Nina's Fight With Cancer

Nina Petrow is a 38-year-old mother living in San Antonio, Texas.  She is married to Randy Pike. She is an accomplished lawyer, avid runner and above all a FIGHTER.   On November 29, 2016, Nina was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer called Cholangiocarcinoma (Stage IV).  She had given birth to her son Niko six weeks before her diagnosis.   Only 2.4% of the U.S. population is diagnosed with this type of cancer (normally men over 60/primarily Asian or Hispanic).  In the midst of fighting cancer and practicing law, Nina is working hard to bring awareness to this rare disease.

We are friends of Nina and Randy. We are listing our connection to this story in the interest of being transparent. We set up this effort to help support Nina partcipate in the  drug trials. They are grueling but they get her more time with Randy and Niko, who is now 15 months old. The funds will be directly deposited into their account.

Randy has documented their aggressive fight with cancer in his blog "Married to Cancer ." Randy hopes their journey can help other families who are cancer warriors.  We have included an excerpt from his blog below.  

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Married to Cancer:
By Randy Pike

I’m not exactly sure what hit the hardest – the first or the second time the doc looked at my 38-year-old wife and said “you have cancer”. The first time I was sitting next to her holding our 5-month-old son, and the news hit me like a ton of bricks…out of nowhere…and I was devastated. The second time – after all the surgeries, chemo, drains, pain, suffering, work – I think I was just mad. So mad I wanted to light the world on fire.

We both expected a recurrence – cholangio carcinoma almost always comes back – but so soon? Was all of the hope blind? Did the chemotherapy not work? Had we done something wrong? Had we trusted the wrong people? Or…is this just the reality of it all?

I started Married to Cancer to shed light on our experience for those walking along this path behind us. Admittedly, it has – at times – become an outlet for how I’m feeling…which, I guess, is part of the experience of being a husband with a wife with cholangio carcinoma. To sum it all up, there isn’t really much to say other than ‘this ride really sucks’.

We know about 5 small tumors in her liver. A team of docs said 1 or 2 of them are granulomas — or non-cancerous tumors — while 1 of them is confirmed to be cancer and the rest are simply suspicious. However, another team says they’re all cancer and there are probably 8-10 more that cannot be seen. Who the heck knows?

Nina is currently awaiting entry into a double-blind trial managed by MD Anderson where she will receive therapy to directly target her gene mutations. The hope is to keep the tumors from growing, or perhaps to make them shrink. I don’t know how long the trial lasts (90 days, maybe?). I don’t what happens after the trial. Other than Nina’s sheer will to keep pushing forward like a mad woman, I’m not really sure about much, to be honest.

I guess all I really know is surgery, cisplatin, gemzar and xeloda worked for a little while — but it wasn’t the cure for which we had hoped.

Nina’s last chemo was June 2nd. We found out the cancer had returned at the end of August. We had about 8 weeks of feeling as if we had beaten the beast. That was – for absolute sure – not nearly long enough.
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