lunhs cancer

From the day I started chemo for my stage 4 lung cancer, I have had nothing but great results. The chemo started working immediately and my breathing improved noticeably after the very first treatment. Each scan showed shrinking (or at least stability) of my tumors and a PET scan even revealed that my targeted medicine Xalkori (crizotinib) had led to a complete metabolic response to treatment. But everyone living with metastatic cancer knows that this is incurable. We all know that one day the treatment will stop working, one day the cancer will get smarter and find a way around the medicine. I am on a fancy targeted therapy that has a great track record of controlling cancer in ROS1 -positive folks like me . However, it is well known that Xalkori has one weakness, its Achilles' heel: It does not cross the blood-brain barrier. Any cancer cell that manages to slip into the brain can grow freely, unhindered by the medicine. I bet you can guess where this is going. My regularly schedu...

The times are a-changin' in CancerLand. Gone are the days when you simply had breast cancer, lung cancer or leukemia. Now each has its own specific type and these days you can often discover what precise mutation is driving the cancer. As I discussed in my post " A Personal Take on Personalized Medicine ," my cancer is driven by a mutation called ROS1 . In many ways, knowing this is a GREAT thing. When we found out what was driving my cancer, I was able to stop chemo and instead take a pill called Xalkori (crizotinib) that has been controlling my cancer for close to two years. That's fantastic! So what's the downside, you may ask? Well, of the over 220,000 new cases of lung cancer each year, only about 1 percent of those have the ROS1 mutation. While being unusual may have a nice charm to it, from a research point of view, it is pretty crummy. Why would researchers focus their efforts on helping such a tiny fraction of people? Us ROS1 ers lucked out by riding on ...

  I just finished an incredible young adult book. It is the kind of cancer book I would want to write if I ever write a cancer book. It has monsters and talking trees and tells the truth the way only fiction can. It is so very sad, and it gives me hope. Not the I-think-I-might-be-around-for-a-long-time kind of hope, but the scary, painful, they-will-still-be-okay kind of hope. "Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth." The illustrations are stunning, so here is a "book trailer" (I guess that's a thing now?) that gives an overview and shows some of the amazing artwork. The book was written by Patrick Ness, but as he explains in the Author's Note, the story was conceived by Siobhan Dowd. "She had the characters, a premise, and a beginning. What she didn't have, unfortunately, was time." I'm sure you can guess what caused Ms. Dowd's death at age 47. Zander saw me rea...