In the winter of 2002 John Kanzius felt soreness in his abdomen. On Good Friday, he went in for a CT scan. Doctors told him he had five to seven years to live.
The drive home felt like the longest of his life. On the way, he called Marianne. She noted that moment in her journal:
“I hadn’t heard from him. Then the phone rang. ‘Honey, it’s bad. I have a tumor in my stomach. They’re not certain, but they think it’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’ The phone went silent.”
A year after his diagnosis, on Good Friday again, doctors gave him bad news: He had an aggressive type of cancer that had not actually gone into remission. They gave him nine months. Doctors said he needed a bone marrow transplant, and Kanzius traveled to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for a second opinion. During his visit, he noticed the children in the cancer ward. Kanzius went home thinking about them, and soon mapped out his idea.
He knew that metal would heat when exposed to radio waves. He wanted to focus the waves by inserting metal particles into tumors. The infused cells would be placed in a radiofrequency field. The waves would pass through the human body, and the particles injected into the cancer would heat and kill the cells without harming anything else.
He built a machine to send the waves, while undergoing his second round of chemotherapy. This time the treatments nearly killed him. He spent three or four days a week at the hospital, sometimes for as long as eight hours. He came home to rest, only to toil over his project…
Full story at LA Times