New scan, mixed results

The immediate aftermath of the high excitement I wrote about last time was fairly hum-drum. I’m trying to watch my diet – it’s amazing how many foods may be more prone than others to block one’s intestines – and so far things seem reasonably under control. Foods aside, the main effect of my hospitalization may have been that I lost my regular Friday appointment slot at MSK. Once I got out of the hospital, it took multiple phone calls to get another time – Wednesday, April 11. That meant that my treatment was delayed by the 5 days between when my appointment would normally have been (Friday, April 6) and this new Wednesday time. Meanwhile, it was only on Monday, April 9 that they got me scheduled for a CT scan the following day, April 10, so that the oncologist would be able to evaluate the results of my recent treatment when we met. (They didn’t schedule me for an MRI, which I’ve always had in the past; apparently my oncologist believes in switching between MRI’s and CT scans, though – frustratingly – this change was made without any prior discussion.)

So we came to NYC on April 11. Besides going to MSK, we planned to stop afterwards at New York Law School to see my friends there (and return a couple of overdue books). As it turned out, our timing was very good: we got to see a bunch of my clinical program colleagues (just to be clear: I’m using “clinical” as in teaching lawyering skills, not as in medical treatment) and had a lot of fun talking with them. But I didn’t say much then about the day’s test results; it just didn’t seem the time.

In any case, earlier in the day our oncologist had given us the results of the April 10 CT scan. The results weren’t terrible, but they weren’t perfect either: while my large tumor, off on the left side of my liver, is admirably stable, three smaller tumors over on the right side have grown between 0.5 and 0.9 millimeters. (I asked whether these results could be an artifact of using a CT scan instead of an MRI, but the oncologist assured me that this wasn’t the case.)

Growth is not what I wanted, though it’s still very good that the growth isn’t in newly emerging tumors and that it’s all still confined to my liver. It’s also good that my liver function tests are all in the normal range, so once again my loyal liver cells seem to be able to do their thing despite the presence of the tumors. And despite this tumor growth, when my oncologist checked my abdomen she couldn’t actually feel my liver – which suggests that the tumors aren’t affecting the liver’s overall dimensions.

Over a year ago, when I had just started on the clinical trial using the pump to deliver chemo right to the liver, I had something similar happen: everything was stable or smaller, except that one tumor had appeared and grown. Apparently that one rogue tumor is one of the three that are growing now. A year ago, the fact that there was any tumor behaving this way was enough to knock me out of the clinical trial. Now that I’m not in a formal trial, but just receiving treatment – through the pump again – the Sloan Kettering reaction hasn’t been as dramatic.

Our oncologist thinks that the stability elsewhere in my liver indicates that the chemo I’ve been receiving through the pump over the past several months is still having a positive effect – just not everywhere. So the question is what to do. What she did on April 11 was to give me another dose of my current chemotherapy, which will continue to flow to the liver via my pump for the next two weeks. Then, at my appointment next week – also still not quite scheduled – we’ll consider multiple other options. These include:

(1)  Trying to destroy these three growing tumors. There are a bunch of ways to attack individual tumors, but the ones the oncologist mentioned use radiation, either by putting radioactive beads of a substance called Yttrium on or near the tumors or by hitting them with radiation beams. One particularly interesting option is proton radiation, which evidently can be aimed with more precision than other forms of radiation; we’re not sure, however, whether MSK offers this. I like the radiation idea, since it really seems like there’s something different about these three tumors as compared to the rest. I believe that the biopsy done on one of them after it first appeared showed a different genetic mutation than my other biopsies have found, and certainly their behavior has been different from that of my other tumors. Also they’re in a spot, the oncologist says, where they can be attacked without risk to other parts of the liver.

(2)  Continuing the current pump treatment and perhaps adding a systemic chemo drug that wouldn’t go in via the pump but instead intravenously, to affect my whole body directly; that might in the process also jolt these three growing tumors in my liver.
 

(3)  Immunotherapy: evidently our oncologist can get the drug Jimmy Carter took for his melanoma (keytruda) quite easily as a “compassionate use.” This drug was great for Jimmy, but of course my cancer isn’t the same as his. (The fact that it’s so easy to get this drug as a “compassionate use” – that is, a use for which the drug hasn’t yet been approved by the FDA – is one indication that the “right to try” legislation that Congress is currently considering may really be unnecessary, but that’s another discussion.)
 

(4)  Immunotherapy plus: Sloan Kettering is doing early-stage clinical trials using combinations of immunotherapy and chemotherapy. There’s some ground for believing that two complementary attacks are better than one. (Just by way of explanation: immunotherapy aims to get your own immune system working more effectively against the cancer; chemotherapy simply tries to kill cancer cells directly.)
 

(5)  Targeted medicine, aiming at vulnerabilities created by particular genetic aspects of my tumors; these also would be early-stage clinical trials at Sloan Kettering. Unfortunately, so far my tumors haven’t shown any terribly attractive targets for attack this way – but a few weeks ago Sloan Kettering did a new blood biopsy which may turn out to suggest some promising ways to proceed.
 

(6)  Clinical trials not at Sloan Kettering; Sloan Kettering is really good but there are several other places that are really good too, and each place tends to have its own projects under way.

The good news is that there are all these options. That really is good news, though I’d certainly have preferred a longer period of stability on the current chemo regime. Now we have a lot of studying and thinking to do. Teresa’s putting her formidable internet research skills to work to update the list of possible clinical trials she compiled months ago, and I’m going to be studying up too – while continuing to write my book!