I've asked my doctor about liquid biopsies for the last ten years when I first heard about them, because I I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm at the cutting edge of every new technology that comes out. And I'd heard about these tests being developed, and I've been asking for year after year when is this commercially available? Because, you know, that sounds a lot less intrusive than that colonoscopy that you want me to get and things like that. And it was always no such thing. It doesn't work. It's not available yet. My name's Roger. I'm a lawyer. I do startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley, California. At the time, I didn't think anything was wrong. Looking back on it, let's say I had no symptoms, but I did have signs. All right? There were clues and the one big one that I completely missed and my two doctors missed entirely was that my blood sugar increased just slightly. And I noticed it in my blood. Sugar has always been exactly where I want it to be. And I went in and I got blood tests. I noticed it was up a little and I said, Hey, doc, I said, What's up with my blood sugar? She said, Well, that that just happens. You know, fasting glucose is kind of all over the place. Your A1 C is fine, probably doesn't mean anything. And I said, Well, it must mean something is higher than it was before. She said, Well, we'll come back in three months and tested again. So I came back in three months and had gone up even more and I'd lost £5 in the meantime because I thought maybe it's because I needed to lose some weight or something and I googled it, of course, and that was my first clue because there's like a million things that could cause that to happen, one of which is pancreatic cancer. I know now that that always happens with pancreatic cancer, weight loss and blood sugar increase. I didn't know what that, but so I had a clue. But still, I had no symptoms, I had no pain, had no fatigue, had none of the stuff you read about. So I was just setting baselines. When I got tested, I'm just like that. I just really want to test for everything. I want to monitor. I want to keep track and pay attention to these little itsy bitsy changes like in my blood sugar. So when I got tested for in my liquid biopsy, it wasn't because I had some I didn't even have really any risk factors either. It was simply to set a baseline. And the doctors characterized this as no symptoms. I used a a blood test by Gallerie, by Grail. It's a we call it liquid biopsy. My I've asked my doctor about liquid biopsies for the last ten years when I first heard about them, because I I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm at the cutting edge of every new technology that comes out. And I'd heard about these tests being developed and I've been asking for year after year when is this commercially available? Because you know that sounds a lot less intrusive than that colonoscopy that you want me to get and things like that. And it was always no such thing. It doesn't work. It's not available yet. You can't have it. FDA has an approved it. But one day I was it on an airplane in April of 2022, reading Tony Robbins book, I and it mentioned the gallery test and says, here's a blood test that can detect 50 different cancers. And I made a mental note. And as soon as I landed, I went to the website and I started investigating. Now, took me a couple of months to actually get that test because a doctor has to prescribe it. So what we mean by that is they take blood in that tissue and they can examine it, look for protein markers using strong A.I. to assist it. That will identify markers of different types of cancers and the tissue of origin. And I got that blood test, took about a couple of weeks. I got the results. Doctor called me up and said, Look, we found some signals for pancreatic or gallbladder, or it could be stomach or esophagus and you should do further tests. Doesn't mean you got cancer. Just means we found strong signals, especially for pancreatic cancer. And based on that, I went in for an MRI the very next day, by the way, and they found a mass on my pancreas, took about a week. And based on that, I went into a CT, scanned and had a biopsy where they actually well, it's a tissue biopsy or if they actually examined a tissue and I confirmed a diagnosis of stage two pancreatic cancer, they considered it to be unnecessary testing because, I'm so young and healthy and I got no symptoms. Well, you know, the thing about pancreatic cancer is once you got symptoms, it's pretty late stage. It kind of like to catch these things before you get symptoms. But I pushed ahead and found a telemedicine doctor that would prescribe to test, and that's how I ended up in it. So I got the gallery tests, we got the blood markers, and like I say, it was easy once I understood the process. It's just that this process is very mysterious, you know, it's it's not. I can tell you right now that primary care physicians, at least two years ago were not out there telling everybody in the world to get this. Unless you've got concierge doctors, you're probably not hearing about this. So I had to figure it out for myself. And once I did, I got the gallery test. Well, then the next step is to do scans. Well, again, you can go into your hospital and you can wait around until they come back from vacation and get around a schedule. And you hopefully they've got the personnel to do it, etc.. I didn't do that. I went the very next day and got a private scan from a company named NUVO, which is right down the street from my house. And so I was able to get that scan right away. But after that then, then I had to get out of the system because then I needed more sophisticated things