Specialist Visit

I've just gotten back from a visit to the mesothelioma specialist at Johns Hopkins. Like my local oncologist, she is very positive about how well I've responded to treatment. Her advice is to simply stay on the immunotherapy for two years or for as long as my system will tolerate it. 

She doesn't particularly recommend surgery. In her experience, patients who respond well to immunotherapy do pretty well on that therapy alone, and surgery does not usually add any benefit for them. Unfortunately, there are no very long-term studies to look at in this regard because immunotherapy for mesothelioma is quite new, particularly the drug I am getting (Keytruda/pembrolizumab). Nevertheless, she says she is seeing patients maintain a stable level of disease (in other words, with the cancer not progressing) for some number of years with immunotherapy. 

Hopefully that will be me! 

Mesothelioma is a wily beast, though, and has a nasty tendency to come back. Hopefully there will be yet more treatment options available by the time mine does.

In the short term, I am hoping that my fatigue and general malaise levels will continue to drop as I get further past the chemo. Fatigue is a major side effect of immunotherapy, though, so that may be too much to expect.

Meanwhile, for those who might wonder how my chemo plants are doing, they are all thriving. Three of them are on my deck where the deer can't get to them, but even the Canterbury bells out in the front bed are doing well. To protect them, I surrounded the bed with various garden trellises (after which I had to order some more for my beans and cucumbers) with the reasoning that although deer can jump just about any fence, they are reluctant to jump into a space if they can't see a good place to land. With my peach tree at the center of the bed, there's not much space for a landing. 

Chemo plant tree rose: flourishing

The trellises blend in with the background vegetation, so while they are a bit of a hodge-podge, they're not too ugly. I also hung soap slices in little mesh bags from the trellises, and I'll admit that that is ugly. However, I found a scientific paper reporting on a controlled study that showed that deer are at least somewhat repelled by tallow-based soaps. So I'm elevating science over aesthetics.

Soap bags: science over beauty

So far my deer-repelling system is working. There is plenty of food for the deer elsewhere, so they are eating that for now—including a few beautiful lupines I put in this spring. If we have a drought later this summer things may be a bit more difficult. For now, though, the chemo plants and I are both declaring victory.