For those of you curious how my "home made" immunotherapy experimental treatment (Atezo/FOLFIRI/Avastin) has been going the past month, here is the first report (as a personal blog post)!
https://adventuresinlivingterminallyopt ... om/?p=7238
Excerpt:
So where do things stand now?
I get my next PET-CT scan in October after getting Atezo/FOLFIRI/Avastin infusions every other week for about two months. I got a “baseline scan” to compare that scan against to gauge whether this off-roading experimental treatment was working or not. That recent baseline scan showed some tumors were stable as well as some tumors which were growing and there was a new tumor on my kidney.
As a scientist I am absolutely thrilled right now by what I am observing since it matches a scientific hypothesis that my clinical signs point toward the possibility that the new therapy is working. Of course this is all dependent on me not messing up the hypothesis by any placebo effect but I think that is relatively unlikely since at least that first infusion pain was intense! But the body and brain are both very complicated… so we’ll just have to see what the scan shows. There is also the chance of “pseudo progression” in this first October scan if tumors get inflamed and infiltrated by immune cells but since radiologists are on the look-out for that now days, the possibility of this giving a false impression of therapy failure is lower than it used to be.
So this is what GOING OFF-ROADING – EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT STRATEGY STYLE feels like… welcome to the wild world of Stage IV Cancer…
To Life!
-DK37