The Good Fight:Did nutrition, vitamins and a wife’s love save Greg Holmes? By Anne Stanton Greg Holmes remembers reading a Wall Street Journal article in March of 2004 with more interest than usual. It concerned a Tulane University medical student with sino-nasal undifferentiated cancer (SNUC), an extremely rare disease. Like most rare diseases, pharmaceutical companies haven’t pursued a cure; it would be a multi-million dollar endeavor for little need and no profit. So the medical student had resorted to growing his own cancer cells to find a chemo drug that would shrink his tumor. He has since passed away. At the time, Holmes himself was having some sinus problems. For months, he had been unable to breathe or smell through his left nostril. He had changed his diet, taken antibiotics; nothing worked. The whole thing annoyed him. “After I read the article about this medical student, I was so sad for him. He had a rare, super aggressive cancer and he was running out of time. Here I’d been kvetching about my nose. I thought, ‘Greg, that’s nothing. You are so lucky; what is wrong with you?’” A few weeks later, Holmes found out what was wrong. He was diagnosed with Sino-nasal cancer. He not only survived it, he is doing well, save for an occasionally weeping left eye and a damaged thyroid. (Many survivors have suffered brain damage, chronic pain, and disfigurement.) Holmes, a psychologist, sums it up: “My wife saved my life.” His wife, Katherine Roth, M.D., a family practice physician, is far more humble. “There were a lot of things that saved Greg’s life, including his will to do everything he possibly could. I wonder how many other people would do that. Would you? His commitment to our program has been unshakeable for the past five and a half years.” To mark the fifth anniversary of his recovery, Holmes wrote a short memoir, The Good Fight. The following account was drawn from his memoir, along with an interview with Holmes and Dr. Roth at the office building they share on Front Street in Traverse City.
THE STRUGGLE Having exhausted the route of antibiotics, allergy medications and his internist’s ideas, Holmes went to an ear, nose and throat doctor, who took a biopsy of a suspected polyp. A few days later, the doctor called Dr. Roth with the results. “It was April Fool’s Day, 2004. I was driving near the hospital when the call came. My daughter, Emerson, was in the back seat—I think she was only three years old, and I don’t know if she remembers, but I had to pull to the side of the road. I was devastated. I just couldn’t believe it and I said, ‘Are you kidding??’ He said, he wished that he were.” After hearing the news, Holmes could think of little else. He had to decide: would he give up easily or fight? He was driving down Silver Lake Road to his home on Duck Lake, and decided to stop in at the Catholic Church, which was unlocked. “I went inside and I don’t know if I prayed, but I asked, ‘If there is a God, and I don’t know if there is, but I really, really want to live. Please help me. I want to live.” Within a week, Holmes went to the University of Michigan Hospital where he met with a team of doctors. The surgeon told him the tumor was so advanced and so large that “carving a hole out of his head” was out of the question. It was too close to his optic nerve and his brain stem, Dr. Roth said. “Greg was literally begging them, ‘Please, can’t you give me some hope?’ He must have asked three or four times,” Dr. Roth said. “Finally, an oncologist admitted in this flat voice, ‘Yes, there is always a chance.’ I know, as a doctor, that you don’t want to give a patient false hope, but there has to be a balance between that and giving them no hope whatsoever.” The oncologist met with the couple and proposed a treatment program of chemotherapy and radiation. Holmes didn’t blink an eye. “I’m going to do it. I want to do it right away,” he said. Dr. Roth and Holmes agreed to fight “fire with fire.” They’d throw everything into the fight. In addition to chemo and radiation, Dr. Roth would draw on her 20 years of medical education and intense study of nutritional and vitamin therapy. “I felt like we’d both been preparing for this our whole lives, both psychologically and medically,” Dr. Roth said.
‘THERE WAS NO ONE ELSE’ Chemotherapy works by killing rapidly dividing cells. Those include cancer cells, of course, but it also includes cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles. That means side effects: a lower white blood cell count, inflammation of the digestive tract and mouth, and hair loss. “Chemo does so much, it can almost kill the person and sometimes it does. The treatment can be stronger than the person. Dr. Roth said. Dr. Roth took a multi-faceted approach to rebuild Holmes’ body as the cancer broke it down. She worked to strengthen his immune system with mushroom extracts. She supported his nutrition and detoxication with high quality protein shakes (whey), probiotics and essential fatty acids, and fought inflammation with green tea extracts, proteolytic enzymes, and curcurmin. Probiotics, which naturally occur in fermented foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt, replace “good bacteria” that gets destroyed by antibiotics and chemotherapy. The combination of all of these helped repair the lining in his mouth and intestines. Finally, she did energy work in the form of acupuncture and low-level laser therapy to maintain his energy flow. “We know there is a vibration (also known as QI or prana) in the body. Energy work helps with stagnation, pain and fatigue,” she explained. Dr. Roth relied specifically on the medical textbook, The Prevention and Treatment of Cancer with Natural Medicine, by Michael Murray, written in 2000. It contained detailed recommendations for number and strength of dosages, along with clinical study citations. Each day, Dr. Roth prepared for Greg three cocktails full of nutritional supplements in the form of liquid shakes. She asked her older son to return from Nepal to help take care of their Emerson, who had stayed with Dr. Roth and Holmes during their entire three-month visit in Ann Arbor that summer. Dr. Roth believed that Holmes—like all cancer patients—needed a knowledgeable coach, someone to research, order, and prepare the complementary nutritional supplements to bolster health. She tried to find that assistance in Ann Arbor and Traverse City; she even called the principle researcher in Tulane, but he couldn’t help either. So by default, Dr. Roth became his coach. “I shouldn’t have been his doctor, as I was his wife, but we didn’t have anyone else. Other doctors didn’t want to take Greg on. They’d see his scans and diagnosis, and turned him away. There was no one else.”
