Post Yervoy – mets to lungs have grown

Good Day fellow warriors!

It's been a long time since I've posted here since I thought I wasn't going to need to again.  However, I've updated my profile with all the happenings of the past year, so if you'd like a complete update, please check that out.

Good Day fellow warriors!

It's been a long time since I've posted here since I thought I wasn't going to need to again.  However, I've updated my profile with all the happenings of the past year, so if you'd like a complete update, please check that out.

Summary…I hat spots on my lungs this past April, which they scanned 3 months later and they had grown to 7mm and 12mm.  Biopsy confirmed melanoma, so Dr. Chmielowski of UCLA started me on the Yervoy treatment.  I was able to complete 3 of the 4 injections before I came down with severe colitis which landed me in the hospital from 8-11 Nov (got discharged Veteran's Day of all things).  They started me on 100mg of Prednisone which I'm not happy about, but it's made the colitis much better for now.  I've started tappering 10mg a week and I'm at 90mg now.  Needless to say, I'm not finishing the Yervoy treatment.

PET/CT scan the other day showed that the spots in my lungs have grown to 9mm and 22mm, but there are no other remarkable locations of melanoma, so at least it's not spreading to anywhere else yet.  The next steps we came up with are to remove the nodes via surgery and test them for the BRAF mutation.  If positive, I'll go on BRAF inhibitor drug post-surgery and see how things go.  I'm running this plan by my docs at MD Anderson too, just to make sure they wouldn't do anything different.

All-in-all I actually feel good, I'm eating, not quite exercising yet, but walking when I can, got good meds to help me sleep, and I'm not symptomatic from the cancer at all.

So, any comments or suggestions out there from folks on other trials that may be also promising for someone like me?  Also, we're wondering if there may even be a delayed response from the Yervoy and maybe it'll go to work later.  I'm not very hopeful about this since they have me on such high dose steroids and my immune system is just getting shot to pieces from that.

Also, I just want to say to everyone on here…keep fighting this hard, not only for yourself, but for those you love and who love you.  It's the fight in us that makes us strong, and through our strength we will have victory.  Peace.