Fingers Crossed!

Today, I went to Stanford Cancer Center for my infusion of PDL-1.  I met with the incomparable Dr. Holbrook Kohrt to discuss further what they saw in my scan and outline the plan of action.

It was a great visit today.  Holbrook said that he’s feeling very positive because he feels like we have my cancer under control.  While they don’t like to have any tumor get larger than 1 cm, he wasn’t too concerned. 

As he walked through my scans, I realized that I hadn’t quite understood George the other day.  Bottom line, they know that 2 of the spots that they’ve been watching are cancer.  One of those spots has decreased dramatically and the other has stayed stable.  The two other spots that have increased are actually lymph nodes – they don’t know what is in them.  The biopsy is to see if the growth of the lymph nodes is due to cancer or if it’s just inflammation caused by the drug.

I told Holbrook that George thought that it was probably cancer but wanted to know for sure.  He told me that oncologists have 10 rules that they live by and that one of those rules is that you never turn your back on cancer.  Therefore, they have to assume that the growth is due to cancer unless proven otherwise.  However, he did indicate that it is a real possibility that the growth in the lymph nodes is really just inflammation.

So – tomorrow (Friday), I will be heading back down to Stanford for a CT-guided biopsy of one of the lymph nodes.  If there’s cancer in there then we will move forward with our plan to radiate the tumors in the lymph nodes.  There is no need to radiate the other tumors because they are responding to the drug.

Please send all your “let it be inflammation” prayers my way at about noon tomorrow.