Archive for October, 2008

I have never posted about this before, mostly because it’s never come up. But over the last year or so, I got caught up in the tale of Angela ledcke at bustedscammers.com. People use the web to cheat each other out of money all the time. It’s happened before Angela Ledcke and it will happen long after she disappears from the web. But around 2:30pm today, I seen an anouncement on her introduction page that she had ovarian cancer and was taking Etoposide, then would under go surgery then chemotherapy.

As an RN, a cancer victim, a mother of a daughter who had cancer, an aunt whose nephew suffered and died of cancer earlier this year, and an employee of a pediatric cancer clinic, I don’t think Angela is entirely telling the truth about her alleged cancer diagnosis.

Red flags went off for me when she said she was given Etoposide then surgery then chemotherapy. Etoposide is a form of chemotherapy. I was also shocked that she was not given a surgery date. When cancer is in a tumor form, normally surgery is the first line of defense. If the cancer is embedded in a part of the brain where surgery cannot be performed, the patient then goes through rigorous rounds of chemotherapy, biopsies and MRIs.

I just had my second MRI and biopsey Monday for detection of organ failure due to excessive doses of chemotherapy. It was not fun nor was it pleasant, and it certainly was not something I’d get on the web and lie about for attention or pity. The iodine dye used in my MRI made me nauseated and unable to eat for days. Everything I ate I vomited up. I am just now able to drink and keep down chocolate milk. This has made me lose massive amounts of weight when I was not overweight to begin with.

Other red flags were her links to her disease and diagnosis. They were all WebMD.com links. The oncologist that I work for, as well as my own doctor, have told me that places like WebMD.com and Wikipedia should be banned from the internet because people self-diagnose themselves and often mis-self-diagnose themselves and order medicine from places like Mexico or Canada on the web and end up sicker than they originally were. Some people mask cancer pain with extreme pain pills from those places. While it’s possible that Angela Ledcke got the diagnosis and just Googled around to put her diagnosis in simple, user-friendly terms, that doesn’t explain why she did not Google her medicine and word her scamming note as “I am currently on chemotherapy called Etoposide…”

A red flag: Angela’s daughter didn’t make a video about wanting her mother well. What 11/12 year old wouldn’t be scared their mother might die of ovarian cancer, especially when she was given end-stage chemotherapy drugs, enough to make a video about it? When my nephew was dying, we made lots of videos of him. Most of them are on our Revver account, but they are all preserved on CDs for us to view whenever we want. My nine year old even made a video about how she misses her cousin.

The last red flag for me was that she made this public on her website, though she claimed it was for her loved ones overseas. If that was true, why not make it in a private blog on Myspace? Why post it where all your “haters and their followers” can see it?

Yes, I alerted bustedscammers.com about the alleged cancer hoax. I took my screen shot, I put a load of laundry in to wash, loaded the dishwasher, and came back and refreshed Angela’s page and guess what? She’s changed it. They’ve reported about it here.

This whole Angela thing made me remember a woman, about 40, the age Angela just turned, who pretended to have cancer over the course of two years. I became close to her, because I was freshly diagnosed with leukemia, something I thought this woman had. I also thought she was 19 years old, but that’s a different story. When the girl died, people were sad. When they found out she was a fake, people were enraged. Others were questioned. I was questioned. The few of us who had cancer-survivor blogs were questioned, called out, proof was demanded of us. One of the reasons I cannot stand fakes is because it makes those of us who are telling the truth about our lives that much harder to believe.