In 2017, Janet Bor went to pick up her mother from a Scottsdale group home one day when the owner of the home, someone Janet trusted, looked at Janet and wondered why her skin looked so yellow.
“Neon,” as Janet’s primary care physician would later comment, a jaundiced condition brought on, in Janet’s case, by an excess of a digestive fluid called bilirubin, which resulted from a blockage in her bile duct.
Looking back, Janet, now 76, was never so grateful for her jaundice, since it prompted a medical evaluation that eventually resulted in her being diagnosed earlier than otherwise would have occurred with pancreatic cancer, one of the most aggressive and deadly of all cancers.
Fortunately, her cancer was detected in its early stages and was successfully treated with a unique combination of drugs through a clinical trial at Scottsdale’s HonorHealth Research Institute. Upon completion of her drug treatment, her entire pancreas was surgically removed, and Janet has now been cancer free for more than six years.
“Oh my God, it’s fabulous,” she said, knowing how lucky she was to have had the cancer detected before it metastasized and spread to other organs.
And Janet can’t say enough about the care she received, especially from Erkut Borazanci, M.D., B.S., medical director of the Institute’s Cancer Research Division, who after her diagnosis put her on an experimental combination therapy that included the standard-of-care drugs Gemcitabine and Abraxane, plus a form of platinum called Cisplatin, with an added twist: mega doses of Vitamin D called Paricalcitol.
“The thing that I loved the most about Dr. B, he spoke in English, not ‘medicalese.’ ”
She remained on the four-drug cocktail for four months, shrinking the tumor before her surgery in January 2018. Once her cancer-ladened pancreas was removed, her tumor-marker numbers — a measure of certain proteins in her blood — fell from 100, down to just 19.
“His whole thing was about prolonging quality of life,” she said of Dr. Borazanci. “And, I can’t say enough about the staff at the Institute. It was just mind-blowing. They understand what the patient experience is. They’re an unbelievably coordinated team. It was a joy to go there.”
She now describes herself as a survivor, warrior and advocate, working with the non-profit pancreatic cancer philanthropy group known as the Seena Magowitz Foundation, where Janet volunteers to support other pancreatic cancer patients.
These days, she visits the Institute just once a year for her annual checkup. She takes every opportunity to urge other pancreatic cancer patients to consider asking for a second opinion, researching the latest in clinical trials and enrolling in clinical trials, if possible.
“The Institute is such a jewel,” she said, though she sometimes feels it is the best kept secret in pancreatic cancer research and treatment. “The Institute and its staff offer hope to patients and families who are given this devastating diagnosis.”
