Gifts of Love for Gillian
Donation protected
Okay this is probably going to be a really long story, because so many people don't understand at all what has happened. I apologize for my terrible punctuation as Gillian always edited almost everything I did and put punctuation in for me.
Gillian and I have been self-employed since 2003 and in 2006 I was able to quit my regular job. Self-employed people tend to not be able to find decent insurance that's affordable so we ended up going with Christian Healthcare Network. They reimburse 100% of anything that happens in a hospital or emergency room, but the keyword is reimburse.
Late last summer Gillian had a lump show up and after very exhaustive research we found that if there was pain in the breast during menstrual time then it was NOT cancer. I tried (even to the point of a fight) to get her to go get it checked out and as most of you know Gillian hates going to doctors and needles and all that. She figured it was just a benign tumor and it reacted very well to nascent iodine and Evening Primrose oil. It shrank a bit at first then stayed the same size. Fast forward to this summer I talked her into going and getting it checked out by a nurse practitioner that she respected. The nurse practitioner was pretty sure it was not cancer because of the predictable pain every month, but she wanted Gillian to go through the whole gamut of tests to make sure.
We got the test done just for peace of mind, but to our amazement the doctor said he sees this kind of thing all the time and he believes it's cancer and we needed to wait on the biopsy to see for sure. We were shocked! It turns out there was one kind of cancer that will cause pain at a certain time of the month and she had that one. So, we got an appointment with an oncologist in Minden and he told us at that point she had a 40% chance which he said could improve to a 60 or 100% chance as soon as she started chemo. He just didn't know what the odds were until he saw how she reacted with chemo, so he recommended to immediately go have a port put in so she did.
After the port got put in the oncologist wanted to talk with her and he told her you have reimbursement insurance and this medicine is so expensive we can't give it to you and wait 6 or 8 months for them to pay us back. This is going to be a six-figure treatment, so we had to start looking for another way. Obamacare has a window from November to January 31 to sign up then you can't use it until February… This is cancer we can't wait! Medicaid turned her down, even though we didn't make very much money in our business last year, because I took some money out of an IRA and it messed up our chances of getting Medicaid.
My amazing sister called one day and asked what we were waiting on and I said we have to get some sort of insurance worked out because they can't do the treatments because it is going to get too expensive too quick. Much to our amazement she said don't worry about the cost I will pay for it and if you want to look into alternative methods to deal with cancer until you can get the insurance straight, go ahead just let me know what you want to do.
So after a lot of research we found that there were some alternative methods that combine a smaller dose of regular chemo along with homeopathic methods. The main method was called IPT or insulin potentiation therapy. This is where they use insulin to lower your blood sugar to around 40 then when the cancer is screaming for some sugar then they send in a dose of chemo which is basically regular chemo but only 10% of the regular dose. In the chemo they also used dextrose which will bring your blood sugar back up, but when cancer sees sugar it slurps it all up and gets chemo right down to the heart of it.
Now, before you start judging about anything alternative you need to realize that traditional methods were not possible until February because of the stupid Obamacare rules. Alternative cancer therapy was something to either fix the cancer or it would be a first step to get us to February so she could go through traditional cancer treatments. Traditional cancer treatments were plan B, but until February they were completely unavailable. I don't know how much money my sister has but I feel like regular chemo, surgery and radiation would probably be completely out of the budget.
The IPT therapy seemed like to us the perfect 1st line of defense to help her get something done right now that wouldn't send my sister into financial ruin. If it didn't work fine, but at the very worst it would have given us time and that's what we needed to get her to the point we could do regular chemo, surgery and radiation. On top of that our research showed us that IPT had a much better rate of success than traditional cancer treatments with a much longer timeframe before getting cancer again according to statistics.
