My Mother had duodenal cancer back in 89-90 with invasion to the liver. She died March 5, 1991 on my birthday....she never wanted me to forget her...so I guess she checked out on my B-Day to insure it.
Anyway, when the tumor popped up in the liver about eight months after surgery, they gave her two months to live....she had 10 tumors in the liver.
I decide to "wage war" on the cancer, my Mother being a tough old nurse for 50 years....Red Cross nurse during WW2 and spending her post WW2 days as the head nurse of a "crazy ward" at Winchester Medical Center, she was tough as nails.
We bought her about 18 months using the drug 5-FU with lucavorin. The lucavorin increased the effectiveness of 5-FU, which is the standard cancer drug (been around for years), while minimizing the side effects. She lost no hair and had minimal side effects.
Nine of the ten tumor disappears and the tenth was almost gone, but it came back like a freight train and eventually took her life.
She was 77 when she died and at that time there were only 6 cases of duodenal cancer in the U.S. She also had TB of the Bone which complicated issues (only 40 cases of the form of TB in the U.S. at the time).....she was the only person in the world that had both those two diseases together.
Anyway, had she been younger and not had the TB she would have beaten the duodenal cancer....but it wasn't meant to be.
Dr. John Cameron, chief surgeon at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore handled my Mother's case. He's still there. Johns Hopkins is ranked as the best overall hospital in the U.S. (U.S. News & World Report) and rank 3rd in Cancer. They know their stuff.
Jim Silvester
P.S. Two years after Mother died, her best friend in West Virginia died of the same thing, which I reported to the New England Journal of Medicine. And my pet dog, Bixley, just came down with the stuff. I figure those odds about 1 billion to 1. That's why I am suffing the net about the latest on the disease.
Good Luck everyone and my prayers are with you.