Stampeding Elephants

Yesterday Anand read out to me a sobering post he found on a mesothelioma Facebook group he belongs to (I don't myself use Facebook). A woman asked why, given that she was seeing mesothelioma patients mention being years past their diagnosis, her own father lived only 14 months past his diagnosis in 2019. The question provoked a flurry of responses from bereaved family members who shared that their loved one lasted only five months past diagnosis, or four weeks, or in one case, three days.

It made for a chilling litany as Anand read out the replies. We say that a sudden chill means that someone is walking across our grave. If so, this was more like a herd of elephants stampeding across my grave.

An important detail in the original query, though, was that the woman's father was diagnosed in 2019, the year before the first immunotherapy drugs were approved for mesothelioma. At that time, 14 months' survival was around average for pleural mesothelioma patients who received treatment, although figures for average survival times have always masked a lot of variation in the individual cases. Since 2020, more people are living longer than that, mostly thanks to advances in the area of immunotherapy. Since my immunotherapy seems to be working well for me, I am now optimistic that I will be one of them.

Meanwhile, I attended my online support group for mesothelioma patients in active treatment on Wednesday evening. As always happens, I came away sobered all over again by the force and persistence of the disease but also inspired by the courage and persistence of my fellow patients, most of whom have had the disease longer than I have. Not all of them are getting good results from the current crop of immunotherapy drugs, and not all them can tolerate those drugs.

More and better options are still needed to combat mesothelioma, which brings me back to a topic I raised a couple of weeks ago. If you are able, consider donating to my fundraiser at the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation. They fund important foundational research in mesothelioma and also provide a range of services for patients and caregivers, including the professionally moderated support group I attend.

For those who have already donated: thank you from the bottom of my heart! 

Some would-be donors have had their credit cards rejected when they tried to give, so I asked the Foundation to look into it. They checked that their system was working and concluded that the problem must have occurred because the donor's credit card company suspected fraudulent use. The Foundation is not a large, well-known charity, and most of my readers have not used the site before; these two factors together would flag a donation as suspicious in the eyes of the AIs monitoring card use for fraud. If this happens to you and you can spare the time, contact your credit card company to request that the payment go through. Once again: thank you, thank you, thank you!