January 31, 2011

This was an important day in my battle against cancer.  I got a CT scan done that day and found out that I had some breathing obstructions that they suspected might be pulmonary fibrosis resulting from the trial drug I had been on for the past two months.  My rapidly declining ability to breathe, combined with some fibrous growths seen in the scans, caused my oncology doctor, Dr. F. to refer me to a pulmonary specialist.  After lots of hemming and hawing, it was determined that I did not have pulmonary fibrosis, but rather that the tumors in my lungs had started to seriously encroach.  I was put on "at-home" oxygen, steroids, and an antibiotic (in case pneumonia developed) and began a series of tests to try to find out what we could do to ease the problem.  I never did have pulmonary fribrosis or any other drug-induced toxicity, so the conclusion has been that my lungs are too full of other crap to let me breathe right.  So, I remain on O2 as needed, and pain killers to lessen the pain associated with the tumors in the lungs, liver, kidneys and pancreas.  (That sounds far worse than it is...).

I'm now on a new drug called AMG-337, which is a C-MET inhibitor.  If anyone is interested in more info on this trial (I'm the first in the 100mg cohort so thee are very few people taking this drug) you can visit the government website:  http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01253707 for more info.   I'll be completing the first month on that drug in 10 days, and will then have a set of PET and CT scans to "re-stage" the tumors.  Re-staging is the term used by the docs to mean taking a set of scans and comparing them against a baseline set which was taken at some earlier point.  In my case, we took the baseline a month ago, so they'll be able to say things like whether there are new tumors in new locations, whether the existing tumors have grown or shrunk and by how much, and whether their metabolic activity is different from the baseline.  Joel will be coming with me to Houston for the four days needed to complete those tests, get the results, and then re-start (hopefully) the trial drug regimen.