go down there and initially, you know he was very sympathetic to my case.
Speaker 1:He was very upset at the system and he couldn't understand why they would refuse to do the thing that was working and keep going with it and why they, would you know, choose to do this standard of care. And I realized that it was. It's just the way they have their program, it's the way their book says, and the way that I was able to present the chemo only treatment as a neoadjuvant or precursor solution, that's the only reason they bought it. If I would have said, hey, I think I have an answer instead of chemo radiation, they would not have accepted it. They would have said, no, this is what we recommend. But because I said I want to use this as a neoadjuvant, a let's shrink the tumor down so I can stay alive to survive this secondary therapy that you want to give me. And they said, ok, well, we'll agree to that, but that's what gave me three doses and no more.
Speaker 1:And this guy says, well, they're wrong and you're right and he said it several times and he was just visibly upset about that they wouldn't do this. And he says, well, I would help you, but I'm so far down, I'm an hour and a half away, and if there's a problem, I don't, you know, I don't know that I could help you. And I says well, you know, there's emergency rooms wherever I go, and I've done pretty well so far and I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to survive this and I'm willing to do whatever it takes. If I got to go move down there while I'm getting therapy, I'll do it Whatever. You tell me what I got to do. And he says, well, let's see if we could find you a doctor nearby. And I said, well, that's great, but how am I going to find a doctor? That will go outside of the standard of care. And you know he saw pictures of what I looked like before and what I look like now.
Speaker 1:And he realized it's been over six weeks since I've had my last round of chemotherapy and you know, if we didn't get moving on this thing, it could take off again, even though I know I'm on the diet, I know, I'm pretty confident that I can hold it back, but there's no guarantee of anything. And, um, I don't know, my wife and I were looking at each other going, man, why, why does it always happen this way? Like we get an answer, but then we, we have, we get thwarted right at the last second and then somehow, some way, he changed his mind. Next thing, you know, he's pulling blood from me and talking to his nurse about scheduling, and I said what's going on? Are you going to treat me? He says, yes, I'm going to treat you, I'm not going to leave you stranded. And that was last Tuesday, a week ago. And he says, well, I got to get it cleared through insurance and we'll see what happens next. And I, last Friday, I got the call, insurance cleared it and yesterday I went in and received my first infusion of the three-drug cocktail and I'm carrying around with me a pump for the third drug that will be taken out on Friday. I'm handling it pretty well. This time I'm stronger.
Speaker 1:I did my three-day fast two days prior, one day after, and boy, this morning's breakfast was sure good. I did my little chest move. I ate one egg and some beans and some hash browns, so I put a little methionine into my system. I did take the methionine days afterward. I'll be taking a second dose later on today, but it's my theory that it lights it up just enough so the chemo can find it easy.
Speaker 1:And talking to Dr Exame, a guy that I very much respect his opinion, he seemed to think it might be a good idea.
Speaker 1:And you know what I'm following my gut on this. I believe I'm in good contact with my body and I feel that, um, I'm able to judge people's advice pretty capably now, more than I have ever been able to, and I'm going to continue down this road. So I'm visualizing the chemo just wrapping around the last of that tumor, finding any circulating tumor cells and destroying them. And when I get done with this, I've got to save up some money so I could get over to Japan and get a med pet scan, which is really the only way to really tell if you have cancer or if it's gone. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. Once again, I'm really grateful for all the support and I hope you continue and please tell somebody about this if you find this is to be an interesting show and we can grow it all together, build this community, all right. Well, thank you Until next time. I'm just so very grateful for all the support.