The only problem about IPT as they do not offer it in our area, but they do offer it in Nevada. So, we loaded up the van and headed out there. Last Tuesday on the 20th she got her 1st IPT treatment and it went very well. When they lowered her blood glucose levels she felt hot and sweaty, but she was okay because it didn't last long. She got another IPT treatment on Thursday and it went even better than the 1st one. It looked like she had this thing down. We would even go to the lake and go for a hike when she got home every evening. I stayed at the cabin and worked, Caden stayed here with me and did his homeschool, and Megan would go with Mama then go to Starbucks to do her homework. When Mama texted her she would come back over and pick her up when her treatments were done and Megan would drive Gillian home.
So Monday on the 26th she had another IPT treatment to do. She got her insulin her blood glucose level went to around 40 or a little below and they gave her the chemo along with the dextrose. Her blood sugar was increasing nicely and they gave her the yogurt she brought to eat when her blood sugar had increased to over 60 something. After these treatments she was ravenously hungry so they recommend bringing something to eat.
While she was eating her yogurt she became unresponsive and the nurses immediately called to the doctor who was on site. The doctor who was filling in for the regular doctor was actually a cardiologic anesthesiologist who is no stranger to people becoming unresponsive. This is what he does on a daily basis. He is used to people's lives being placed in his hands every day. He immediately started CPR and put in breathing tubes while the ambulance was getting there. They tried and tried repeatedly to get her back and she would not respond no matter what.
I talked with the pathologist who did the autopsy and she said the cancer had not spread anywhere except the breast and the 3 lymph nodes that we already knew about from the scans we had done in Minden, LA. She said all her organs were absolutely perfect and until they send some things off for lab reports they are not going to be able to come to a decision about the cause of death. It's like she left this earth without any cause or reason.
Now, before some of you say they needed another angel in Heaven or they needed someone to sing in the choir in Heaven I can promise you they can wait on her. I can also tell you it was not her choice to leave here because she has 2 teenage children who are being homeschooled and she takes their education very seriously. I'm no good to them in that area. We were both looking forward to grandchildren someday and her biggest concern about cancer was that she wanted to make sure live to see them grow up. Our family is way closer than most families and we are pretty much inseparable, so I can assure you no matter how great Heaven is she would not have shirked responsibility down here to get there sooner. We talked about this many times. Trust me I KNOW her wishes.
We had a week with her here on Lake Tahoe and everything seemed so magical. We reunited with old friends and relatives that we haven't seen in 3 years. We didn't get to take a vacation this year, so it seemed like we were actually going to get a month-long vacation while she was getting treated and she was enjoying it as much as we were. Yes we were still at work, still doing homeschool, but we were actually having the vacation we missed in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
I'm not going to pretend that everything is all right. The three of us are utterly crushed. We may look like everything is okay the outside but it's not. My first night was spent without a wink of sleep and every time I started to fall asleep I had a vision that played the dreaded phone call over again were I started screaming bloody murder.
Every hour we are faced with new things she did that we know nothing about and now we have to figure it out. We are not independent people that easily assimilate after something like this, because we were heavily dependent on her. She was the life force behind this family. She meant so much to so many people, but it was nothing like what she meant to us.
The love and support we have had from friends and relatives has been unbelievable. Everyone would love to help and I have no idea what to tell them to do. Loving us actually does feel really good. I can really feel love coming from so many different places, so many different people. I didn't even realize we knew so many people. So, just love us pray for us. So, if I have told you I will call you back I apologize in advance, because probably at least a dozen close friends are waiting on me to call them and I just can't seem to make it happen. The doctor that tried to save her called me twice today and was in tears about what happened.
Please don't send flowers to us in Lake Tahoe, because our cabin can't hold them and it looks like a lot of people want to send them our old church in Reno and we are not going to have a service there. We are going to have a celebration of her life here in South Lake Tahoe on Kiva Beach on Saturday at 1 PM. This Lake is our favorite place in the whole world and we thought that would be the perfect place for her. A few flowers for the beach may be nice, but we can't get too wild. This will be for friends and relatives in the Reno/Tahoe area and California. We will also have another service in Louisiana, probably in Ruston, for all of our Louisiana/Arkansas friends and relatives. If you want to send flowers that would probably be a better option, but we don't know when that service will be.
