Return to Hyderabad – Alan

I am excited to return to Hyderabad. My last visit gave me the opportunity to focus solely on returning to health and I think has paid off.  Although, I have had a few challenges since I left the clinic in March of 2011.

During my previous visit, I had a premonition that I had brain cancer but didn’t act on it to have it checked out. Well, when I returned to the states in April I did make an appointment with an ears, nose, throat specialist regarding the incessant ringing in my ears and what did he do? He ordered an MRI that didn’t find anything particularly wrong with my ears, but did find a tumor, or lesion on the upper left portion of my brain. After undergoing a PET scan to make sure the cancer had not spread anywhere else (it had not!),  I had Gamma Knife radiation therapy.  The treatment doesn’t eradicate the lesion, it jumbles the DNA and prevents it from growing any further. It took a couple of weeks to recover from the swelling and to wean myself off the accompanying steroids, but other than that the recovery went smoothly.

I decided after that episode to change oncologists and made an appointment with Dr. Jon Richards out of Lutheran General. He is a melanoma specialist and was responsible for the regional clinical trial of a new treatment for melanoma called Yervoy. Dr Richards is incredibly caring and made me feel comfortable right away as I explored my options for additional preventative treatment.

By August I was on track to start the Yervoy treatment as a way to boost my immune system and prevent any further recurrence. Yervoy is given as series of four infusions spaced out over 12 weeks. I handled the first infusion well but about a week after the second infusion I started having issues with colitis, which is a known side effect of the drug. Even with taking large quantities of prednisone, the colitis continued to progress until the end of September, when I was admitted to  the hospital for a long weekend to get it under control.

Dr. Richards stopped the treatment and  he stressed that I should not count the number of infusions as a measure of the success of the treatment. He said that in his experience the presentation of side effects meant that the immune system had actually accelerated and that it correlated with higher success rates with the drug.

It took a while to taper off the prednisone but by mid-December I was off of it altogether and feeling good. Since the Yervoy, the only preventative measures I have been taking are a combination of:

• My diet, which is mostly vegan but with a few eggs and fish.
• The herbs that I have continued to take since my last visit to the clinic.
• Lots of green tea for its anti-cancer properties
• And vitamin supplements, that support the immune system that I have researched over the past couple years.

By January, Susan and I were planning our trip to India, the kids were going to be at camp for eight weeks this summer so that gave us our window. Six months later, here we are!

While the one lesion I have has not grown, neither has it stopped lighting up on the MRI(meaning it is still active). My neuro-oncologist told me it can take eighteen months for a  lesion to actually die and stop showing up as brightly on the MRI. My focus for this trip is to accelerate that process. And the best part about it? Susan is here with me for this visit…..although she might not exactly agree with that statement! 🙂