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Well, the meeting with the oncologist was sort of awesome. Three cheers for being the proactive patient who read it on the internet. Two very good things came out of this morning. The first were the answers to my questions about dose dense. I am not high, there is promising research, and my oncologist is more than willing to go for it. The current research is not definitive enough to make it preferred (currently dose dense and standard are considered equivalent) and most patients are not willing to commit to the more intense schedule, so she generally does not offer it up front. But because I asked, I get to do it. And from my internet learnings (which is what led me to ask in the first place) it may not be the preferred standard now, but I would lay money that it will be, especially for triple negative patients, in the next few years.
Which leads us to the next thing of awesome. One of the questions I had been planning to ask today is about a clinical trial for a drug called Avastin that I'd read about, and wondered why I hadn't been offered. Turns out my oncologist had thought that I'd have to pay for it myself given my uninsured status, and not even my Bank of Dad could cover that. But, since I asked about dose dense, and the Avastin trial requires the patient be doing dose dense chemo, she went and dug more and found out that the drug is actually no-cost for trial participants. So as I'm sitting there with my list of questions, she says 'If we're going to do dose dense, I have a clinical trial you might be interested in' and I was all 'Avastin?' and her there was a grand meeting of the minds where we both got very excited. I'm in. And this is super exciting because it's one of the first targeted therapies that might actually work for triple negative. It targets cancer's ability to create blood supply and essentially starves it. It's shown huge promise in metastatic cancer patients, so the trial I will be in is one trying to determine if it is also of benefit in earlier stage patients. There is a twenty percent chance I'll be given a placebo, but what the hell, even if I'm not in one of the active arms, or if it turns out to be useless for early stage cancers, this is important research. \o/
So pretty much because I did the research, and because I asked, my entire treatment is now at the cutting edge of what's currently available. If it doesn't work, I will still be able to look back and be absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt sure that I did everything I could, everything that could have possibly been available to me at this time. And I made that happen, because I didn't just nod and say 'okay' to the first thing my doctor said. I'm feeling pretty damn good about that right now.
Which leads us to the next thing of awesome. One of the questions I had been planning to ask today is about a clinical trial for a drug called Avastin that I'd read about, and wondered why I hadn't been offered. Turns out my oncologist had thought that I'd have to pay for it myself given my uninsured status, and not even my Bank of Dad could cover that. But, since I asked about dose dense, and the Avastin trial requires the patient be doing dose dense chemo, she went and dug more and found out that the drug is actually no-cost for trial participants. So as I'm sitting there with my list of questions, she says 'If we're going to do dose dense, I have a clinical trial you might be interested in' and I was all 'Avastin?' and her there was a grand meeting of the minds where we both got very excited. I'm in. And this is super exciting because it's one of the first targeted therapies that might actually work for triple negative. It targets cancer's ability to create blood supply and essentially starves it. It's shown huge promise in metastatic cancer patients, so the trial I will be in is one trying to determine if it is also of benefit in earlier stage patients. There is a twenty percent chance I'll be given a placebo, but what the hell, even if I'm not in one of the active arms, or if it turns out to be useless for early stage cancers, this is important research. \o/
So pretty much because I did the research, and because I asked, my entire treatment is now at the cutting edge of what's currently available. If it doesn't work, I will still be able to look back and be absolutely, positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt sure that I did everything I could, everything that could have possibly been available to me at this time. And I made that happen, because I didn't just nod and say 'okay' to the first thing my doctor said. I'm feeling pretty damn good about that right now.