Keep loving us and praying for us!
Gillian and I have been self-employed since 2003 and in 2006 I was able to quit my regular job. Self-employed people tend to not be able to find decent insurance that's affordable so we ended up going with Christian Healthcare Network. They reimburse 100% of anything that happens in a hospital or emergency room, but the keyword is reimburse.
Late last summer Gillian had a lump show up and after very exhaustive research we found that if there was pain in the breast during menstrual time then it was NOT cancer. I tried (even to the point of a fight) to get her to go get it checked out and as most of you know Gillian hates going to doctors and needles and all that. She figured it was just a benign tumor and it reacted very well to nascent iodine and Evening Primrose oil. It shrank a bit at first then stayed the same size. Fast forward to this summer I talked her into going and getting it checked out by a nurse practitioner that she respected. The nurse practitioner was pretty sure it was not cancer because of the predictable pain every month, but she wanted Gillian to go through the whole gamut of tests to make sure.
We got the test done just for peace of mind, but to our amazement the doctor said he sees this kind of thing all the time and he believes it's cancer and we needed to wait on the biopsy to see for sure. We were shocked! It turns out there was one kind of cancer that will cause pain at a certain time of the month and she had that one. So, we got an appointment with an oncologist in Minden and he told us at that point she had a 40% chance which he said could improve to a 60 or 100% chance as soon as she started chemo. He just didn't know what the odds were until he saw how she reacted with chemo, so he recommended to immediately go have a port put in so she did.
After the port got put in the oncologist wanted to talk with her and he told her you have reimbursement insurance and this medicine is so expensive we can't give it to you and wait 6 or 8 months for them to pay us back. This is going to be a six-figure treatment, so we had to start looking for another way. Obamacare has a window from November to January 31 to sign up then you can't use it until February… This is cancer we can't wait! Medicaid turned her down, even though we didn't make very much money in our business last year, because I took some money out of an IRA and it messed up our chances of getting Medicaid.
My amazing sister called one day and asked what we were waiting on and I said we have to get some sort of insurance worked out because they can't do the treatments because it is going to get too expensive too quick. Much to our amazement she said don't worry about the cost I will pay for it and if you want to look into alternative methods to deal with cancer until you can get the insurance straight, go ahead just let me know what you want to do.
So after a lot of research we found that there were some alternative methods that combine a smaller dose of regular chemo along with homeopathic methods. The main method was called IPT or insulin potentiation therapy. This is where they use insulin to lower your blood sugar to around 40 then when the cancer is screaming for some sugar then they send in a dose of chemo which is basically regular chemo but only 10% of the regular dose. In the chemo they also used dextrose which will bring your blood sugar back up, but when cancer sees sugar it slurps it all up and gets chemo right down to the heart of it.
Now, before you start judging about anything alternative you need to realize that traditional methods were not possible until February because of the stupid Obamacare rules. Alternative cancer therapy was something to either fix the cancer or it would be a first step to get us to February so she could go through traditional cancer treatments. Traditional cancer treatments were plan B, but until February they were completely unavailable. I don't know how much money my sister has but I feel like regular chemo, surgery and radiation would probably be completely out of the budget.
The IPT therapy seemed like to us the perfect 1st line of defense to help her get something done right now that wouldn't send my sister into financial ruin. If it didn't work fine, but at the very worst it would have given us time and that's what we needed to get her to the point we could do regular chemo, surgery and radiation. On top of that our research showed us that IPT had a much better rate of success than traditional cancer treatments with a much longer timeframe before getting cancer again according to statistics.
The only problem about IPT as they do not offer it in our area, but they do offer it in Nevada. So, we loaded up the van and headed out there. Last Tuesday on the 20th she got her 1st IPT treatment and it went very well. When they lowered her blood glucose levels she felt hot and sweaty, but she was okay because it didn't last long. She got another IPT treatment on Thursday and it went even better than the 1st one. It looked like she had this thing down. We would even go to the lake and go for a hike when she got home every evening. I stayed at the cabin and worked, Caden stayed here with me and did his homeschool, and Megan would go with Mama then go to Starbucks to do her homework. When Mama texted her she would come back over and pick her up when her treatments were done and Megan would drive Gillian home.
