Good Chemo News

I saw my oncologist this afternoon to get the results of my CT scan and blood work following the second round of my second course of chemo. I had been concerned that the tumors were continuing to grow because one blood test, a measure of the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), had increased by about 40% (from 2.3 to 3.2) since the last blood test three weeks ago. The good news is that the increase was not meaningful, and my tumors were either unchanged or apparently smaller in a couple of cases. The pemetrexed seems to have had a positive effect. Consequently, I had another round of chemo following my doctor's appointment.

To explain why the CEA values were not significant, the doctor showed me a graph of another patient's CEA values (with the name obscured, of course). His scores had risen from 100 to 400 at the start of therapy (for non-small cell lung cancer) but had declined back to around 50 over the course of a year, and he said he had patients with much higher values than that. He said that the increase in CEA at the start of treatment may be the results of dying or stressed cells producing more of the antigen. We'll see in three weeks if the values continue to rise, but it will six weeks before the next CT scan.

All in all is was a good afternoon at the hospital.