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dancing james
@Rowhan
Well, I had my Oncology/ENT meeting yesterday.
Same type of lymphoma found in both tonsils, not just the left one as had been anticipated. 3rd time around seems to be dramatically more complicated to treat long term. Dramatic enough that if I don't make it on to a new type of trial drug program that I've essentially got about 6 months left.
Yup, 6 months.
Having a PET scan either Monday or Tuesday so they can workout how many tumours there are other than the few we've already discovered lower down the left side of my neck. Hopefully it's only stage 3 at the moment, but could well be stage 4 already given that I've had some mild pain in my liver and small intestine in the last week.
The treatments I had first and second time around will be tested on cell samples to see if there's any reaction this time, then I'll likely be straight in to St.Georges for a few strong and narrowly spaced rounds of chemo to reduce if not get rid of the tumours I already have.
If that doesn't make any serious inrodes in the disease and extent the time I can wait for a trial place to open up for me, they've said there really won't be much hope unless I get accepted for the same sort of trial in France or Germany.
Failing that, the last hope would be a trip to the US but the treatment would be likely to cost in excess of £100,000 maybe way way more.
The reason I've been given for the outlook being so bad is that it's the fact that it's back at all, a third time, after a successful stemcell transplant. The odds of it coming back were very low i.e. 2-3% per year at this point but it having come back now poses new challenges because we're out of conventional drug combos that are going to have more than a temporary effect.
We can completely eradicate every cell with the same drugs as last time and i'm almost guaranteed to have a recurrence within 6 months, which is why they've said my only real hope is the new Cancer "vaccine" which will train my body to have a strong immune response to Lymphoma cells in the future.