Yesterday my husband and I met with our new radiation oncologist and we both really liked him. Dr Schroeder is young, energetic, interactive and very up to date with his knowledge of current research and treatments for melanoma.
Yesterday my husband and I met with our new radiation oncologist and we both really liked him. Dr Schroeder is young, energetic, interactive and very up to date with his knowledge of current research and treatments for melanoma. Best of all, he was on the same page as we are regarding prophylactic whole brain radiation (WBR) and radiation therapy.
Like us, his feeling was that WBR should be held back as a last resort treatment for me if I should have recurrance in my brain that cannot be managed with gamma knife surgery. He talked about with the size of the tumor that bled last year, I most certainly had other melanoma cells in my brain. The fact that I have had no recurrance in nearly a year is an excellent sign and to him means that most likely my body has handled them on its own.
On using radiation therapy on the adrenal tumor site as a prophylactic treatment, I was on the fence on it and would have agreed had he thought it was a good idea. But he didn't. He said with no active disease there or anywhere else, there was nothing for him to focus on and since the adrenal gland is located in the middle of a lot of organs including the bowel and spine, it would be too easy to also damage organs that either couldn't be repaired, or repaired with great difficulty and all of it life threatening.
So the decision we all agreed on is that I should enjoy the summer with a break from any treatment! And he will continue to follow my case with consultations after each of my three month scans. I feel very good about that as I was impressed with his level of knowledge on melanoma and that he isn't a doctor who wants to jump into treatments just to be doing something.
So there you have it! My next scans will be on July 11th and we all hope that closing notation of 'No evidence of metastatic disease.' continues to show up on these scan reports too.
Carmon in NM – Stage IIIb 9/2008, Stage IV 6/2010 with brain and adrenal mets. NED since 4/13/2011 after craniotomy, gamma knife surgery and clinical drug trial with carboplatin, paclitaxel and temodar.
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