metastatic cancer – Page 2 – Wozzers Journey with Cancer

34-Calm before the storm

And this is because a couple of weeks ago I received my latest CT scan results, which like the curate’s egg, is partly okay and the other bit not so.

The good bit is Tom, Dick and Harry are just about still behaving themselves, in that since they had that good zapping with radiotherapy back in December – they’re still not yet back to their pre-treatment sizes.

The not so good is because the scan report states ‘there are multiple tiny nodules in the left lung which are suspicious’. Typical understatement – really meaning that it’s looking like the beginnings of spread to my other lung.

So that also meant re-discussing my treatment plans and a big decision that went with it.

In my last blog post, I was trying to choose between entering a trial program with some shiny new drugs to test on me (and others), or immunotherapy under the care of Dr Wozzer at my local oncology unit in Cheltenham.

But now, considering what appears to be the onset of further spread, chemotherapy will be the first-line drugs treatment. This in itself isn’t straightforward for me, because the ‘go-to’ treatment would have been Cisplatin, but there were (and still are) concerns that my kidneys would be damaged by that treatment.

So, quite fittingly for Wozzer– I’m having a cocktail of two chemo drugs: Carboplatin, which is less toxic than Cisplatin, hopefully with reduced side-effects and Fluorouracil (5-FU), which I think is going to do most of the heavy lifting in attacking the cancer cells.

If we remember back to a previous post when I touched on how cancer cells uncontrollably divide and create serious problems in the body, well, chemotherapy disrupts this cell-division and generally shrinks tumours or at least slows down their development.

Unfortunately, chemo drugs in general can’t just target cancerous cells. Other fast-dividing cells in the body, such as hair follicle cells (leading to hair thinning or loss), cells that line our stomach and bowels; (leading to sickness and diarrhoea); or blood cells (leading to tiredness and bleeding from almost anywhere) are also attacked by chemotherapy – so this is what causes the well-known side-effects that we see or hear about.

Of course, there’s a long, long list of side-effects and it appears that every single patient reacts differently. But it seems for my case that the three listed are the main ones to watch.

How they get the chemo drugs into me and for how long I’ll be on chemo? Well, that’s a longish answer and worthy of its own blog post.

Which is my way of saying I’ll do my best to write that up in a day or so! Until then, I’ll keep on with the beerotherapy 😊

33 – Testing, testing…

31^st March 2022

Wow, how time flies.

Looking back through my blog – it’s exactly 2 years to the day that I went to my local hospital with a bit of a sore throat. Mind you – it’s not a date I’d ever forget anyway!

I find it interesting to look back at the phases – from the shock of initial diagnosis in 2020, through the aggressive radiotherapy and recovery, to the ‘living with cancer’ phase of 2021 and now the palliative treatment phase due in 2022.

I have to say that right now, the issues are far more mental than physical.

Outwardly I look fine and generally feel okay – well, apart from breathlessness and a nagging back pain. Both are the result of the Tom, Dick and Harry tumours. They were stunted in growth when given a good zapping of radiotherapy a few months ago, but the little bastards are telling me that they’re finding a way to recover and annoy me further.

Inwardly though, it’s becoming more of a constant daily, hourly reminder that all is not well with me. While I try and only worry about things I can control, rather than things I can’t – this is for sure becoming more difficult with a poor prognosis and a generally uncertain future.

Still – as we all seem to say these days, it is what it is 😉

On the diagnostic front, there’s been a fair bit happening in these past couple of months or, but no firm decisions right now on the best way forward.

What we do know is that 2022 will see more treatments, just to relieve and hopefully slow the development of the current lung tumours and of course, any further spread to other organs.

And I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with the choices that might be coming my way.

It could be chemotherapy or immunotherapy or a combination of both or indeed, experimental trials.

I’ve started the pre-screening for a clinical trial involving a new type of vaccine combined with an immunotherapy drug. It sounds quite exciting, but of course there’s a few ‘buts’

It’s quite experimental, known as a ‘phase 2’ trial.
This means it’s got past a small sample of patients (generally with very advanced cancer) in a Phase 1 trial.

