So I had a PET scan on Monday Sept. 13 (coincidentally, the birthday of my favorite singer and songwriter), and I met with my oncologist on the 20th to go over the results. And the results really are quite spectacular. There is no sign of active cancer in my body. My PET scan from the 13th looks clean. There is still tissue from the tumor in my lung, but it is dead tissue. The metastases on my bones are all gone. Tagrisso has, for all intents and purposes, killed all the cancer in my body, within the limits of medicine's ability to detect it. My family and I could not have asked for better results, just 4 months after starting treatment and 5 months after being diagnosed. I don't think I'm quite at No Evidence of Disease yet, as I do still have a pleural effusion from the cancer in my lung. I'll have a thoracentesis for this on the 28th, which should improve my breathing as I am still a little short of breath,
It should be noted that I am not considered "cured", or anything like that. With stage IV cancer, that's not generally a term that is used. Cancer is the kind of disease that likes to come back, so I will continue taking Tagrisso for as long as it works. My oncologist believes that because I've had such a strong initial response, that response will last for a longer time than the median (which, depending on the statistics you find, is somewhere between 11 - 19 months). Apparently there's a correlation between the depth of the response and the length. However, no one can really tell us how long this great response will last. There's a Facebook group for patients and caregivers of patients on Tagrisso that I'm a member of, and within that group are people who's cancer progressed in as little as 6 months, and there are people who have been taking Tagrisso for 3 or 4 years or more who are still N.E.D. or stable. One person had his cancer stay stable on Tagrisso for 7 years before it progressed. So there is a lot of room for hope, tempered by a slight bit of fear.
Moving forward, I will get my body scanned and have an MRI on my brain every 4-6 months. If a spot of active cancer appears, my oncologist is hopeful that we can kill it with targeted radiation therapy. And there are several new targeted therapies specifically designed for cancers that have mutated around Tagrisso that are in clinical trials at the moment. It feels to me like we are all living in the cusp of a moment where cancer goes from being a lethal disease to a chronic illness that can be managed or eradicated. There are so many new treatments being tested and developed, from targeted therapies to immunotherapies, new chemotherapies, better more targeted radiation therapies that attack the cancer and leave the healthy tissue alone, and even potential vaccines. I am hopeful for the future of cancer treatments, and I do feel like I am a part of that future that's just getting started. My experience has been so different from my mother's experience just 10-12 years ago, and my father's experience just 5 years ago, or my friend's experience 3 years ago. I may still get to experience the joys of chemotherapy and radiation therapy at some point in the future, but for now, I continue to take a daily pill. I am very, very lucky.
The next steps for me and my family are addressing some of the side effects of Tagrisso to hopefully increase the quality of my life, and to start to learn to live with the vast uncertainty of what the future will bring. But really, don't we all live with that uncertainty? All of us know we will die someday, and none of us know when. I just have a very particular wolf at my door that, for now, is kept at bay.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
No comments:
Post a Comment