Hello Everyone!
Hello Everyone!
There has been a fair number of posts/discussions lately by those of us who have or are caring for someone in stage IV with brain mets. Often the posts and discussion have been centered around being denied access to clinical trials and having to undergo some sort of brain radiation in combination wth Ipi and concerns about the efficacy of WBR and Ipi's lag time before showing any effect. I've been following many of these posts and replied to several myself as I found myself with 7+ brain mets in June and denied access to PD-1 trials. Due to the number of brain mets I ended up going with WBR starting concurrently with Ipi and my doctor decided to add on self injections of GM-CSF for 14 days after each dose of Ipi.
I recieved my 3rd dose of Ipi one week ago, and had my one month post radiation MRI this week and just got home from the results appointment. I wanted to share the good news and possibly give some hope to the others out there that are dealing with the worry that comes along with stage IV with brain mets. They were expecting my one month follow up scan to be more or less the same as my pre-radiation scan, with reduction in tumors hoped for for the 3 month follow up MRI. Today I got an early gift: There are no longer any areas of concern on my meninges and of the 7 visible masses that were there before on only 4 are still visible and those are so faint/subtle they may just represent scar tissue. It's a much better result than anyone was hoping for for this scan and I'm on cloud 9!
So hang in there everyone! There is always hope and good things do happen!
-Eva
.
