I had my regular check up today with an MRI to see how the
brain is doing. Everything is clear and all is well in the noggin. The blood work
was also normal across all but a couple measures and those were just slightly out of normal
range.
We talked to Dr. Bonomi at some length about Opdiva, the first immune therapy drug for lung cancer and
AZD9291, the 3rd generation of an EGFR inhibitor like Tarceva.
The Opdiva has just been approved
now for squamous non-small cell lung cancer but not for adenocarcinoma like I
have. The hope is that it will be approved for that as well in the next couple
months. However, Dr. Bonomi said the Opdiva seems to work better with the
squamous type cancer because it has a lot more mutations than the adenocarcinoma.
He thinks the 3rd generation Tarceva will work better for me and is
a better match for my condition, especially given the great response I had to
Tarceva originally. That drug should hopefully be coming out before the
end of the year. If that doesn’t work, then he would try the Opdiva with
me. So I guess I will sit tight and stay with the current treatment a
while longer. I am feeling good and the cancer in the lungs is growing at a slow enough rate that Dr. B feels we are safe to continue on this path for quite a while.
In the meantime, Doug and I just returned from a wonderful trip on the Danube river boat cruise.
We went to Budapest, Vienna, Melk, Passau, Regensburg, and Nuremberg. The towns
were charming and the architecture and history were amazing. After the boat
trip, we took a side trip to Prague and fell in love with it. I’ve
attached a panoramic view of one of the city plazas that I took with my
iPhone in Prague. I have posted over 300 pictures from our trip that you can view using this
link to Shutterfly.
