We’ve Lost a Noble Warrior, But Will Not Give UP the Fight! In Memoriam: Marlene C. Utz

Editor’s Note: We here at IA received the sad news of the death of Marlene Utz, Grail Guardian’s mother, on Friday.  We send our heartfelt condolences to Grail and her family and our love and respect to Mrs. Utz. Godspeed, noble warrior…From all of us here at IA.  (SEE UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS POST)

~~By Grail Guardian

We’ve lost a noble warrior, but will not give up the fight!

In Loving Memory

Marlene C. Utz

April 10, 1938 – February 5, 2009

As many of you know, the past few months have been especially rough for me since my Mom was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in her life. She battled courageously as we tried everything in our arsenal to beat back the beast. But just as our nation was overtaken from the evil within, she lost her valiant struggle this week to that which grew inside her. I have learned so much while researching her disease, possible cures, and the corruption that has swallowed our “health care” system and smothered any hope of recovery for cancer patients in this country. I cannot begin to share with you all of the details I have found, but this will be the first in a series of articles about the death of the medical profession in America, and as you will see it is totally related to the current political crisis in this nation.

Let me begin with the personal part of the tale, because my mother’s story needs to be told. We first discovered she had cancer when she went in for what was to be a routine cholecystectomy, the removal of her gall bladder. Normally, the surgery is laparoscopic and involves four small incisions, miniature surgical tools, and an overnight stay in the hospital. I myself had the procedure several years ago, and was home the next day. The surgeon called down to the waiting room following the procedure and informed my Dad that there had been a mass in the gall bladder and they had to perform an open surgery and would be biopsying the mass. She was left with a major incision and a five day hospital stay( which she was furious about). But after the surgery, despite her gaping abdominal wound, I began to notice that she appeared healthier than she had seemed in months (if not years). When she went for her standard follow-up visit with the surgeon after a couple of weeks (there was a visit in between with a nurse or PA to check the incision) he brusquely informed my parents that the mass had been malignant, that he probably had not been able to remove it all, and, as an almost casual aside,  mentioned that he had removed part of her liver during the surgery. He referred her to a local cancer clinic, where we were immediately told that a program of chemotherapy, followed by a month of radiation therapy plus chemo, and finished off by another 3 months of chemo alone was pretty much the only way to go. It would not cure her, but if all went perfectly we could expect to get maybe a year and a half more of her life.

Now having gone through some of the earliest chemotherapy ever given, nitrogen-mustard gas (yes, the same stuff they used during WWI and subsequently banned from warfare, but not medicine), Mom was more than a bit reluctant to have chemo again. But once faced with the option that she was going to die (and die very quickly) if she didn’t have the treatment, she surprised us by changing her mind and agreeing to the chemo. Based on the recommendation of the oncologist, she started a 3 week course of Gemcitibene in October. After a week off, she took another 3 week course in November. The following week (on her recovery week) they sent her for a CT scan, where she was asked to drink radioactive material so they could trace its course through her body. It was immediately following this test that she began her slow downward slide. She felt very tired and drained for a few days, and the following week when we took her in for her next round of chemo, we got the news; it wasn’t working and she had developed “nodules” across her peritoneum (the protective tissue that surrounds your abdominal organs. There was no need to continue the chemo or try radiation we were told, and they basically sent her home to die.

That’s when the anger kicked in. We became defiant and refused to believe that it could be over and done with so quickly. After all, nearly 40 years before Dad had been told to go home from her hospital room and begin the funeral arrangements (she was proud to tell everyone she knew that she outlived 5 of her doctors after her bout with Hodgkins) and my sister had been told her son, who had fallen into a swimming pool at age 4 and suffered severe brain damage, would not survive–but he lived for another 21 years. So I went into research mode. I began to read everything and anything I could get my hands on about cancer. I scanned websites and articles that told of successful alternative treatments performed in other countries such as the South American herb Graviola, Japanese mushroom therapy (Shiitake and Maitake mushroom extracts), mistletoe, and even the heat treatments performed in Germany on the rich and powerful that simply raise the body temperature to 107.5 ° and make you feel like you’re taking a pleasant nap as cancer cells are killed off and healthy cells survive. According to author Andrew Schollberg:

When President Ronald Reagan got cancer during his presidency, the great German doctor Hans Nieper, M.D, treated him. It would have been front page news if it hadn’t been hushed up at the time.

Just imagine if the American public knew a sitting president preferred German cancer treatments!

I learned about it from my confidential source in Germany. In addition, Reagan’s German doctor acknowledged it in an interview.

I learned that the salary for an oncologist in the US can range from over $100,000 per year for new docs, and as high as $787,000 per year for radiation oncologists. Andrew Schollberg also claims that American pharmaceutical companies have offered a German doctor 3.7 million euros (approx. $5 million US) under the table merely to recommend that his cancer patients use their brand of chemotherapy. That’s one single doctor, and that should give you an idea of how lucrative the chemotherapy business is in the United States. He adds:

It costs $350,000 to die of cancer in America.

