Michael Retsky awoke from surgery to bad news. The tumor in his colon had spread to four of his lymph nodes and penetrated the bowel wall. When Retsky showed the pathology report to William Hrushesky, his treating oncologist, the doctor exclaimed, “Mamma mia.”
“Michael had a mean-looking cancer,” Hrushesky remembers.
Retsky didn’t need anyone to tell him his prognosis. Although trained as a physicist, he had switched careers to cancer research in the early 1980s and spent more than a decade modeling the growth of breast cancer tumors. During his treatment, he joined the staff of one of the most prestigious cancer research labs in the country.
In the absence of chemotherapy, there was an 80 percent chance of relapse. Even with therapy, there was a 50 percent chance the cancer would return. The standard treatment was brutal. Six months of the highest dose of chemotherapy his body could withstand and, after that, nothing but hope.
Like many cancer patients, Retsky didn’t much like the odds. Unlike most cancer patients, however, he had the knowledge to question them. His own research had sown doubts that standard chemotherapy, as used the world over to treat colon and some breast cancers, was always the best approach. In collaboration with Hrushesky, the two devised an inexpensive, low-impact chemo treatment following surgery that dripped smaller doses of the drug into his body over a longer period of time.
Seventeen years later and cancer-free, Retsky cannot be entirely sure the treatment cured him...continued....
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