Consultant meeting - April 17th

 

Well we've just come back from the latest meeting with the Myeloma consultant in Addenbrokes and I have to say it was all good news. 

The consultant, who is an enthusiastic and  well-informed Italian in her late 30s, always strikes me as someone who will tell you things exactly as they are, with no varnishing or sugar-coating. So when she says that my body has had "an excellent response to the Melphalan chemotherapy" I am inclined to believe her. All blood markers have gone in the right direction, and the key one of paraproteins has gone down - on Addenbrokes latest measures - to 5g. When I tell her that last week's measures at Ipswich had shown it as low as 3g she is even more pleased.

I have agreed to enter a clinical trial at Addenbrokes that will give me a 50/50 chance of getting an immunotherapy drug called Elranatamab, and I signed the papers today, to start within a small number of weeks. Which may give me an even better outcome. 

But the thing which is clear from the consultant's enthusiasm is that Myeloma is one area of cancer where great steps forward are being made, and where new drugs are being developed and tested. So it seems that the estimates and average survival times that are given today are certain to increase over the years that I have myeloma. The senior nurse who also attended my appointment is the head nurse for clinical trials and she said that when she started 10 years ago there were hardly any trials involving myeloma, and now it is one of the biggest subjects of clinical trials. 

And on the subject of first remission (generally your longest) the consultant said that for a simple myeloma 7 years in first remission was quite normal and even with my genetic higher risk variant I could expect half of that. And three and a half years was more than I was assuming. 

So we came out of the appointment with big smiles on our faces, checking with each other that we had really heard what we thought we had. And then we drove off for a long-planned weekend down in Sussex, picking up champagne on the way to toast the weekend and the news.

A very good day.