Well, we got the results back from my most recent CT scan last Friday, January 4, 2013, and the results were not good! Evidently, the 3 FOLFOX treatments I'd gotten before Caroline and I left on our Trans-Atlantic Adventure were no more effective at halting the progression of the metastatic appendiceal adenocarcinomas in my abdominal cavity and on my peritoneum (the all encompassing membrane that surrounds the gut) than the FOLFIRI and Avastin treatments I've gotten since May 2012! Unfortunately, I've now exhausted the state-of-the-art standard-of-care conventional chemotherapy treatments that are used to fight colon cancers, FOLFOX and FOLFIRI, with or without Avastin! The upside of this is that I won't have to subject myself to any more IV chemotherapies! The downside is that there are no more IV chemotherapies for me to use! Medicine has made great strides in the 20 years since Audrey Hepburn was diagnosed with appendix cancer in the early 1990's when 5-fluorouracil (5-FU, the F in FOLFOX and FOLFIRI) was about the only chemo agent available that was useful against colon cancers (appendix cancers are almost always treated as a subspecies of the far more common colon cancers)! However, when you run out of treatment options, the ultimate outcomes are not all that different today than they were in Audrey's day!
Fear not! It turns out that we're not completely out of treatment options after all! Even as we write, we are meeting with researchers here at MD Anderson Cancer Center who are involved in 100's of Phase I clinical trials of promising new "targeted therapies," one or more of which may be appropriate for me and my tumors!
I promise to keep you all up to date on the latest! In the meantime, enjoy another amazing picture from our Trans-Atlantic Adventure, in front of Gaudí's amazing La Pedrera apartments!:
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