So I read on; books like How to Fight Cancer and Win by William L. Fischer that stressed the importance of diet in preventing and beating cancer, including details of the poisons labeled as food on your grocery store shelves in the guise of commercially processed fats (a true eye opener, even if you don’t have or fear cancer). I read pamphlets like  Deadly Cancer Myths – And the Truth that Will Save Your Life by Dr. William Campbell Douglass, I that talked about the dangers of chlorine, flouride, and prescription drugs. We radically changed her diet, including freshly juiced vegetables and fruits (especially antioxidant rich purple ones), stopped red meat and sugar intake, and (thanks to my sister’s natural foods website) added supplements like Silymarin, IP6, and Nattokinase to her daily regimen.

While we frantically reviewed the myriad of alternative treatments, my cousin Christina (who has a medical background) e-mailed that she knew a doctor that had successfully treated a friend of hers for lymphoma and strongly urged us to see her. Her name is Dr. Dana Flavin, and she heads the Foundation for Collaborative Medicine & Research (http://www.collmed.org/). What Dr. Flavin does (and did next) is truly amazing.

Dr. Flavin is a former toxicologist for the Food and Drug Administration. She spent 20 years doing research on cancer and cancer prevention in Germany before returning to the US and heading the Foundation. Put simply, this woman reads between 100 – 150 medical research papers each week. She is an intellectual sponge that understands the nuances of biochemistry, pharmacology, and nutrient biochemistry and translates an incredible amount of highly detailed scientific data into an understandable treatment plan that doesn’t unnecessarily poison (chemotherapy), burn (radiation therapy), or cut (surgery) the human body in an effort to heal it. She will consult with your current physician or oncologist and recommend a course of action based on all the latest data that your doc doesn’t have the time to read because they’re busy treating 30-40 patients per day.

We were lucky enough to be able to take Mom to the Foundation in Greenwich, CT last month for a consultation with Dr. Flavin. We were armed with a 38 page report from the cancer clinic and the desire to learn. And boy, did we learn! We spent nearly 3 hours with Dr. Flavin as she not only rattled off a variety of natural supplements to build the immune system, detoxify from heavy metals, and remove parasites (not the big kind, the microscopic stuff like bacteria, viruses, fungi, yeast) but also made us aware of a new treatment discovered by the University of Alberta (Drs. Stephen Archer and Evangelos Michelakis) involving Dichloroacetic Acid (DCA), which appears to induce apoptosis in cancer cells. Apoptosis is a natural process that cells use to commit cellular suicide when their time is up. Cancer cells do not die off like healthy cells, and DCA appears to restore that function to the cancer cells.

Needless to say, we were quite excited when we learned about the possibilities, plus Dr. Flavin also provided Dad with some help for his case of borderline glaucoma (which she noticed immediately upon sitting down opposite him at the table) and psoriasis. I had pages of note with the names of natural substances that would help Mom, plus we all had a comfortable understanding of what each item was expected to do and why. When the time came to leave, we were bracing ourselves as Dad asked her “How do we pay you?” and you can’t imagine our relief when she responded that we could make a donation to the Foundation according to our financial ability. She understands that many cancer patients have been so financially raped and physically abused by the approved “main stream” medical system that they cannot always afford hundreds or thousands of dollars in additional medical advice, even though they desperately need it.

I would like to take a moment out here for a shameless plug. If you have ever lost someone to cancer (or any other disease) and felt like they should have, or maybe even could have been saved if only there were just one more thing you could try, I would like to ask you to consider donating anything you can muster to the FCMR (there is a handy PayPal link at the site: www.collmed.org ). If you have ever laughed, cried, or been moved by anything I have written here at Insight Analytical, consider taking the money you might have donated to a political candidate this year and instead direct it to the Foundation. Their work will actually save lives, rather than ruin them. (unabashed begging)

We now return you to my story. We left feeling encouraged, hopeful, and much lighter of spirit. I called my sister that night and read her off the list of supplements we would need and told her about our wonderful experience. As we spent the night at Mom’s cousin’s house, we gushed with enthusiasm and tried to explain the sheer phenomenon that is Dr. Dana Flavin. I even snuck on to their PC to check out the magnificent website she had recommended for research:

http:www.thedcasite.com

This site contains a wealth of information about the research that has been done, plus a forum for families and patients to share their experiences using DCA. I was overjoyed at the possibilities, and could hardly wait till we returned home to start my research into DCA. And just as you might expect, once again the walls came tumbling down. As I read and researched DCA, I made a horrible discovery. Not about side effects or lack of efficacy, but about its regulation. You see, as it turns out the University of Alberta took out what are called “methods of use patents” on DCA and decided to forge ahead with studies of DCA as a possible cure for cancer. And I’ll bet you can already guess what the rub was; yep, you guessed it! Money. The almighty buck, the great North American greenbacks. You see, DCA is actually * gasp * inexpensive. That’s right, no drug company can patent it and make trillions of dollars a year off of it like they do chemotherapy drugs. So likewise, no pharmaceutical manufacturer was willing to spend the estimated $1.5 million needed to conduct the required blind studies on DCA. (Don’t despair totally, the U of Alberta is proceeding on their own by privately raising the funds to conduct the required studies on their own!) So my next lesson in the world of DCA was horrifying; the FDA had actually shut down DCA manufacturers for selling DCA in the US. In fact in July, 2008 the website http://www.buydca.com/ was raided and shut down. It is operated by the same people who run the informational site http:www.thedcasite.com, but was not the first or only such raid on a website that sells supplements. Click here to read about the terror induced by the FDAs Gestapo-like tactics against the Life Extension Foundation.