LOSING HOPE Despite the three nutritional shakes each day, Holmes’ weight dropped steadily: 165 … 150 … 138 … 129 … 125. The doctors threatened to insert a tube feeding if it dropped below 120. So borrowing a page from the anorexic teens he once treated; he wore jeans, hiking boots, and heavy shirts every morning as he weighed in. Despite the shakes and Holmes’ firm conviction in positive thinking, he was losing his energy, and even his will to fight. “With little energy left to push back, my psychic dam caved in and the waves of gloom rushed over me ... The pain in my mouth was unbearable, and the protein supplement drinks that were my lifeline became impossible to swallow without first injecting lidocaine, a pain medication in my mouth through a syringe,” he wrote in his memoir. One night, Dr. Roth drove back to Traverse City, leaving Holmes alone with his dark thoughts. Maybe it would be for the best if he died, he thought. He could release Katherine and his daughter from this living hell. “The psychic and physical pain intermingled and built to an unimaginable crescendo. I reached out in desperation and grabbed the television remote that was next to me on the sofa,” Holmes wrote. On it was a boxing match—the same Ali-Foreman fight he had seen in a documentary years ago. Ali was against the ropes and dropped his gloves briefly to protect his abdomen. At the same time, Foreman responded by drilling Ali in his left sinus area. As blood began to poor out of Ali’s nose, the same thing was weirdly happening to Holmes. He took it as an unmistakable omen that just as Foreman did not beat Ali ,the cancer would not kill him—he would destroy it! The moment was truly a turning point for him. He carried his conviction into the last few weeks of chemo and radiation. “As the cisplatin poured into what was left of my veins, I looked at the infusion pump with an unfamiliar feeling of disdain as I heard Ali’s voice echo in my head. “I’m so tough, I make medicine sick!”
SENSE OF SMELL His first clue that he’d beaten the cancer? His toddler daughter had an accident and he could smell it! He could smell a flower blooming. Shortly afterward, his MRI still showed a mass in his brain and sinus, but the fight was still on. He returned to Traverse City with a firm resolve, taking a daily regimen of 80 to 90 pills. He re-opened his practice, and started back on the treadmill at the local gym. As he walked, he clenched his fists and shadowboxed his tumor, right, left, right, right into oblivion. “I imagined what the other people in the gym must think of me: an odd, razor thin man with wisps of white hair, violently shaking his fists at the sky. Whether they had heard the word or not, the bottom line was obvious—I was one very sick man.” Six months passed. It was now fall of 2005 and Holmes went to Munson for a PET scan. Holmes couldn’t tell anything from the radiology technician’s poker face during the scan, but Dr. Roth received a call the next day from one of her colleagues. “The PET scan revealed the cancerous tumor had not just been stopped in its tracks, but that there was no evidence of cancer activity at all! The bizarre premonition that came to me that dark night in the cottage had proven to be true. … The tumor departed just as it arrived, offering neither explanation nor apology.”
SKEPTICISM During Holmes’ treatment at U-M, the physicians were frequently skeptical and even derisive when told of the supplements that Holmes was taking. One physician remarked, “Well, I guess it can’t hurt him -- the worst that can happen is that he will have very expensive urine.” But their remarks left Dr. Roth undaunted. She remains fueled by her passion to continue to offer hope, energized to further explore the frontiers of medicine and cancer treatment. This spring, she’ll attend a national conference, “Confronting Cancer as a Chronic Disease.” She plans to listen to the cutting edge presentations and then share the new information with her patients and local medical community. Holmes himself was deeply changed. After living for months in a twilight world, never knowing the number of weeks or even days he had left, he feels transformed. He speaks about it to audiences, including physician groups, locally and across the state. “To come back from death, to have a psychological and spiritual resurrection – it’s like, I can’t tell you what it is. I am not the same, and I am very thankful I’m not. Like most people, I took life for granted before this, and I’ve been given another chance. Maybe that’s why I am here—to tell people. When they ask me how I am, I’ll say, ‘I am dying. As a matter of fact, we are all dying. Celebrate and enjoy the miracle of life.’” After Holmes’ made his full recovery, Holmes emailed his physicians at U-M’s Cancer Center, informing them of his remarkable outcome with an offer to speak. His emails were ignored. Yet both remain committed to sharing their story, offering it as a ray of hope for many who feel none…as he once did.
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