On 24 February 2014 I was given another chance at life when almost all our hope had disappeared. Almost a month earlier, we had found out that I was not responding to my initial treatment as a Stage 4 Melanoma patient – Debrafenib and Trametinib. The cancer had spread so far and so quickly that I was given just 3 months to live.
I was given one last glimmer of hope; hope that I would gain access to a clinical trial that was about to close. The clinical trial was for an immunotherapy treatment now known as Keytruda.
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Last week I shared the news that my latest CT scan wasn’t great. A lesion on my adrenal gland had grown and there appeared to be activity in my lymph nodes.
It is really difficult to explain the emotions that were triggered by this scan. On one hand, I felt silly that I was so upset by these results because the big picture was not that bad – everything else was stable, which is great! But, this one naughty little lesion had the potential to change the direction of my treatment, a treatment that essentially bought me back from death’s door.
It feels like a lifetime ago that I was given three months to live and being told that my only hope of more time would be gaining access to a clinical trial of the drug Keytruda and hope that it would work.
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