Archive for the ‘Melanoma’ Category
Rough Week (Brain Metastasis)
Following on from last week’s post. The headaches got worse and worse, and then I started getting double vision, muscle weakness in my legs, and some confusion. On Wednesday, while on the phone to my Mum, I fainted in my kitchen. After I called the hospital, they asked me to come in for clinic on Thursday.
In the clinic, I was given a neurological examination, then the oncologist said “we need to scan your brain.” The scan couldn’t be done same day, so I had to come back in on Friday morning for an MRI scan on my brain. As soon as the tech had finished the scan, she said “Dr X wants to speak to you in outpatients,” and that’s when I started worrying. Read the rest of this entry »
No scan yet
Went in to see the melanoma unit at the Royal Marsden yesterday. Short version: it’s ‘highly unlikely’ that the headaches and other symptoms come from a brain metastasis. No CT scan now, but one scheduled for three months time. Read the rest of this entry »
Why you need sunblock.
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Powerful stuff.
Rose Bengal and Melanoma
More results from the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology:
“CHICAGO — June 9, 2010 — Chemoablation with an injectable 10% solution of rose bengal disodium (PV-10), an iodinated fluorescein derivative, induces a robust response in a majority of patients with metastatic melanoma, researchers reported at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).”
And what’s interesting about this is that the effects are seen in tumours not directly injected with the solution (so even though it’s injected into the tumour, it seems to work systemically), and that there seems to be a high response rate.
Full article here.
This is another very interesting treatment for metastatic melanoma (which is generally considered incurable). It needs to be tested in a larger trial, and compared with the current standard treatment (which I believe would be a Phase III trial). Many drugs for melanoma have failed Phase III trials (with ipilimumbab being a notable recent exception), so I’m not getting too excited at the moment–but these results are certainly encouraging.
Another short lesson on statistics
The Median Isn’t the Message by Stephen Jay Gould
My life has recently intersected, in a most personal way, two of Mark Twain’s famous quips. One I shall defer to the end of this essay. The other (sometimes attributed to Disraeli), identifies three species of mendacity, each worse than the one before – lies, damned lies, and statistics. Consider the standard example of stretching the truth with numbers – a case quite relevant to my story. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction (The NHS maze)
Back in Blighty, the first hurdle was getting registered with a GP. NHS care is only free to UK residents–NOT citizens. So if you’ve been living overseas for a while, the NHS wants to see proof that you’re actually now living in the UK, rather than just coming back to get your whatsits clipped, or whatever. The amount of documentation they needed was . . . intimidating. (Visa for my wife, school registration documents for the kids, etc. etc.) It really was jolly exciting dealing with all of that and preparing for the operation. Read the rest of this entry »
