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Lisa Warwick found her husband gasping for air at the foot of the basement stairs and knew the miracle was over.
It was Aug. 2, 2020, more than 11 years since Scot Warwick had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. Most patients are dead in months, but her husband, who had just turned 51, had somehow destroyed the odds.
“Are we going in?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We are going in.”
Dr. Randy Sasich
Credit: Brooke Herbert for ProPublica
His body had endured six years of chemotherapy and an additional five of experimental therapies. According to his medical record, he had responded “singularly impressively.” Two months earlier he had been running 5 miles a day, but since the latest round of chemo he had rapidly declined.
Lisa Warwick guided her husband up the stairs, dragged him to the car and raced to St. Peter’s Hospital in downtown Helena, Montana.
The emergency room doctor cited shortness of breath, fever, and chills. He flagged that Warwick’s respiratory crisis could be the result of the chemotherapy. It had been restarted weeks before on the order of the oncologist who diagnosed him, the only doctor he’d consistently seen for more than a decade.
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