Let the Treatment Begin!

Sunday we bid goodbye to Madeleine and Andreas -- they were such a godsend! - and took the train to Nurnberg, where we stayed for a couple of nights in the "Altstadt", the medieval part of the town that was painstakingly rebuilt after being bombed extensively during WWII. Here Liz and I discussed our strategy going forward (we liked Thaller a lot, but his treatment program is much more expensive!), and geared up for returning to Markt Berolzheim. By Tuesday morning we had acquired a cheap rental car (with a TomTom navigating device, a must for going to small towns!) and drove down to begin treatment.

Dr. Thaller gave us a warm welcome again, and gave me a "focus diagnostic" that led him to prescribe various homeopathic remedies for general detoxification. On the 2nd morning, I began the fever therapy -- 1 hour after the injection, I was shivering with chills, then in another 20 minutes I had a 103 - 104 degree fever (up to 38.9 Celsius) -- whew, that put me through the wringer very quickly! I spent all afternoon recovering from that. Fortunately I met two other patients with their helpers here who were all English-speakers -- they had all come over on the recommendation of Ralph Moss from the Moss report; this was really reaffirming that we were not alone in our strange quest to come to this farm town in Bavaria!

Thursday we spent the day driving cross-country to a very nice hospital clinic in the Black Forest . We stopped for lunch at a great café in Nordlingen, and enjoyed the scenery as we approached the "Black Forest" -- we are in a town, Donaueschingen, where the Danube River begins, and it is extremely beautiful. The windows to the hospital room are open all night, there is no TV in the room, and both my hospital room and Liz's family room are 30 Euros a night -- which seems incredibly low! Here a colleague of Dr. Thaller's, Dr Geiger, will insert two ports in my upper chest directly underneath the skin. Each will have a catheter in it that will guide either a virus or cancer vaccine injection directly to the neighborhood of the tumor . The idea is not to have the injection diluted by having to go through the entire bloodstream first; it will instead target the exact area of the tumor. The devices themselves won't be visible from the outside -- they will just be bumps in the skin, but injections can be made directly into their nylon core without any pain. Dr. Geiger seems very adept and intelligent, so I am looking forward to going off to the operation in a few minutes here!

(just back from the operation, everything went great. I came out of the anesthesia in a snap, and the doctor said the operation went very quickly. This afternoon there is a HUGE double rainbow outside the window -- very auspicious!)