Phase 2 trials generally aim to find out:

if the new treatment works well enough to be tested in a larger phase 3 trial
which types of cancer the treatment works for
more about side effects and how to manage them
more about the best dose to give

This particular trial is being tested on around 190 volunteer patients in 10 countries.

It’s known as a ‘double-blind, randomised’ trial to test this new type of vaccine treatment combined with an immunotherapy drug that’s been used in the past for a similar type of cancer to mine.

The randomised bit is that 50% of the patients get the real vaccine and 50% get a placebo vaccine. All patients do get the immunotherapy drug though.

The double-blind bit is that neither the patient or the people delivering the treatment, know (or certainly won’t say) who is receiving the vaccine and who is receiving the placebo.

So all in all, this is really about the drug companies testing product combinations for possible future wide-scale treatments, using the latest ideas around. For the patient, it’s a gamble as to whether there’s any additional benefits – and by this, I mean survival time against more shall we say, the more conventional types of chemotherapy or immunotherapy.

Although, this trial might just be the ‘miracle cure’ that the world has been waiting for!

I’ll be discussing all my options during April with both the clinical trial team in Somerset and my own Dr Wozzer here in Gloucestershire. Pretty sure one way or the other, I’ll be having treatment before the summer.

Immunotherapy is definitely the hot subject in the oncology world right now. I’ll research and then write up some more on this, hopefully next week.

Until then – take care x

32 – Palliative Radiotherapy – what does it do?

14 Dec 2021

Now I know how a ready meal feels. Cook on full power for 4 minutes and then rest for one minute.

I’ve now finished my fifth and final (for now?) fraction of Radiotherapy. So that’s been one treatment a day for five days. As I mentioned in my previous post, there’s no mask for body positioning in the treatment machine (LINAC), just a small tattoo on my chest.

Each day, I’m positioned on the machine and then the radiologists use lasers to ensure my body and the machine is in exactly the correct position. Then I must lay perfectly still for a few minutes as though my life depends on it. And to a great degree, I suppose it does!

I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised that the side-effects are not so bad at the moment – certainly when comparing with the extremely tough treatment to my throat last year. This treatment is really to ease the pain in my back, that’s been caused by the tumours increasing in size.

So, they are hopefully shrunk a bit in size, but my understanding is that it’ll be a few weeks before the full effects are known.

I’ve also had the time – and inclination – to read up some more on what radiotherapy does and what these treatments are given in ‘fractions’, rather than one good ‘zapping’ – so to speak. When I say ‘read up’ I really mean ‘skim read’ of the bits I can understand.

So here goes:

It starts off with the billions of cells that we have in our body. Normally they ‘just work’ and keep all our body working in tip-top shape. Different types of cells in the body do different jobs. But they are basically similar. They have our DNA which generally controls how the cells behave.

Cells come and go. They make copies (reproduce) in an orderly and controlled way and are needed to keep the body healthy. Sometimes they get damaged, and our body has amazing repair teams that can fix cells very quickly and get them good as new.

BUT, some cells get confused by instructions from our normal DNA and they start reproducing (mutating) in a disorderly way and become uncontrollable.

In the worst cases, they can’t be fixed by the repair teams. These worst-case mutated cells can become ‘cancer tumours’

Of course, there are a number of treatments to either kill-off the cancerous cells, or at least hinder their growth. These range from chemical therapy (chemotherapy) to radiation therapy (radiotherapy) and even newer treatments such as Immunotherapy.

I’ve also spent the past few weeks on my own self-administered treatment of Beerotherapy. I’m finding that high intake doesn’t actually control the tumours, do I do forget about them for a few hours. Treatment will continue for as long as I can get to the pub.

Anyway – back to radiotherapy!

The machine that I refer to is a medical linear accelerator (LINAC). I wrote an article on this last year here

It uses extremely high-power energy beams - let’s call these micro-bullets – moving at the speed of light and accurately aimed at the tumours. They’re ‘fired’ from outside the body and because they’re so minutely small and incredibly fast moving, I don’t feel anything while the treatment is being done.

