Pancreatic Cancer 18 Month Update

Hey, guys. I can’t believe it was a year ago that I initially posted my dad’s 6 month pancreatic cancer update. Now I’m posting his 18 month update! That’s pretty wild. It’s been an amazing and challenging ride, for sure – and I feel really grateful that I’m able to post an 18 month update. I know my whole family is feeling grateful, too.

While I was on my 6-week instagram break, I got a handful of emails from people asking me for an update on my dad — I was thrilled to see that those were the posts people missed most from me. :)

My dad just had his latest scan at Dana Farber this week, and met with his oncologist today.

He’s 36 chemo cycles in, at this point! Read everything about his treatment plan here.

I’m currently in Tulum, Mexico, so I wasn’t able to be at the scan meeting — I usually love being at the scan meetings because I want to ask the doctor questions and get as many details as I can about what’s going on. Luckily, though, my mom takes great notes and reported back to me as soon as the meeting was over.

The doctor said his scan looks “great,” and that he’s “a very atypical patient” and “they’re very pleased.”

His liver and pancreas tumors are stable (same or slightly decreased from last scan) and his CA 19-9 is down to 20 (It started out at 1810, and 1 year ago it was 70). CA 19-9 is the pancreatic tumor blood marker – and although they don’t use this number exclusively to track progress (the scans are most important), it’s a number we’ve been watching since the beginning and it’s now in normal range (normal range is 0-37).

So he’ll stay on the same plan he’s been on — Folfirinox chemotherapy and our at home treatment plan of cannabis oil, CBD oil, and medicinal mushrooms.

He is still feeling great, playing golf, traveling, working in the yard, winning cornhole tournaments, going out with his friends, and not experiencing the typical chemo side effects. 

About the scan meeting today, he texted me: “It sure feels like things are going right! You missed a fun meeting. There was a lot of laughing…”

He also showed his oncologist a study I sent him about cannabis and pancreatic cancer – and he said they were very interested. This is all good news for my life dream of cancer hospitals being able to insert cannabis medicine directly into tumors. I think it’s the future…at least, I hope it is.

 

Speaking of the future, my dad and I recently attended a talk at Harvard Business School with Rick Doblin of MAPS. MAPS stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and Rick’s life mission is to advance legal psychedelic therapy — and to help regulators and society feel comfortable with these therapies.

Although Rick’s talk focused mostly on MDMA, not cannabis – he said that with any illegal drug, “legalization follows medicalization.” So the more we can show that these “drugs” (aka cannabis, psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, etc) have proven therapeutic medical benefits, the more widespread legalization and therapeutic access will be for patients who may be helped immensely. I’ve become a big proponent of this research.

This is also really exciting – Tim Ferriss just helped launch the world’s first research center dedicated to turning psychedelics into medicines.

Anyway, psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA aren’t a part of my dad’s cancer treatment plan, but I thought it was worth mentioning here as it’s all interrelated.

In other exciting news — I recently met a new friend who was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and he’s been using the same cannabis oil and medicinal mushrooms as my dad – and he just found out that he’s cancer free!! He also had none of the typical chemo side effects and his doctors were really surprised. I’m going to share more details from him soon, but it’s truly incredible what’s possible…

All in all, we are feeling very hopeful and grateful right now. If you’ve just been diagnosed, please know there is hope that you can feel good, and have a great quality of life during treatment. 

All cancer resources here:

Healthy Crush Cancer Resources

Alright – signing off, from Tulum! I’m giving myself a little book-writing retreat for a few days after being at a Summit conference here for the weekend, and I’m writing this blog post from The Real Coconut. If you’re in Tulum, you must go. Trust me. They have a medicinal mushroom coffee with chaga, reishi, cordyceps, shiitake and espresso…yes.

The view as I press “publish” on this post…

Con amor,
Jenny