to do with contrast, you know, biopsies, endoscopes, stuff like that. What I heard from my primary care doctors was mostly quit bugging me about this. It's not serious. You're not diabetic, you're not pre-diabetic. So it's gone up a little bit. You're getting old stuff like that's going to happen. You have no symptoms. And I'll never forget these words. That is unnecessary testing. Boy, it was not unnecessary at all. Well, that was the frustrating part because I fired my first doctor because he wouldn't give me anything preventative. His attitude was very much come back when you're sick and quit wasting my time. If you're not sick because I've got sick people that need me, you know? And I guess I'll admit I maybe I'm a little of a hypochondriac. I want to check out every little thing. That's just my personality. So I found an institution that advertised that they were all about preventative care. They're all over the TV, all over a lot of advertising promoting that. And I said, Great. And I went into them and yeah, they were preventative, provided I told them what I wanted to do. What I liked about them is at least they didn't say no, but I still had to tell them what I wanted. So like I told them long before this happened, I gave them a list of blood tests that I wanted, you know? And that was the one big message I would like people to have for health care. Your health is just too important to trust to a doctor. You know, as odd as that sounds, and as much as it pains me to say that it is my personal experience that health is too important to trust to a doctor, you have to take charge yourself. You have to tell your doctor what tests you want run. You have to tell your doctor what you're concerned about. You know your body better than anybody does. And if you think just even subconsciously, that there's something going on that shouldn't be, you need to tell them because you doctors and I don't blame doctors for doing this. They're not trying to keep you from getting sick. That's not their job. Took me a long time to realize that because I was very angry for a long time. Like a lot of cancer patients, I was angry. It's like, how could you let this happen to me until I finally came to the realization that, hey, it's not their job to keep me healthy. That's my job. This is my father, not theirs. Their job is to fix me when I'm sick. And that's why I kept hearing from them. Come back when you got symptoms. So big lesson, you know, try to find a doctor that's. That's willing to work with you and prescribe what you need to take care of your concerns. But then go out and self educate and make sure you're covering all the stuff that is silent. Right. Or symptom free. Yeah, I, I went through all of the stages of grief in about 12 hours. I think, you know, bargaining or anger or whatever they are sadness, acceptance. And the good thing and the bad thing is that we've all got, you know, search engines and the Internet and we can go out and research this stuff. And the conventional wisdom about pancreatic cancer is that it's American Cancer Society says it's incurable and fatal. And, you know, stage two, life expectancy, about 1 to 3 years on average, and even some very good doctors read what they say online. Peter Attia has said I've heard him say three times now that pancreatic cancer is a death sentence and a stage. And he was a surgical oncologist at one time. And I heard that from a lot of other doctors, too, online. What I came to discover, however, is that all of those doctors were looking at backward looking data. Yes, that's been true of you know, the studies that have gone so far up till now. And plus that date is kind of old because you've got to wait five years to find out, you know, what the five year survival rate is for somebody and the message. And the second thing I guess I'd like everyone to know and a second thing I figured out is that the statistics are really are really bad. The stats are bad, but those stats are based on standard of care. The United States standard of care. Those statistics are based on what we've done in the past under U.S. standard of care. They're not based on what's going on going forward and what's out there in the future and what's beyond standard of care. And also, statistics are very misleading because you know, you have to make generalizations. And they as someone told me early on in this, I talked to a lot of survivors and a lot of patients and one of the pancreatic cancer survivors I talked to, one of the few who made it, he was 12 years at the time since his diagnosis. He said, really, you have to think of yourself as a statistic of one, you know, because every person is unique, every cancer is unique. You know, even within the cancer, it's going to be different than any other cancer. So it's hard to generalize and place all of your faith in those generalizations. So I was able to get admitted into Stanford Health and also into UCSF and San Francisco. They both have very well-respected oncology departments. And I will say that I think I had just top quality care from from my doctors. I am very grateful to my doctors for for what they've done. So that process. But it wasn't easy because this was at a time when everybody's overwhelmed. I think our U.S. medical system, as is generally overwhelmed and it's you know, it's it's just hard to, you know, to get attention, to get in. And again, this is where the patient has to be CEO. It has to take charge. You have to be very, very assertive about these things. And I was very, very assertive. And once I did get in front of an oncologist and I saw the numbers, I saw scans, a blood tests, then everything changed that all of a sudden urgent. And because pancreatic cancer is