UAB Medical Research has Worked Before
June 2, 2009 In this issue, there’s an item on an experimental drug in testing with an active ingredient derived from cottonseed that’s showing encouraging results in treating the most deadly form of brain cancer. The research is being done at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
The drug is administered in pill form and the research information says it is manufactured from “a potent compound” found in cottonseed that “overcomes the abnormal growth patterns of tumor cells.”
We’ve been trying diligently to find out what the compound is, and we believe it’s gossypol, which has been in trials for other forms of cancer … we’ll have more as soon as we know for sure.
My son was born with a heart birth defect called a “Tetralogy of Fallot.” The details are too complicated to go into here, but if you’re interested, Google it. Right after the Tetralogy was discovered, a pediatric cardiologist told us as delicately as possibly that surgery to repair the defect was not a matter of if, but when.
Right after a vacation to the beach, his mother and I took him in for a checkup. We thought our tan, surfer-blond two-year-old was the pure picture of health. Based just on the way he looked, we were stunned when the doctor told us the “when” was now. He gave us a weekend to go home, pack bags and come back for surgery.
But there’s a happy ending. After successful surgery, a sick two-year-old started growing and dunked a basketball when he was 16. In tennis, if he connects on a forehand, I run or duck. There’s been a lot of soccer, football, track … we never had to hold him out of anything.
When it was all over, what I vividly remember were these words from the surgical nurse: “There’s a little boy awake in recovery who wants to see his Mama and Daddy.” Just as vividly, I remember the words stitched on the nurse’s scrubs top: “Pediatric Cardiology, University of Alabama at Birmingham.”
If all goes well, there’s somebody, somewhere with glioblastoma multiforme who’ll owe UAB as much as I do.
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