Cancer Update – July 2012

Well I could have called this blog post “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” but there really wasn’t anything particularly ugly about today so I’ve gone with a relatively boring title.

Today’s visit to the Auckland Hospital Oncology department was a new chapter in my journey through cancer. They gave me the bad news first, followed by the good (not that I had a choice). The June CT scan had shown the cancer was still there. And it was bigger. And there was more of it. And it had resurfaced in my neck around the area where I was operated on in December.

Where’s the good news I hear you ask. Well, that test that I had to determine if I was genetically eligible for a new type of drug (B-Raf inhibitor) came back positive. This is great news as the success rates of the B-Raf inhibitors are a lot higher than traditional chemotherapy drugs – recent trials of the drug Dabrafenib have shown a 47% partial success rate and a 3% complete success rate, far higher than the 6% success rate with the 40-year old chemotherapy drug dacarbazine (DTIC) commonly used for treating patients with metastatic melanoma.

The next step in my case is for the hospital to apply to the Dabrafenib drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline for me to go onto their drug trial on ‘compassionate grounds’ as the drug is not funded by the NZ government at this stage. This process may up to 4-6 weeks although it could be quicker.

If there’s one thing doctors don’t generally like, it’s uncertainty. When the young doctor told me they really had no idea how effective the new drug might be in my situation, her body language conveyed a feeling of empathy for our situation. That’s why she seemed a little surprised when my wife Tracy told her how great the uncertainty was because it meant there was every opportunity for something good to happen.

Of course, what Tracy was alluding to was God’s ability to heal me from cancer completely. That ‘not knowing the outcome’ factor that could have brought fear and worry to our hearts instead brought excitement and expectancy about what God can and will do for us. 

Whatever the uncertain situations we face in life, we have to choose to focus on the positive outcomes and speak them out as though they were a done deal. Otherwise if we speak the negative outcomes over our situation we take ourselves out of the realm of the miraculous and become subject to the power of the ‘natural odds’.

So the future looks bright for me. How does yours look?

‘Til next time
David