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A Navy veteran thought she was having a heart attack. A trip to the emergency room found something else.
While having an uncharacteristically quiet day at home, Navy veteran Mary Jo Burkhard began to feel strange symptoms that she thought could be signs of a heart attack.
The 71-year-old knew men and women had different symptoms for sudden cardiac events. Burkhard was determined not to ignore possible warning signs. The pain in her back and chest were alarming enough to go to an urgent care, and when she threw up the painkiller she was prescribed, she immediately went to the hospital.
Emergency room doctors ran tests, including a CAT scan. They found she wasn’t having a heart attack — but there was a three-inch cancerous tumor on her pancreas. After two days of anxious waiting, she was diagnosed with Stage II pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly forms of cancer.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna die,'” Burkhard said. Her first thoughts were of her children and grandchildren.
Dr. Alexander Itskovich, a medical director of oncology services at the Statesir Cancer Center in New Jersey, was quick to offer reassurance. Her cancer was still treatable, he said, but it would require surgery to remove the mass, and radiation and chemotherapy to eliminate as many cancerous cells as possible. It would be a long journey, and even if all went well, Burkhard would have to be closely monitored for the rest of her life. Burkhard said that the same determination that helped her in her military career helped her get through the grueling treatment schedule.
“If you can get through boot camp, you can get through anything,” Burkhard said. “It changes your mindset on how you do things, it makes you stronger and makes you into a fighter. So I was a fighter. I was fighting.”
Treating one of the most deadly cancers in the U.S.
Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute. It’s “very difficult to catch this cancer early,” said Dr. Suneel Kamath, a GI oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center who was not involved in Burkhard’s care. Early symptoms typically include vague stomach upset, abdominal pain and acid reflux, which Kamath said are easy to ignore or attribute to more mild maladies.
Often, the cancer is only found when a person seeks treatment for a different issue, Itskovich said. In Burkhard’s case, the pain she was feeling likely wasn’t even related to the pancreatic cancer, Itskovich said, but her decision to seek medical care led to the early diagnosis. Her cancer was diagnosed as Stage II. Most people with pancreatic cancer aren’t diagnosed until the disease is Stage IV, Kamath said. At that point, the cancer has spread throughout the body and treatment is unlikely to be an option.
For patients like Burkhard who can still be treated, speed is key. Just days after being diagnosed, Burkhard began chemotherapy. The sessions were every three days for more than four months. The treatment took a toll on her body: The 71-year-old often struggled with fatigue and sometimes had to call her children to help her move around the house. But it worked: Scans showed the chemotherapy had shrunk the tumor to half its size. That meant Itskovich could operate and remove the remaining mass.
During surgery, he found that the mass was attached to multiple other organs in Burkhard’s body. It took over nine hours, nearly twice the length of a typical surgery, but he was able to remove the entire tumor. The surgery was followed by more chemotherapy, as well as radiation treatment. Burkhard spent several weeks in the hospital, and while the recovery from surgery was difficult, she was actually more bothered by the puree diet she had to maintain.
“It was the only thing I could eat,” she said, calling the semi-liquid meals “worse than a military diet.”
Enjoying life with “no evidence of disease”
After completing treatment, Burkhard underwent another round of testing to confirm that the intense regimen had worked.
“I was so scared all up through the CAT scan and waiting for them, waiting for the answer,” Burkhard said. “I was just worried. I knew (Itskovich) caught everything, cut everything out, and I knew the radiation had killed the microscopic cells. I knew all that in my head, but my heart was saying ‘OK, anything can happen.’ That was scary.”
The scans came back clear, but Burkhard’s waiting isn’t over yet. She will get CAT scans every three months for the next three years, and then every six months for the next two years. The disease can recur, Kamath said, and Stage I and II pancreatic cancer only has a five-year survival rate of about 44%. Because it’s only been a short period, Burkhard can’t be described as cancer-free, but Itskovich said she currently has “no evidence of disease.”