Inside my body however, a number of things begin happening.

First, obviously the micro-bullets are also damaging good cells that are adjacent to the tumours – but my body’s repair teams get straight to work on repairing these. The really clever bit is that the cancerous cells that are getting blasted are not able to repair themselves anything like as effectively – and so bit by bit they become reduced or sometimes destroyed.

And this bit-by-bit thing is helped by what the medics call ‘fractionalisation’.

Which means that instead of one single dose of energy – in my case 20 Gy (grays) of energy (equivalent to around 200,000 normal chest x-rays) is given to me in five fractions of 4Gy per day. In this way my healthy cells are being repaired 24/7 and ready for the next treatment.

An analogy (admittedly not a great one) is to consider a car with four road tyres and a spare in the trunk. If the driver was unlucky enough to have a puncture in each – it would most likely to be less disruptive to have one puncture each day and repair it, rather than five punctures in the same day.

All the while, the cancerous tumours are in big trouble, because they don’t have the efficient repair teams to fix themselves.

So, fractionalisation is far better for the body. Of course, not all the healthy cells repair overnight – or even over days or weeks. Some of these also get damaged beyond repair and this becomes what we know as side-effects from the treatment.

And unless I’m one in a billion – I’ll feel these side-effects over the next few days, weeks or even months.

Which leads me nicely towards the holiday season. No more treatment until at least mid-January, when I see Dr Grant again and find out what comes next.

And that leads me nicely in to wishing you a very happy Xmas and a peaceful and prosperous New Year, wherever you are in the world.

Take care

Woz x

31-Big balls are not aways desirable

1^st December 2021

Well, it was always coming, but a bit of a shock just the same. I’ve had a nagging pain in my back for a good couple of months or so. Not a lower back muscular pain and certainly not a sports injury!

I flagged this up at my recent meeting with my Oncologist – the ever-professional Dr Warren Grant. He did say that secondary tumours in the lung sometimes show few symptoms and for those that do, a low ‘nagging’ pain is not uncommon.

So, definitely time for a new CT scan to see what’s developed since my previous scan back in May, when the tumours were still relatively small.

The results of the scan came back last week and yep, it was a bit of a shock – to me, at least.

Metastatic (secondary) tumour development in right lung
	Jan 2021	May 2021	Nov 2021	About the size of…
Tom	17mm	20mm	55mm	Snooker / Pool ball
Dick	14mm	15mm	36mm	Ping Pong / Squash ball
Harry	7mm	11mm	29mm	Lollypop candy

I say ‘to me’ because Dr Wozzer indicated that these sizes are not too bad, when considering the overall size of a lung.

“Oh really?” I thought.

Anyway, he decided that now is a good time to begin treatments. The plan is for some ‘palliative radiotherapy’ now and most likely to follow with some cycles of chemotherapy in the new year.

So a couple of days, ago I was back to the Oncology Centre in Cheltenham, for a pre-treatment scan and some body mark-up.

Felt a bit strange (and disappointing) to be walking back in there nearly 18 months after the throat radiotherapy.

In another respect, a feeling of familiarity: The same receptionist greeted me with a ‘Hi Warren’ - obviously remembering me (or at least remembering the tin of biscuits I left back then).

And the radiologist doing the prep work was the ever-friendly William – who is always bright and cheerful and became a good ‘mate’ during the hard weeks of treatment back in May / June 2020.

Will took me through the procedure which was a quick scan to see the tumour locations and then a tiny ink tattoo on my chest, which defines the ‘reference point’ that will be used when aiming the radiation treatment.

I’ve known all year this treatment was coming – and I’m ever so glad that Dr Grant held off until mow. It’s allowed me a good summer and autumn to get around and see family and friends.

Equally I’m now relieved that treatment is commencing. Larry the Lump was well beaten – and remains so.

I also know that Larry's sons - Tommy the Tumour, Dick and Harry have been gearing up all year for a fight and I’ll be taking them on next week, with the first bout of palliative radiotherapy.

I'm scheduled for five treatments (known as 'fractions') on w/c 6th December.
More from me soon after x