The long and short of it was this: the FDA (self-proclaimed arbiter of good and evil items to ingest, and the folks that brought you such perennial favorites as Aspartame, Vioxx, and Fen Fen) had declared it illegal to sell DCA in America. We were crest-fallen. I began to research whether we could enroll Mom at a Toronto clinic so she could receive legal DCA cancer treatment or whether I could purchase DCA in Canada and bring it back to the US legally. I was frantic to get on to the chat room at the site, but the night I tried to register I was unable to do so. I sent an e-mail to the administrator and he responded the next day. I was able to log on, and since I had his attention, I asked if there were any legal way to obtain DCA in New York. The wonderful folks at the site: Jim Tassano, Heather, and Jackie all contacted me to ensure that I was able to obtain some pure, pharmaceutical grade DCA without violating any laws. (If anyone reading this ever wishes to try DCA in the US, e-mail me at GrailGuardian@nonpartisan.com and I will gladly help you.)

We waited anxiously, but Mom started to show signs that she was weakening even further. She wasn’t eating much solid food, needed to sleep often, and started to have intermittent pain in the vicinity of her liver. On the day I walked into the house with the DCA, she had been on a diet of over 30 natural supplements to strengthen her system but before she was able to take her first dose she began to have swelling in her feet. Worried, I called Dr. Flavin to ask her advice. She was concerned about kidney or liver failure and recommended we get her in for tests right away. We trundled her off to the cancer center to have blood drawn and a urine test, but the strain on her body was evident. By the next day, she had begun to experience new pain that did not go away no matter what she did (by now she was sleeping in her wheelchair with her head on the kitchen table as it hurt too much to lie back in bed). The oncologist had called to say her kidneys were fine, but didn’t really go into much detail with Dad and he was distracted by her worsening condition. She stopped eating anything solid, but still took her DCA treatments every day. By the weekend, she was unable to help Dad transfer her in and out of the wheelchair so the round-the-clock care began. My sister and I started to take shifts to spend the night so Dad wasn’t on call for her 24 hours a day (he was totally exhausted because she rarely slept through the night). During the days, I made calls to Dr. Flavin and the cancer center. They hadn’t sent the test results to the Foundation, so there was little Dr. Flavin could do but guess as to what was happening. I struggled for a full week before I was finally able to get the tests faxed to her, and by then Dr. Flavin was very worried about her liver and the huge increase in her tumor markers. She recommended another treatment called Hepa-Metz, which removes ammonia from the liver, but were unable to get to see the practitioner as he was half a state away (unlike Dr. Flavin, he seemed more worried about being sued and how he would get paid). We did all we could do to make her comfortable (which, of course, never seemed like enough), and eventually brought in hospice care through Lifetime Assistance, who were absolutely wonderful at the end. The nurses and social workers listened and took notes about the treatments we were trying, excited about the possibilities. Even the nurse that showed up after she finally surrendered peacefully asked questions and wrote down Dr. Flavin’s name and the Foundation’s website.

When I e-mailed Dr. Flavin that Mom had passed, she took the time to reply to me:

”Only God can do miracles, and perhaps you did even more than any mortal could have done. Tell your Dad, he did all he could and more. When it is too late, we have no decision anymore on this. God bless”

And with those words begins my next quest; to find out why it should be that we, as ordinary Americans, can learn more and do more to cure cancer and ease pain than the entire combined medical establishment of this nation, powered by the Ted Kennedys and Tom Daschles of the world. To find out why those who shun the poison/burn/cut philosophy cannot find funding, and why a family’s efforts to try everything before giving up hope are met with ridicule, derision, and impatience by the very people paid to give aid and comfort and first, do no harm. I will continue with Mom’s fight, and urge each and every one of you to join me. The current Congress and Administration will only make matters worse, and “Universal Health Care” in this country died a violent and rapid death 16 years ago when Hillary Clinton’s efforts were trashed by Big Pharma and the MSM used the opportunity to wage their personal war against the only politician in modern times that ever actually attempted to improve the health care system in America.

I will continue her fight, and I know she will be beside me all along the way.

This is a photo of Mom in her InsightAnalytical hat (made with love by our own Kenosha Marge). She loved this hat, and felt she was somehow connected to us by it. One of the last times she left the house she wore another of Marge’s hats on the trip to CT to see Dr. Flavin, but this one will be present at her viewing this weekend.

***

Related post:

5. The Heart of the Season: Hats for Grail Mama and Friends Beyond Family

***UPDATE***

These and MORE LINKS to USEFUL INFORMATION in this FOLLOW-UP POST. ALSO, SEE THE LIFE/HEALTH TAB at the top of the home page for additional resources.

2/12/2009 Health Links: Alternatives to Mainstream Medicine re: Cancer and Other Diseases; Stem Cell Research Clinic