Chad Sears has had two surgeries to remove a recurring cancerous tumor from his brain, and family members have noticed that each operation costs the 31-year-old a little more of his comic nature.
"Apparently, I used to be a lot funnier," deadpans Sears, who once performed stand-up routines for family and friends.
His brain tumor, a slow-growing malignancy, recently reappeared for the third time in eight years, about a year after the second surgery.
Although he's lived longer than the odds would have it, Sears doesn't want to go through another surgery followed by radiation and chemotherapy. It won't buy him much more than another year, he says, maybe less.
Instead, he wants to go for the long odds of an alternative treatment that insurance won't cover and established medical science pooh-poohs.
Who could argue with this happily married father of three from Yakima? Who could tell anyone facing death not to reach for a cure, unproved though it might be?
This is a story of one young man's encounter with a terminal disease that he confronts on a daily basis while trying to maintain as much normalcy as possible for his children, Keegan, 14, Cameron, 7, and Jaden, 5.
"The worst part is not knowing if I'll be there for them as they grow up," Sears says.
It can be a short, quick fall back into depression and anger, but Sears is determined to keep moving forward even if it takes him outside established medicine into the unknowns of an experimental treatment.
Up to 54 percent of cancer patients seek alternative or complementary treatment, accord-ing to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. A unit of the National Institutes of Health, the center was established in 1992 in response to consumer demand for government-sponsored research into comple-mentary and alternative therapies.
Complementary medicine is the use of techniques such as massage, aromatherapy, yoga and acupuncture alongside standard treatments, often to boost the immune system or relieve the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy, like nausea.
Alternative medicine is more ambitious because it seeks a cure when standard treatments are no longer effective.
While many medical profession-als embrace complementary medicine, just as many scoff at alternative treatments, equating them with quackery.
In Sears' case, the alternative treatment is a drug that has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for certain noncancerous diseases and which also has been the subject of clinical studies on cancer patients for more than a decade.
The problem is that almost all of those studies have taken place in one clinic in Houston.
Clinic founder Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski is a medical maverick and hero to many of his patients but anathema to many oncologists and researchers. They say his results have not been sufficiently demonstrated in other clinical settings or conclusively reviewed by an objective jury of his scientific peers. They also question the safety of the drug -- a compound derived from human urine -- that he pumps into patients' veins or gives them orally.
Sears and his wife, Andrea, know all this.
They first learned of Burzynski from an article in The Wenatchee World that was reprinted in the Yakima Herald-Republic in Feb-ruary 2007. The story featured a building contractor who turned to the Houston clinic after three surgeries to remove a recurring brain tumor. (He hasn't actually been treated yet, but friends and acquaintances raised more than $40,000 toward the cost of the treatment.)
What makes the Searses ner-vous is the money they would need to pay Burzynski to treat Chad --
more than $50,000.
They don't have that kind of money. Chad works on straight commission selling insurance and Andrea is a medical lab technician. Because they struggle to stay in their westside rental near church and schools, they have reluctantly agreed to let friends and family members raise money to send him to Texas.
"When Chad came back from his initial consultation," Andrea said, "he was pretty positive that there might be this drug that could help him. But it was bittersweet news because it was so expensive."
Chad's memory sometimes fails him these days, but he recalls clearly the moment eight years ago when something went terribly awry in his head.
Waiting in the photo processing line at Kmart, he smelled a sharp odor: "It was like taking a big whiff out of a bowl of vinegar," he recalled.
He pulled the camera out of his pocket to see if it was the source. Upon sniffing, he collapsed. Only Andrea kept him from crashing to the floor.
"It felt like I had been hit in the head with a baseball," he said.
Months of medical drama ensued. Chad fell again, this time while shaving in the bathroom. He insisted on going to the emergency room, where doctors told him he probably had the flu or a migraine.
But Chad knew it was more serious and insisted on a brain scan. Sure enough, doctors saw the image of a mass in his right temporal lobe. Subsequently, he was put on a medicine to control seizures pending a decision on how to approach the mass. Doctors didn't yet know it was malignant.
Chad grew sicker and sicker, losing 60 pounds in a few weeks. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, he had developed a severe allergic reaction to the anti-seizure medication. With a 104-degree temperature, he was trying to work while being a husband and father.
Meanwhile, Andrea was
81/2 months pregnant with their second child. Given Chad's condition, her obste-trician agreed she should be induced, and Cameron, now 7, was born.
