Almost all cancer patients feel shocked after knowing about their dead disease because they have little chance to be treated successfully. However, some patients have been reported to beat the terrible case. Now, take a look at themiracle survival of five particular cancer patients.
Sharon Belvin
At the age of 22, Sharon Belvin from Jamesville, North Carolina, US was diagnosed with melanoma in her lung. Two years later, she had tumors in both lungs and the few standard treatments failed.
Fortunately, the patient tried on an experimental drug called ipilimumab delivered by doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The medicine aimed to trigger the immune system against cancer.
Within four months, her lung tumors started to shrivel and they went by late 2006.
Sharon Belvin now spends time with her husband and 1-year-old daughter, Lilly Elizabeth, who she called “a miracle baby”
Belvin is currently off all treatment
Charles Burrows
Charles Burrows from Mesa, Arizona, US, had been diagnosed inoperable liver cancer by doctors at the Phoenix Veteran Affairs (VA) and he had just a month or two to live. At that time, his tumor, the size of a baseball, already started to strangle the portal vein and went into the liver.
Magically, he was among few lucky patients, whose tumors go away on their own. When Charles Burrows came back to the hospital for further examination, doctors found no sign of cancer based on computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging scans.
Charles Burrows’s case was so unusual that his doctors published it in a medical journal
“I won a lottery, and I don't understand why”, Charles Burrows said
Joseph Rick
A high school social studies teacher Joseph Rick from Los Angeles, California, US, has a purple pimple on the small of his back in 2002 and it then spread into his colon. The patient underwent nine surgeries and forty chemo rounds over two years to remove it in vain. Doctors said that he had two months to live as dozens of tumors riddled his body by fall 2004.
To lengthen his life, Joseph Rick decided to try on a new immune-system-boosting drug being tested at UCLA, similar to the one Sharon Belvin received. Luckily, visible brown tumors on his neck and thigh began to fade, and his appetite returned a week after his first infusion. By early 2006, they disappeared.
Joseph Rick had burst into tears watching the sunrise as he came back to work after a long time of treatment
Jamie C. Spencer
In the summer 2001, Jamie C. Spencer from Yakima, Washington, continuously received bad news, she lost her son in a mugging, as well as her job and health insurance. The unlucky woman then was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. No surgery was possible because tumor snaked around the portal vein supplying blood to the liver.
A miracle occurred as she underwent three months of heavy-duty chemotherapy with two drugs, followed by a fourth month that combined daily radiation with infusions of a third chemo drug and her tumor shrunk. And a nine-hour operation in March 2002 removed the rest.
Jamie C. Spencer has no been free from cancer for eight years
Jan Lesser
In February of 2000, Jan Lesser from Manhattan Beach, California, US, was diagnosed with two tumors in her right lung, two more in her liver and another in her brain.
She then took an experimental drug called Iressa, which only helped 10% of patients in trials, and her tumors had shriveled away after five months. Jan Lesser has an opportunity to see her three kids go to college and the birth of a grandson in 2006.
Jan Lesser still takes the drug every day and remains free of cancer
Cancer Survivor Stories
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