very aggressive, very fast moving, you can't you can't wait two, three months to go get a scan. It could be dead in two, three months. Right. So they moved me a lot really quickly, put me in a treatment quickly. Now, one thing I will say about that, and I like it this way, is the doctors I had, I talked to lots of them. You know, second opinion isn't good enough for me. I bet I talked to a dozen oncologists before I decided on anything because there are a lot of different options and it's all up to the patient. Are you going to get chemo or not? You, the patient, have to decide which chemo are you going to get. There's about six or seven different kinds for this, and we're guessing which ones might work. When are you going to have surgery? Are you going to do it now? Are you going to do it three months? Are you going to do it in six months? How many months of chemo are you going to have have all of these decisions and the doctors would have opinions which almost always varied, even within the same institution would varied. no, you should do three months of chemo surgery. You should do two months in that surgery, you should do four months, you should do six months. So ultimately, at one point I just asked pharmacologists, I said, Wait a minute, are you telling me that this is up to me? And he says, Yeah, I'm afraid so. You tell us. You have to decide. These are your options. This is what I recommend, but these are your options. So it pays to be well advised and well-informed. I had every side effect that you could possibly have from the chemo. My oncologist said the first thing he told me is when I met him, this is he said, I want to apologize in advance for what I'm about to do, which is not not a great thing to hear. And he said, We're going to be very aggressive about the chemo because you look like you're strong enough to take it. And the thing about chemo, like most medicine in the US, you give the minimum effective dose, right? But chemotherapy, it's the maximum, maximum tolerable dose. Well, it turns out I can tolerate a lot. So I had six months of just pure hell. I mean, it was pretty miserable. It looked like I could age 20 years for almost back to normal now. But it was it was super unpleasant and so every side effect, plus some I'd never seen before because I was getting a lot of this stuff and some of this is still with me. I still have similar apathy, I still have some other things, but I'll get over it. I'm confident that I will heal and it did things to my arteries that they said wouldn't. Well, nobody made me any guarantees because some things to my arteries. I did not think it would happen. But I will I will feel from that too. I will get over all of this. But to combat the effects, the side effects of chemo, I was given a whole bunch of drugs and painkillers and anti-nausea and and I had this inhibitor that I don't take any of them. So it's like, you know what? The chemo is enough. You know, that's hard enough on my liver. I like my liver and my kidneys. So I didn't take any of those. You said I would rather just lie here in my bathroom for for a week and suffer and take any more drugs. And that's what I did. And I don't recommend that approach to anybody else other than a masochist like me. According to the pathology report, there was no treatment effects. So switch chemo, three months of chemo surgery and three more months of chemo. So we switched chemo to James are emphasizing and I ended that in February of 2023. And I don't know who knows what works. I mean, there's so many confounders because like I say, as I sit here today, I am cancer free, at least for now. And you might ask, why is that? Why? I can't tell you. It might have been that you might have been having surgery. The exact right time. It might have been metabolic factors. It was no doubt. Partly it's lifestyle changes. You know, there's a million things that could have contributed to this. And the way I look at it is, is cancer is a very complex group of diseases. It's not one thing. And therefore the cure is not going to be any one thing. It's going to be, I guess, multimodal, right? You're going to it's going to be a lot of things. One of the things I did that again, I'm talking about forward looking technologies, not backward looking and more of the things I've done that is very cutting edge and forward looking, even though it's been around for ten years, is a cancer vaccine. And the vaccine that I got, I went through after it took me a little while to find people that do this legitimately and are not out there just trying to steal money from dying cancer patients. But I did find groups that do this legitimately, and I received last year a neoantigen peptide vaccine. I also received anti cell expansion therapy and dendritic cell expansion therapy, as well as some other things. I'm going in for that next month. I'm going in for a second round of a different set of targets, same concept, new antigen peptides, and I really think that's the future. That is the cure. That is the cancer cure. That's the future because chemo doesn't kill all the stem cells, right? So it's stuck and it always stops working. Everyone knows that, right? Radiation is not a cure. Even my radiologist told me that, you know, surgery bias you a little time, but there's micro metastases and that's not going to be an option. So really, we have to train our own bodies to deal with this. And and the way I look at it, I mean, how did this cancer start? Well, it was an invasion of my immune system. So I think where we start is by strengthening system. I think if anyone is really considering getting a cancer vaccine, I went to Japan to have mine the first round anyway, because they could they don't they're