Got a CT scan today and the results are in. Seems like my little mutants are a stubborn lot. Just like FOLFOX, 4 rounds of FOLFIRI also failed to reduce my tumour load. This is strike 2. Most liver mets grew by a few millimetres over the last two months, few reduced in size, couple of new mets developed, while some smaller mets vanished without a trace. Not the result I have been hoping for however. Still as the growth was only slight, and few mets reduced in size, the oncologists are still treating it as stable disease. Unfortunately stable disease does not lead to a liver resection, the only official curative option known to western medicine.
The rgcc oncogenic test I had done suggested a multidrug resistant cancer, so chemo is not likely to do anything for me. Only thing left that traditional medicine has to offer are two experimental drugs. TAS102 out of Japan and Regorafenib, neither as yet approved in Australia however, though that has not stopped me finding other ways to access yet to be approved drugs in the past.
The worst thing is that the oncologists do not know whether the chemotherapy is doing anything at all, or if it is just a slow growing cancer, growing at its normal rate. Only way to find out is to stop chemotherapy and check the growth rate, a chance I am not ready to take yet, so will continue two more cycles of FOLFIRI, before I jump into chemoless, cutting edge therapies in Germany.
So what’s next. This month I will be throwing all my efforts into TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), though some of the therapies prescribed for me are quite hardcore even by my standards and I believe are quite dangerous. Desperate times call for desperate measures however and at this point I have to give it a try, but its going to be tough. (more on that next week).
