You're right about the type of pain she has, possible selenium overdose, other questions

Thank you for the reply.

One of my mom's acquaintances gave her a bottle of "lipidic selenium," which looks like a type of oil. He told her to take a capful of it, which he thought was around 5 drops, which are the directions on the bottle. A cap, it turns out, is around 27 drops, and she has been taking his for 5 days. I'm not sure what the dose is in each drop or bottle, but it is more than 5x than what is recommended on the bottle. She does not really have any of the symptoms of selenium overdose that I came across, however. Anyway, after this guy found out that she took so many drops, he told her to take cranberry extract and drink cranberry juice to flush it out of her system. Just in case, I told her to stop taking nattokinase and cayenne in the meantime due to their blood thinning properties. What should we use to flush the excess selenium out? By the way, her pain from heavy breathing, coughing, etc. increased quite a bit since she started taking this lipidic selenium five days ago, but I'm not sure if there is a connection. After taking some cranberry extract and drinking cranberry juice, she went to the bathroom and some of this pain eased up just a little.

We will ask her to stop taking the advice of other people, as it can sometimes be dangerous, it seems. She is doing enough, we think, and does not have to be adding more things to an already large number of herbs, minerals, and treatments. I think that you're the only person who was actually able to help her so far (and she's very grateful).

Since she has a particularly severe case of inflammation, how much yucca and licorice root do you recommend daily? We use 00 capsules. We will also give her fish oil and boswellia extract.

While the oxycodone and Exalgo may be reducing her pain threshold, her increase in pain since December was not all that gradual, so it may have less to do with the pills. By the way, the oncologist said that Exalgo (hydromorphone) is a new opioid drug that comes in up to 16 mg per pill. She takes double the dose, 32 mg, per day. Seems like a pretty scary drug, actually: "A low dosing user of hydromorphone opting or otherwise forced to quit "cold turkey" can expect a withdrawal syndrome as intense as that of morphine but much more severe" (from Wikipedia).

You are right on with the type of pain that she's experiencing: the affected part of her chest is very tight with a powerful pulling sensation, and movement, coughing, etc. causes her to have these sharp, jerky pains. But she gets these sharp jerky pains even when she is not moving sometimes as well. And of course, she has a constant pain in the region that sometimes eases up and other times gets worse, not just when she moves or coughs. It helps explain why the baking soda is not helping much, and why after stopping ozone the pain persists. When you say that "the contraction of scar tissue can also cause pain," how does scar tissue cause pain, exactly?

Why does she have scar tissue where the tumor is? Is it just from the destruction of the tumor? Besides nattokinase and red sage root (found in your cardiovascular formula, so it is in that amount), do you have any other recommendations to break down this scar tissue (I'm also ordering serrapeptase and ginger right now).

Is there anything else that you recommend for pain from this scar tissue? Can it somehow be alleviated before the tissue breaks down, something for more immediate relief when the pain is at its worst? She is taking DLPA, and has been taking it for a while, but probably only half (or less) of your recommended dose. Is there anything else specifically for this issue?

Also, she keeps an ice bottle on her chest to numb the internal pain as well as the skin -- is there anything better? She sometimes uses a cabbage leaf to deal with some of the pain from inflammation. Should we try aloe vera?

What is the pus composed of? What is being carried out of her body? She is also constantly rubbing Neosporin on this large area -- are there any problems in doing this? Can you recommend something better? She uses it because she says that her wounds will reopen if she does not.

Should we be worrying about the pericardial effusion right now? The oncologist went over the results of the last scan somewhat, but did not mention it, or mentioned the effusion very briefly. How do we go about treating it or finding the cause of it?

I thought that her prolactin levels had to do with excess estrogen that the ozone destroyed. Can this be solely due to stress now? Again, the milk stopped for about three months and recently started again.

We cannot figure out what's going on with her right arm. As you already know, it's very puffy, but not painful. It sometimes affects her wrist, but has not been affecting it lately. It's been this way since the summer. She stopped ozone for a week in late September, and at that point, the puffiness mostly left, and she regained a bit more movement with her arm (her chest hurts very, very sharply if she even tries to move it up or down, as it's always resting at her side, horizontally across her stomach). This has not happened after stopping ozone this time, and it in fact became even puffier. There also seems to be a correleation between how puffy her arm is and her other symptons of general pain, unease, etc., but that may just be placebo (my arm is getting better, so I must be getting better). The oncologist said that it may be a blood clot, but you disagreed. Her lymph nodes are nonenlarged. What can we do or try in order to figure this out? Have any of your patients experienced this after undergoing ozone therapy? If you can deduce something from the PET/CT when you get the chance, that would be helpful.

About the lack of PET/CT standardization -- how much of an effect will it have? I understand that no tests can be perfect, especially those that are prone to interpretation, but how much can they differ? We saw that the chest SUV numbers were cut exactly in half, as were the numbers in several other regions -- can it differ so wildly? The tumor turned out to be over 20% smaller (even more if we believe that half of it is scar tissue by now) -- is that within the margin of any possible discrepancies? Or are all of those differences too great to simply be attributed to lack of standardization?

By the way, when the oncologist insisted that it's possible the cancer spread to the bones (but she's not sure herself) and I bring up the normal calcium levels, she says that elevated calcium is only sometimes present in bony metastases. Some other online sources say the same thing. I'm trying to make sense of why she disagrees with you. It seems to me that the destruction of bone will have to end up in the blood and thus in the tests, but I'm not going to pretend to understand all of the nuances of cancer.

When you get the chance, please update this thread or another one of mine or my brother's with your impressions of the latest scan.