The liver is an effective filter, he says, which can block the cancer from spreading further. That was huge for me.”įinding tumors in the liver doesn’t mean there is no hope, explained Fong (who, coincidentally, has starred in his own video). Fong spent an hour with me, showing me pictures, describing how the cancer may have spread, explaining everything,” he recalled. Fong responded the next day and set up an appointment for the following week. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and Liu expected a long wait during the holiday season. Liu delivered his scans to liver specialist Yuman Fong, M.D., Sangiacomo Family Chair in Surgical Oncology and professor and chair of the Department of Surgery. But City of Hope was a complete 180 compared to what I’d seen before.” “I didn’t want to get turned down a fourth time. “At first, I didn’t want to go,” he recalled. That’s when a family friend told him about City of Hope. He also vehemently disliked the treatment facility’s sparse, dreary atmosphere and the perfunctory attitude of the staff. It was the only option offered to him, and it’s not a good one: chemo cannot cure metastatic colon cancer. They believed, as many of their colleagues still believe, that once colon cancer has spread to the liver it is most likely everywhere, and surgery would be pointless.

His anger intensified when three different oncologists refused to attempt surgery to remove the tumors. He also recalled becoming “really furious,” convinced that he could have caught the disease in time had he begun screenings a decade earlier. “They told me I had Stage 4 cancer, that it was inoperable, and I had two years to live,” he recalled. This one detected cancer and, one week later, a computed tomography (CT) scan showed “bright spots” on his liver. It was clear.īut it was a different story eight years later in 2019 when Liu underwent another colonoscopy. After his older brother was diagnosed, Liu took matters into his own hands and paid for his own colonoscopy. His insurance company kept saying no, unwilling to cover a colonoscopy for someone in his thirties (the old guidelines recommended colonoscopies beginning at age 50 the age has recently been lowered to 45 because an alarming number of younger patients are presenting with colon cancer). “For 10 years I was always looking to get screened,” he explained. I also have an older brother who was diagnosed with colon cancer when he was 40, and an uncle in Taiwan with colon cancer, too.” “Twenty years ago he was diagnosed with cancer, but hid it from us. “My father passed away 10 years ago,” he said. He wears his Asian heritage with great pride, but, unfortunately, another family legacy has brought sadness. But when a friend entered film school, Liu’s interest was aroused, and he decided to go for it as well, moving to Los Angeles some 15 years ago.

Liu studied finance at the University of Illinois and spent seven years handling intellectual property issues at prestigious accounting firms. Liu was the All-American kid, excelling at multiple sports, which he saw as his path to acceptance by his overwhelmingly white schoolmates. He was raised in Kansas City, where his father (Dad was Chinese Mom is Taiwanese) had a position at the Midwest Research Institute. In his spare time, he advocates for fellow Asian-American creatives as executive director of the Asian American Media Alliance. He’s written for Disney and Fox, earned the Tribeca Film Festival’s Creative Promise Award, and executive produced the feature film “Fireflies in the Garden” starring Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe and Emily Watson. He’s an award-winning filmmaker and founder of his own production company, Kulture Machine. In other words, write your own script, something Liu is quite good at doing. If you’re not happy with your treatment, go find someone who will champion you.” And so much of it is about having the mental will to fight. “We don’t get taught about dealing with cancer when we’re in school,” he says. Milton Liu, a storyteller by trade, says one critical story is not being told.

Related words for hopefully