not subject to FDA rules, so they could move more quickly. And with pancreatic cancer, it's important to move quickly and a surprisingly high percentage of people that pay for this vaccine in the US end up dying before they get it, because it takes so long to get through the FDA testing protocols. I didn't want to wait around and guess so. I went to Japan and I got it. I got it done quickly. Importantly, the physician I chose there also has his own lab, and that's really important. So the administering physician, you know, also could get it from his own lab. So I didn't have to worry about any disconnect between those two components. Do it and that. So that was once I figured it out, it wasn't that difficult. But figuring out which vaccine, which lab, and then you got to find a company that finds the peptides right in a peptide, you know, it's just a string of maybe nine amino acids. It's but believe it or not, technology now exist. It's out of pocket. All of this is out of pocket. And it is it is very expensive. And, and I acknowledge that it's it may be just simply beyond the reach of a lot of cancer patients. And the reason it's out of pocket is because it's not FDA approved. And I and I don't understand why I honestly do not understand why there is no downside that, you know, this is not like a drug. It's not like a checkpoint inhibitor turn on your body. It turn your immune system against yourself. It doesn't do that at all. You're using your own cells. It's so I don't get it. And I've written the FDA have testified to the FDA. I've been like beating the drum that we really need. Now. I'm getting this vaccine in the United States under an expanded access application to the FDA. They also call that compassionate use. And that is an approach. But it's another big red tape, bureaucratic process that we should not make people go through. And it's really it's unfortunate that it costs so much. Now, I will tell people who are considering this that to get it in another country, you can get the exact same vaccine for a fraction of the cost. It's about one fifth the cost to do this in Japan. And it's costing me to do this here. And it's the same vaccine the way I look at it. So cancer, I look at it like like there was a fire in a house and Nicole or a test and the printable test, they found the fire. Okay. And I call the doctors, my firemen. They came in, they put out the fire. But, you know, they didn't leave me any fire extinguisher in case this happens again. And they also didn't bother asking why did that fire start in the first place? Well, to me, the vaccine is the fire extinguisher. If this does you know, if those those cancer cells are still in my body, the vaccines are going to find them and snuff about it. But more importantly, what did I do to make this happen again? Now, if you ask that question, doctors and my doctor said this over and over, this isn't your fault. There's nothing you do. It's just luck of the draw. Bad luck. You know, it's not your fault. It wasn't because you ate too much sugar or you drank too much or you didn't exercise. It's just bad luck. Well, okay. There's a large component of that. That's true. A lot of it is luck. But on the other hand, I do believe there is a cause for every effect. And I had to go back and say, what could I improve in my life that would make my body as inhospitable as possible to a cancer cell? And I made major, major changes. My diet is much different now than it used to be, right? It is this anti-cancer diet as they come. I wear a blood glucose monitor. I'm not diabetic, but I keep my blood glucose. My blood glucose is now lower than it's been in ten years. Probably. I exercise a lot because that is probably the number one thing. Heavy exercise studies show reduce the risk of cancer recurrence by 50%. 50%. Tell me a chemo drug that does that. And then there's supplements, there's cortisol, there's a there's a lot of things. Sauna therapy I think helps because that creates I learned that in Japan, it creates heat shock proteins that a normal cell can manage just fine, But a heat shock protein to a cancer cell completely messes it up and makes it maybe makes it visible to your immune system or maybe just kills it through mechanical stress. And the big one, though, that where people say, I might have got a little overboard on this is cold therapy. I've really gotten into cold therapy, cold water, ice Mavs in the wintertime, I'll go run in the snow, you know, with with just my running shorts on as long as I can stand it. And I think it helps. I think the cold, cold therapy has made my immune system a lot stronger than it was. And it also increased the brown fat in my body and I've got the DEXA scans to back that up and that is reduced my blood glucose, which means that it's less likely that these sugar hungry cancer cells are going to get all the nutrition that they want. Being your own advocate is super important and you just have to be assertive. You have to be super assertive about this. That's hard for a lot of cancer patients. You've heard about the Type C person. How are these? I don't know if there's anything to that or not, but it's hard to, you know, kind of demand that your doctor do stuff, you know, when they're the expert, you know, what do you know? But you just got to be your own advocate and you have to self educate. Now, number two is, you know, if if you if you do standard of care treatment, you're going to get a standard of care result. And that's all those bad statistics you're looking at, those are all standard of care statistics. You got to be willing to go a little further than that. So and then the third thing is, is don't lose hope, right? Because the things are moving so quickly.