"Chad was really too sickeven to be by my side," Andrea said.
Immediately after the birth, Chad's mother took him to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Doctors there diagnosed the allergic reaction that was about to crash his liver.
In a few months, after he had recovered from the reaction, Chad underwent brain surgery. Then came the fatal news: Chad had a rare and slow-growing brain tumor in his right temple, generally called a glioma, which is similar to the diagnosis recently given to Sen. Ted Kennedy, the prominent Massachusetts Democrat.
Sears went through a phase of fierce anger at his diagnosis, and wanted to shout at people not to take their lives for granted. As an alternative, he kept his head shaved to reveal the long, jagged scar down the left side of his head.
"I just wanted people to stop complaining about their lives," he says.
But he's since learned to keep the conversation in his head positive. Andrea has noticed the difference.
"Now he's just the most sensitive guy I know. He's back to the old Chad. He embraces life," she says.
Burzynski started his clinic in 1977 after working as a researcher and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He earned his medical and doctoral degrees from the Medical Academy in Lublin, Poland.
In the late '70s, Burzyn-ski's research showed that certain compounds isolated from human urine had the potential to reverse cancer activity in cells. The compounds are peptides that, when combined with other drugs, create what Burzynski calls "antineoplastons," or drugs that combat the form-ation of new malignant cells.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Burzynski began treating patients at his clinic in the 1980s without approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Around the same time, the movement for alternative medicine began to gain political clout in Congress. Burzynski's science was good enough that the National Cancer Institute supported his trials. But disputes arose almost immediately over the design of those trials.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department persuaded a grand jury to indict Burzyn-ski on federal charges of criminal contempt, mail fraud and violations of the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. He went through two highly publicized criminal trials in 1997. One ended with a hung jury; the other found him not guilty.
The Texas State Board of Medical Examiners put limits on Burzynski's license in 1998, but they were lifted in 2004, and he is free to administer his treatments in the state of Texas, although not across state lines. That is why patients must travel to Houston.
Dr. Howard Ozer was on a team of independent reviewers who looked at Burzynski's patient data in 1998 and concluded that his clinical trials were poorly designed.
"What we have here are bad trials. ... It's not in the public interest to conduct trials that are not going to yield clear results," Ozer wrote at the time.
Ozer, now director of the Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma's Health Sciences Center, said in a recent telephone interview that he still stands by his conclusions.
"I would maintain that everything in that report is identical today," he said.
Burzynski doesn't give an inch to his critics.
"I am right. Not only am I proven right in the science, but in the hundreds of lives we have saved. We have cured many patients. If I know what I can do, how can I do nothing? It's too important to stop."
In fact, Burzynski hasn't published a cure rate. Chad and Andrea Sears know this, too. But Chad believes his brain -- with help from Burzynski -- can beat his tumor.
"It's 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical," he says. "Just like the game of golf."
When Sears got the news that the tumor had grown back for a third time -- this time more quickly -- he suspected it was related to the several months last year that he went without chemotherapy. Insurance wouldn't cover the cost, which is $4,800 a month.
His employer, Leavitt Insurance & Financial Services, a Farmers agency, worked out an arrangement to reinstate his coverage for an out-of-pocket monthly premium of $400. He paid that for a while.
But he recently qualified for the state's Basic Health Plan, a low-cost program offered to the working poor and their families. The plan likely will cover the cost of his chemotherapy with a note from his oncologist, Dr. Albert Brady of Yakima.
Brady isn't comfortable talking publicly about Sears' case. And although he's among those who don't believe Burzynski's claims, Brady won't tell Sears or any of his patients not to seek alternative treatments. Instead, he makes the point that if there was good science behind Burzynski's treatment, pharmaceutical companies would be racing to develop the drug.
"There is no magic bullet. If there was, there is so much money to be made you couldn't keep a lid on it," Brady said.
Sears appreciates his doctor's opinion, to a point.
"Dr. Brady has helped me survive this long. But honestly, if I could get another five to 10 years, I could see my kids graduate from high school and they would say, 'You know, Dad never gave up.'"
--Leah Beth Ward can be reached at 577-7626 or lward@yakimaherald.com. To see more of the Yakima Herald-Republic or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.yakima-herald.com/. Copyright (c) 2008, Yakima Herald-Republic, Wash. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Copyright (C) 2008 Yakima Herald-Republic, Wash.