(09-22-23)
San
I am a professional dancer and entrepreneur.
“In all, the carbon material is nothing short of a miracle. I’ve gotten many benefits such as more energy, less nausea, less body pain, less fatigue, higher libido, and generally increased quality of life. The astonishing thing about that is there have been zero adverse side effects from the Grafex material. None.”
A.S.
My Colon Cancer trials and tribulations:
At the age of 35 years, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. It had metastasized to my liver. After emergency surgery to remove an ‘apple core’ tumor in my large intestine, and cutting out 2/3 of the large intestine, I started chemotherapy. They threw everything at me, combining the two most common standard of care treatments FOLFOX an FOLFIRI to make FOLFOX-FIRI. Leucovorin Calcium (FOLinic Acid), Fluorouracil, and Oxaliplatin make up FOLFOX, the FIRI is Fluorouracil (also called 5FU) and IRInotecan.
That treatment was very intense and difficult to endure. I encountered all the normal side effects of nausea, hair loss, constipation, fatigue, general intense sick feeling, and weakness. I also got some uncommon side effects such as balance problems, insomnia at night and difficulty waking in the morning, depression, and severe physical (not mental) anxiety. The anxiety was particularly crippling, so I was prescribed Ativan, a benzodiazepine drug. I stayed on Ativan for 18 months before I realized that it was drastically changing my personality and causing me to lose chunks of the day that I simply could not remember. Often those chunks of day were simply being frozen in place staring at something until my brain reconnected. Plus, benzos have severe adverse long-term side effects that I do not want to impose upon myself. I went through the very difficult months-long process of detoxing from Ativan, which has severe withdrawals and is potentially lethal.
The FOLFOX-FIRI treatment was very effective at first, and I was put on maintenance chemo pills, but three months later the cancer was back and worse than before. I have tumors and lesions all over my liver in every node, so I’m not a surgical candidate and a full transplant is not likely a solution either. I restarted FOLFIRI in February of 2022, became resistant to Irinotecan in October 2022, and was switched to FOLFOX with Panitumumab, which is a monoclonal antibody that targets a gene in colon cancer that is also shared with the skin’s dermis layer. This causes severe rash and acneiform breakouts on the face, head, chest, and back, sometimes going as far as the legs.
The latest solutions I’ve been working on his been Deb-TACE chemoembolization and Y-90. The TACE was not effective because the drug of choice for that process is Irinotecan and I’m already resistant to that drug. The Y-90, however, seems to be working, but I won’t know for sure for another 3 months.
I started taking the (Grafex) Nano carbon material halfway through this journey (14 months). Within days of beginning the Grafex, I noticed a sharp increase in quality of life. I felt less sick, nausea was much less severe, I had more energy as time went on, constipation was not as bad of an issue, and muscle weakness/soreness decreased somewhat. I also noticed that my hair was not so patchy and started growing it back out, using a cold cap during chemotherapy infusions to vasoconstrict the blood vessels in my scalp and keep my hair. So far so good on that front, though my hair is much softer and slightly curly now instead of the stiff straight Asian hair I’ve had my whole life. The only difference in treatment that I can point out in the case of regaining my hair is the Grafex carbon material.
The free-radical scavenging capabilities of the carbon material cannot be overstated. I’ve done massive Vitamin C infusions (also a free radical scavenger), ozone infusions, Wim Hof breathing techniques for rapid oxygenation of cells, and other such cleansing treatments and none of them compare to simply taking a couple of pills of this carbon material per day.
While taking the Grafex carbon material I have been able to recover from chemotherapy in a matter of days instead of taking a full week, have had much fewer muscle cramps, and have even avoided blood clots which are very common with this chemo treatment. It’s not recommended by my oncologist/hematologist to reduce the blood thinner regimen that I’ve been on, but the carbon has allowed me to take Xarelto once every 4 days instead of every day. Xarelto, and any blood thinner, has been one of the major things holding me back physically and mentally, and being able to reduce my dependency on blood thinners has been a huge boon. I’ll reiterate, my oncologist/hematologist strongly recommended staying on the Xarelto every day. But doctors tend to have knowledge a mile deep and an inch wide. They don’t know about this carbon material and, when it’s explained to them, they have no idea what to make of it because it’s so foreign to their usual chemistry/surgery approaches.
The Grafex carbon material also helped with my withdrawal from Ativan. On days when the withdrawal symptoms won and I forgot to take the carbon, I lost hours and hours per day to the listless, mindless nothingness of the withdrawals. But on days when I remembered to take the carbon, I missed no time at all. I cannot say for certain why that is, but it happened. Ativan withdrawal has been known to be fatal. I didn’t know that when I decided to stop it cold turkey. My withdrawals were intense and might have actually killed me if it weren’t for the carbon material, I’m certain it helped keep me alive while my body was trying to shut down.
More recently, with the Y-90 treatments, I’ve noticed a few oddities that I and my Interventional Radiologist can only identify the carbon material as the cause. Y-90 is short for Yttrium 90, a radioactive isotope commonly used in radiation treatments. Y-90 treatments involve threading a catheter from the femoral artery in the groin up to the blood supply for the liver and injecting millions of microscopic radioactive glass beads into the liver so they congregate in the small blood vessels of tumors and burn them out. The radiation only penetrates a fraction of a millimeter through the human body, so this is a good way to directly target tumors without harming healthy tissue. Problem is, the burned-out tumors leave behind scar tissue that permanently decreases the volume of a healthy liver.
However, my Interventional Radiologist and I observed some strange details. For one, the after-effects were significantly more painful than would usually occur for that treatment. This sounds like a negative, but I don’t believe it is. Do read on. The second strange detail was that everything that came out of me smelled burnt. The chemical burn smell was pervasive in my stool, my urine, and even my sweat and saliva. After about a month the smell stopped. The doctors have never heard of this effect before. My theory is that the free-radical scavenging of the carbon material was adhering to the dead tumor cells that were not yet scar tissue and removing them from my body. This would explain the smell as well as the increased pain from the inflammation caused by dumping radiation-burnt tumor cells from the body. Furthermore, I ran out of the carbon material the same day as my second Y-90 treatment, which was roughly two weeks ago as I write this. This time the pain is different. Sharp and intermittent instead of constant and depends on my sitting/standing position whereas the first time it was constant and intense no matter how I positioned myself. There is no burnt smell this time now that I’ve run out of the Grafex carbon. The nausea, malaise, fatigue, and muscle pain are much higher than the first time with the only difference being that I’ve not been taking the carbon material for two weeks.
Quality of life is much lower without the carbon. If I were to rate it as a percentage, I’m now operating at about 30% of the quality of life that the carbon material allows for, and I’m certainly going to continue using it for its tremendous benefits.
I’ll know for sure what the difference in Y-90 results are in three months when I can get a PET scan without the radiation interfering and can compare that scan to a CT scan or MRI. I suspect the scarring on the first Y-90 treatment area will be much smaller than the second.
In all, the carbon material is nothing short of a miracle. I’ve gotten many benefits such as more energy, less nausea, less body pain, less fatigue, higher libido, and generally increased quality of life. The astonishing thing about that is there have been zero adverse side effects from the carbon material. None. Even my anti-nausea medications have warning labels on them with severe side effects listed. The carbon, in my experience, has not had a single adverse effect upon me, which is rare and astonishing for any kind of treatment or medication.
I highly recommend anyone going through similar struggles to take the carbon. It’s about the closest thing to a miracle that I’ve seen thus far.
Adam