8th Update: Finished 1st Round

April 9, 2018

My dad has finished his 1st 2 months round of 6 cycles of chemotherapy this past Monday and today begins his off week. He has another identical round to go before he'll see results to be able to judge whether it is working or not. We're hopefully thinking that we are already seeing positive effects and that the chemo is keeping the aggressive esophageal cancer at bay. If not, we have a couple options...Houston for immunotherapy while waiting for those 6 months of being bacteria free to be able to possibly re-qualify for the MSK combination immunotherapy and chemotherapy drug trials. And if all that fails, Asia has promising outcomes with 66% success rate compared to the 5% here, so it might be off to Israel, South Korea, or Japan. But one thing at a time for now and we'll see what works and how well in the meantime without having to be drastic.

Radiation seemed to relieve about 90% of his bone pain and the fentanyl patches almost completely removes what's left. He has a followup scan in about a month to know how well it worked and if he'll need to do a repeat 5 sessions of radiation.

He mostly has trouble eating, but some days are good and he's almost back to normal and then others it's bad again. He hasn't had many awful side effects, thankfully his stomach is spared for the most part. He's been having difficulties concentrating, foggy brain, and he sleeps a lot in the 4 or 5 days during and after his treatments.

A big thank you to Paty, whose helpful suggestions have been wonderful over the last 6 weeks or so. We're trying to approach this from all angles. My dad is doing 3 part breathing exercises which help with his pain control, mood, and sleep. Likewise, his short daily walks outside in nature have been helping in much the same way. He's trying meditation and listening to sound therapy tunes both at 432-hertz heart center and 741-hertz detoxifying healing vibrations. He's also trying to increase his protein, iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and good oil intake with his new natural, organic diet. He's missing certain foods he can't eat because due to food illness concerns he pretty much has to be on a pregnant lady diet: nothing raw nor undercooked and no unpasteurized foods. Unfortunately, it is challenging regaining all the weight he lost and he's still down around 146 lbs.

Fighting with the insurance company has been no fun. They keep wanting to deny him of things the doctors order such as more scans. We received all the bills and finished calculating the price of his pre-treatments consultations with the 2 different oncologists and 1 radiologist in Miami ($345,000), the oncologist in New York ($75,000), and the one in Houston ($) plus all related exams, etc. came out somewhere around $ in medical bills alone, not counting the travel costs like food, lodging, transportation, etc expenses. We started to receive the bills for his chemotherapy treatments at UM which came out to be about $2,200 a day making it around $132,000 for just his treatment alone. That's not including a bunch of doctor and specialist visits like his GP and cardiologist and other extra things apart from the chemo, for example, radiation, other medications, exams, lab work, 2 CT scans, PET scan, MRI, bone scan, drugs, etc. So far in total medical charges that have been billed from January to mid-March, it has been around $250,000. That's not including all the other relevant cancer expenses. Judging by the average costs so far, we're looking at about another $150,000 in medical costs for his next 2 month round of chemotherapy treatments. That's nearly half a million dollars in the 1st 6 months of being diagnosed with cancer. The US medical system is in need of some serious reforms. It's unbelievable!

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Love,

The Vassilopoulos Family: John-Paul, Isa, and Tatianna