When Ruth Phillips was just 47 years old, she was diagnosed with Peritoneal mesothelioma lung cancer, specifically on July 1st, 1999. As of today, she is still living large and enjoying life, and is better off. Born in 1952, Ruth was diagnosed with Peritoneal mesothelioma at the Redmond Regional Medical Center in Rome, Georgia. At first, the diagnosis was of Ovarian cancer which is malignant or Cancerous tumor deriving from an ovary. The diagnosis process began through a Laparotomy (surgical procedure that puts an incision through the abdominal wall to gain access to the abdomen and abdominal cavity). The medical doctor wanted to find out why her Colon was blocked for 9 days. After a huge 16" vertical incision, the doctors found malignant tumors residing in the Omentum and immediately took steps to remove this. The doctors also found 1/4 of the Cancer covering her abdominal wall and thousands of small seed sized tumors spreading over her large and small bowels. An initial pathology report conducted showed that Ruth had mesothelioma, but the doctors chose to disregard this and instead diagnosed her with Stage 3B ovarian cancer. After this, a Mediport was installed in Ruth's body (Mediport is a device that is implanted under a patient's skin so that medicine may be delivered to the blood system). A second pathology report conducted by the Armed Forces Institute also confirmed that Ruth was suffering from Peritoneal mesothelioma.
In the 2nd round, the doctors also started to believe in the diagnosis, and gave Ruth a life prognosis of between 8 - 12 months to live. Ruth was determined to live longer than this and to fight this, thus she looked up for any Peritoneal mesothelioma clinical trials happening on other Cancer websites such as Mayo Clinic, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, MD Anderson, and Johns Hopkins but none seemed to be offering clinical trials. In the hope of finding the right Cancer treatment, Ruth went to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and spoke to a Mesothelioma expert that had witnessed only a few Peritoneal mesothelioma cases in his career and could not confirm nor had research details on how the prognosis would be. The treatment provided in this Cancer center was pouring of heated chemo liquids directly on to the abdominal cavities of the patients. Ruth decided she was not going to get her treatment done by this mesothelioma expert as no concrete evidence or results were known. However, on November 30, 1999, she went to an IAT treatment therapy in the Bahamas. IAT stands for Immuno-Augmentive Therapy and provides immunological treatments to Cancer sufferers. The treatments in this clinic were not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but Ruth spoke to patients who had treatment there and received positive feedback. Spending 3 months in the clinic, Ruth received daily out-patient treatments from Monday to Friday and each day involved exercise, lab therapies and self-administered injections.
Ruth stopped having Computed Tomography (CT) scans 5 years ago because she was exposed to Radiation and the CT scans were not really helping her fight her Peritoneal cancer. Ruth does tumor marker tests that still pick up the minute traces of Proteins that mesothelioma lung cancer is known to destroy off. For this reason, she has a reason to live, and when the tumor marker tests do not detect the proteins, she gets a CT scan to determine the path of blockage or where the tumors reside. Over these 10 years, Ruth has learned to "live with lung cancer, and not die from it." She says she has put all her energy to initiate and develop her own Cancer treatment, and not rely fully on doctors. She feels this gives her a sense of empowerment. It is due to this reason she believes she has been able to live more than 8-12 months as suggested by her doctors. At the moment, Ruth is 56 years old and although she tries to make the most of her life, she faces many setbacks such as her employer laying her off when they believed her Cancer was 'terminally ill.'She now survives off Social Security Disability and Medicare. Apart from this, Ruth goes to church and helps preach the Bible to others.