While the coast is clear, Burkhard says she plans on enjoying her life. She’s gotten back to her community service and Veterans Affairs activities. She spoke at a special flag-raising ceremony hosted in honor of Veterans Day at the hospital where she was treated. Soon, she’ll travel to Indiana for a month for a long trip to see her grandkids. Whenever she’s back at the hospital for scans, she tries to bring positivity to the staff who she said helped save her life.
“I hug the doctors, I hug the nurses. I hug everybody in the hospital,” she said. “Everybody gets a hug.”
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Syrian insurgents have reached the suburbs of Damascus in swiftly moving offensive
Syrian insurgents have reached the suburbs of Damascus as part of a rapidly moving offensive that has seen them take over some of Syria’s largest cities, opposition activists and a rebel commander said Saturday.
Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents are now active in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. He added that opposition fighters on Saturday were also marching from eastern Syria toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta.
A commander with the insurgents, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, posted on the Telegram messaging app that opposition forces have started carrying out the “final stage” of their offensive by encircling Damascus. He added that insurgents were headed from southern Syria toward Damascus.
The redeployment away from the provinces of Daraa and Sweida came as Syria’s military sent large numbers of reinforcements to defend the key central city of Homs, Syria’s third largest, as insurgents approached its outskirts.
The rapid advances by insurgents is a stunning reversal of fortunes for Syria’s President Bashar Assad, who appears to be largely on his own, with erstwhile allies preoccupied with other conflicts.
His chief international backer, Russia, is busy with its war in Ukraine, and Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah, which at one point sent thousands of fighters to shore up his forces, has been weakened by a yearlong conflict with Israel. Iran, meanwhile, has seen its proxies across the region degraded by Israeli regular airstrikes.
How the conflict reignited
Thousands of people were fleeing from the area amid the dramatic escalation in the civil war, which had simmered without major advances by either side for years until the rebels mounted a shock offensive about two weeks ago.
The rebels took complete control of another city, Hama, and about a week after they began a sweeping raid across the north of the country. The first major prize in their offensive was seizing control of Aleppo a week ago, which was long Syria’s second most populous city.
HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani told CNN in an exclusive interview Thursday from Syria that the aim of the offensive is to overthrow Assad’s government.
The Britain-based Observatory said Syrian troops have withdrawn from much of the two southern provinces and are sending reinforcements to Homs, where a battle is looming. If the insurgents capture Homs, they would cut the link between Damascus, Assad’s seat of power, and the coastal region where the president enjoys wide support.
The Syrian army said in a statement Saturday that it has carried out redeployment and repositioning in Sweida and Daraa after its checkpoints came under attack by “terrorists.” The army said it is setting up a “strong and coherent defensive and security belt in the area,” apparently to defend Damascus from the south.
Since Syria’s conflict broke out in March 2011, the Syrian government has been referring to opposition gunmen as terrorists.
In the gas-rich nation of Qatar, the foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkey were scheduled to meet to discuss the situation in Syria. Turkey is a main backer of the rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.
Qatar’s top diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, criticized Assad for failing to take advantage of the lull in fighting in recent years to address the country’s underlying problems. “Assad didn’t seize this opportunity to start engaging and restoring his relationship with his people,” he said.
Sheikh Mohammed said he was surprised by how quickly the rebels have advanced and said there is a real threat to Syria’s “territorial integrity.” He said the war could “damage and destroy what is left if there is no sense of urgency” to start a political process.
After the fall of the cities of Daraa and Sweida early Saturday, Syrian government forces remain in control of five provincial capitals — Damascus, Homs and Quneitra, as well as Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean cost.
Tartus is home to the only Russian naval base outside the former Soviet Union while Latakia is home to a major Russian air base.
On Friday, U.S.-backed fighters of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces captured wide parts of the eastern province of Deir el-Zour that borders Iraq as well as the provincial capital that carries the same name. The capture of areas in Deir el-Zour is a blow to Iran’s influence in the region as the area is the gateway to the corridor linking the Mediterranean to Iran, a supply line for Iran-backed fighters, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
With the capture of a main border crossing with Iraq by the SDF and after opposition fighters took control of the Naseeb border crossing to Jordan in southern Syria, the Syrian government’s only gateway to the outside world is the Masnaa border crossing with Lebanon.