My Loving Sister’s Cancer Journey

This is the journey of my sister, Renelyn de Guia(Karen Castillo in FB) and her battle with Cervical Cancer. She is our eldest sibbling and is a very loving daughter to our parents and caring to us, her sibblings. She is also a photography enthusiast and helps boost our hometown's tourism through her photos.

Her story started 2017 when she normally gets muscle cramps on her tummy. She has gone to multiple clinics and doctors and they mostly say that it is UTI that is causing the tummy pain.

She and her husband decided to get further tests regarding her condition and on Dec 2018, she was diagnosed with Cervical Adenocarcinoma, Moderately Differentiated(Stage 2).

It was all a shock to us since we do not have a history of cancer in our family though we know it is also possible to get it without anyone in the family having any history.

They initially, opted to go medicinal by using 4Life Supplement products. She did have better response with it though it did not help that much with the size of the tumor. Along with this she had 28 sessions of External Beam Radiotherapy with concurrent chemotherapy and 4 weekly sessions of Intracavitary Brachytherapy.

These sessions finished mid of 2019 but to no effect.

Doctors then suggested to go for the clinical trial for a drug that will help increase he immune system including the sessions of chemotherapy. She went through the clinical trial. It even helped in reducing the size of her tumor but eventually she was removed from the trial due to some qualifications in health that she did not meet while in the trial. We hoped a lot for that treatment since she was really responding well with it. This actually helped reduce her tumor's size 2cm which was great.

While on the trial there were infections seen from fallopian tubes which led the doctors to put pigtails on her to drain our the infection.

Since being removed from the trial, she has been asked to go through the regular chemo sessions. Each session will cost 30-40k pesos.

As of date, she has yet to start the sessions mainly due to the outbreak of the COVID19 virus. With her weak immune system she was asked not to go to the hospital.

This was understood, then she has been unable to release gas and move bowel for almost a wekk which caused her tummy to become bloated which she said hurts a lot and she has not been able to sleep well and cried almost every night due to the pain.

This broke our hearts to see my loving sister in pain and I cannot do anything. Her doctors told her that they should do an NGT(nosagastric tube) to release the gas from her stomach and be able to move bowel.

This took a lot of people to convince her to do because she was afraid of the procedure and the nerves got the best of her but mainly I think she was concerned about the cost. It was very painful to see and hear my parents cry because they cannot do anything to convince her, they have called me up here in Singapore to do the convincing to no avail, which was rare since my sister usually listens to me. 3 days passed and my parents called up her doctor to convice her (scared her actually of the complications of not doing the NGT). She then decided to do it and now she is recovering from it.

I have asked when she can do the chemotherapy and her husband told me that she will need to boost her health first since chemo will take too much toll on her.

As of now, her medical card covered only 105k pesos and total accumulated bill sum up to 354,767.95 pesos which was already less the coverage from her card.

So I am asking you who are reading this, to hopefully get your support through your kind and generous hearts. Donating will help her battle through all this and come out bigger, better and stronger. We believe this in our hearts and pray that you will be an instrument to her recovery.

Ryan