So Monday on the 26th she had another IPT treatment to do. She got her insulin her blood glucose level went to around 40 or a little below and they gave her the chemo along with the dextrose. Her blood sugar was increasing nicely and they gave her the yogurt she brought to eat when her blood sugar had increased to over 60 something. After these treatments she was ravenously hungry so they recommend bringing something to eat.
While she was eating her yogurt she became unresponsive and the nurses immediately called to the doctor who was on site. The doctor who was filling in for the regular doctor was actually a cardiologic anesthesiologist who is no stranger to people becoming unresponsive. This is what he does on a daily basis. He is used to people's lives being placed in his hands every day. He immediately started CPR and put in breathing tubes while the ambulance was getting there. They tried and tried repeatedly to get her back and she would not respond no matter what.
I talked with the pathologist who did the autopsy and she said the cancer had not spread anywhere except the breast and the 3 lymph nodes that we already knew about from the scans we had done in Minden, LA. She said all her organs were absolutely perfect and until they send some things off for lab reports they are not going to be able to come to a decision about the cause of death. It's like she left this earth without any cause or reason.
Now, before some of you say they needed another angel in Heaven or they needed someone to sing in the choir in Heaven I can promise you they can wait on her. I can also tell you it was not her choice to leave here because she has 2 teenage children who are being homeschooled and she takes their education very seriously. I'm no good to them in that area. We were both looking forward to grandchildren someday and her biggest concern about cancer was that she wanted to make sure live to see them grow up. Our family is way closer than most families and we are pretty much inseparable, so I can assure you no matter how great Heaven is she would not have shirked responsibility down here to get there sooner. We talked about this many times. Trust me I KNOW her wishes.
We had a week with her here on Lake Tahoe and everything seemed so magical. We reunited with old friends and relatives that we haven't seen in 3 years. We didn't get to take a vacation this year, so it seemed like we were actually going to get a month-long vacation while she was getting treated and she was enjoying it as much as we were. Yes we were still at work, still doing homeschool, but we were actually having the vacation we missed in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
I'm not going to pretend that everything is all right. The three of us are utterly crushed. We may look like everything is okay the outside but it's not. My first night was spent without a wink of sleep and every time I started to fall asleep I had a vision that played the dreaded phone call over again were I started screaming bloody murder.
Every hour we are faced with new things she did that we know nothing about and now we have to figure it out. We are not independent people that easily assimilate after something like this, because we were heavily dependent on her. She was the life force behind this family. She meant so much to so many people, but it was nothing like what she meant to us.
The love and support we have had from friends and relatives has been unbelievable. Everyone would love to help and I have no idea what to tell them to do. Loving us actually does feel really good. I can really feel love coming from so many different places, so many different people. I didn't even realize we knew so many people. So, just love us pray for us. So, if I have told you I will call you back I apologize in advance, because probably at least a dozen close friends are waiting on me to call them and I just can't seem to make it happen. The doctor that tried to save her called me twice today and was in tears about what happened.
Please don't send flowers to us in Lake Tahoe, because our cabin can't hold them and it looks like a lot of people want to send them our old church in Reno and we are not going to have a service there. We are going to have a celebration of her life here in South Lake Tahoe on Kiva Beach on Saturday at 1 PM. This Lake is our favorite place in the whole world and we thought that would be the perfect place for her. A few flowers for the beach may be nice, but we can't get too wild. This will be for friends and relatives in the Reno/Tahoe area and California. We will also have another service in Louisiana, probably in Ruston, for all of our Louisiana/Arkansas friends and relatives. If you want to send flowers that would probably be a better option, but we don't know when that service will be.
Keep loving us and praying for us!
Organizer and beneficiary
Angie Williams
Organizer
Junction City, AR
Jason Draper
Beneficiary
