First Battle with Cancer (1964)
Warren Waters was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 42 in 1964. He went for radiation treatments and surgery on his neck at Baylor Hospital in Dallas, Texas. These treatments were state-of-the art and very cutting edge. His doctors managed to put my Father into remission from the cancer, but the radiation treatments eventually damaged his thyroid gland. I will never be certain if his work at Los Alamos, post Manhattan Project, had anything to do with this rare form of cancer. I imagine there was still a great deal of radiation present there from the two A bombs they built there. He had other close relatives who died of lung cancer and colon cancer, but never Non-Hodgekin’s Lymphoma. I was later diagnosed with Non-Hodgekin’s Lymphoma at age 40. My doctors said that it was a very similar cancer to his, and that it was due mostly to heredity. My DNA sequences show a rare mutation in my blood of the K factors.
His Second Battle with Cancer (1976)
In 1976, after twelve years of remission, my Dad’s cancer came back. This time it was a slightly different mutation of Non-Hodgekin’s Lymphoma. He was having a great deal of trouble walking and terrible pain in his back. His doctors in Newport Beach, California did surgery at Hoag Hospital, and discovered that the cancer had wrapped around the spinal chord in his cervical neck area. They told him that if he had waited twenty four more hours for the surgery, that he would have been paralyzed for life. His oncologist gave him an early chemotherapy called MOP. It nearly killed him. My Father contracted pneumonia from the chemo, but managed to survive. He stayed in remission the rest of his life from cancer after that. He studied cancer and later told me that both of us have a problem with acid. He knew that acid inflammation is what drives cancer.