GRANITE CITY - Granite City’s Darren Miller feels like one of the most fortunate people to walk the face of the earth at this point.
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To date, after an accelerated chemotherapy and medical marijuana treatment, he reports he is cancer-free.
“I am glad to be here,” he said. “With my original diagnosis, I was given six months to a year to live.”
For nine years, Miller has been dealing with multiple sclerosis, which forced him to retire from the Granite City Street Department. For two months before he was diagnosed with cancer, he noticed his hands were cracking open dry and his hands were bleeding. He walked around at Myrtle Beach, S.C., on vacation carrying around rags.
“The doctor gave me lotions for my hands and feet before I was diagnosed,” Miller said. “I was bloated and got up with chest pains in the night. The reason was that a tumor metastasized in my lungs.”
He was first diagnosed with congestive heart failure and during open-heart surgery treatment, it was discovered he had Stage Four Lung Adenocarcinoma. Lung Adenocarcinoma usually starts in tissues that lie near the outer parts of the lun
gs and may be present for a long time before they cause symptoms and are diagnosed. Lung Adenocarcinoma is broken into four stages, and Stage Three is when it has spread to tissue near the lungs and Stage Four is when it has metastasized to another part of the body.
In essence, his only hope for short-term survival was chemotherapy, but his wife, Amy, felt there had to be something else they could try. She was told at the hospital that had her husband not been admitted to the hospital when he was, he would not have lived because there was so much fluid around his heart. Surviving just the initial treatment was a miracle in itself, she said.
During the initial stages of his diagnosis, Darren and Amy conversed with Mark Pederson, co-founder of the ECS Therapy Center in Peoria, and Rick Simpson, author of “Phoneix Tears: The Rick Simpson Story” about how medical marijuana can kill cancer cells. Those relationships helped the couple immensely on their initial journey.
Darren was able to get a medical marijuana card and after Darren was operated on a Monday last July, by Friday, his wife had him in a car headed to California to try and get some treatments. He was able to get an apartment and a medical marijuana card in California and he went to the Emerlands Room in West Hollywood, California, to begin his treatment. The Emerlands Room is a well-known medical marijuana dispensary.
Once he was able to be a legal medical marijuana patient in Illinois, he was able to move home and start his accelerated medical marijuana program, combined with chemo.
Within 24 hours after using medical marijuana oils, Darren said his mouth sores were gone from the cancer. He didn’t know at the time whether or not the marijuana oils were killing his cancer, but at least they were healing his wounds, he said.
When Darren returned to Illinois, he had six aggressive chemotherapy treatments and continued aggressive treatments with marijuana oils at home. He also sought advice from an area internal medicine specialist, Dr. Michael Ambrose, in Fairview Heights whom he said has helped him greatly.
Within six months of the combination treatment, Darren said he was not seeing his original doctor anymore and his blood work was coming up normal. Amazingly, he also never lost his hair during chemotherapy. He said he did flood his system with the medical marijuana oils for three months.
Amy Miller said every day, she is thankful for her husband being healthy and happy again.
“We were just hoping for remission,” she said. “I quit my job to stay at home to help him. His dad, his family and strangers helped us come up with cash to go to California and get this treatment. I cried literally the whole way to California. Darren means everything to me. He is my world and my everything.”
Amy Miller describes her husband as simply “an amazing man.”
“We have been together 10 years and married eight years,” she said. “The whole way to California, he was sucking on a wet rag because of blisters in his mouth. After this first treatment, the blisters left.”
Darren Miller is still shocked at the success he has had with his treatment. He said he was at the end of life palliative care stage and simply wanted to die peacefully when everything changed.
“This doesn’t work for everybody,” he said. “Thousands of people are now doing it. I spend three or four hours a night talking to people how I make the oils and try to educate people about it.”
Darren said he hopes he can be of help to others in the future with whatever questions they might have of what he did. He sees what he has done as something that could be of real help for many people.
Now, Darren and Amy Miller, take life a day at a time. He said he tries his best to educate anyone he can about his transformation and how he did it.
“I have had over 3,000 messages on Facebook,” he said. “I have talked to people all over the United States and as far away as India. I want my mission to be to help people who are struggling with this and give them hope.”
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