Surviving Terminal Cancer

One of the many things that has surprised and frustrated me since my family learned about my dad's diagnosis of brain cancer is the lack of awareness and knowledge possessed by the medical world as a whole about the specifics of Glioblastoma Multiforme, or GBM.  I understand that the average person probably hasn't ever heard of GBM. Because it's rare, it's just not something that most people have ever had to know about.  Unlike more common types of cancer like breast cancer, lung cancer, and prostate cancer, most people probably don't know someone who has had GBM (lucky for them).  I find it appalling, though, that the medical community, outside of oncologists and neurosurgeons, by and large has never even heard of the diagnosis.  

Last fall, I went to a family doctor to get established as a new patient in the practice.  When the physician came into the room, she introduced herself and then sat down on the rolling stool.  As she asked me questions about my medical history and about my family's medical history, she typed in my answers on a laptop computer.  Eventually we came to the part where she asked about my parents' health, and I told her that my dad had died of GBM.  "How old was he?" she asked, and I gave her the same information that I have given many times about how he was only 67 and was active and seemed to be the picture of health.  In fact, I told her, he was training for an Ironman triathlon.  "Did he swim in a lake to train for that?" she asked, which in all honestly I thought was a little off-topic.  Yes, I told her.  "Oh," she said, "is that where he got the GBM?"  

Her question disoriented me, and it took me a minute to respond. "No," I said, trying really hard to control the anger I felt creeping into my body. "The cause of brain cancer is unknown." She blinked a few times and then said, "Oh!  I'm sorry - I thought GBM was a parasite," she said.

I liked this doctor; she seemed thorough and smart and kind, but the exchange brought to my attention yet again how much of a gap there is in what medical professionals are being taught about this disease.  

That's one reason I am so glad whenever I see GBM featured in the media as it will be in the soon-to-be-released film "Surviving Terminal Cancer" aimed at promoting patient advocacy and public education about cancer and research. 

The film features the story of a man who has lived for 19 years after he was diagnosed with GBM, a disease that has a median survival rate of 14.6 months with the accepted protocol treatment:

This film charts the remarkable story of Ben Williams, professor emeritus of experimental psychology at University of California, San Diego. Diagnosed in 1995 with the most lethal cancer known to medicine, a primary brain tumour called glioblastoma multiforme, he was given just a few months to live. But a natural born maverick, and rigorous scientist, Ben decided he would not go down without a fight. Nineteen years later his story is an inspiration to patients the world over, whilst his case is dismissed by the medical community as just one of a handful of statistical outliers.

"Why are we sticking with a treatment protocol that obviously doesn't work?" the filmmakers ask, as anyone who learns about Ben's story will ask.  The film looks at several less well-known treatment options for cancers like GBM, including some off-brand uses of certain medications and vaccines, like the modified polio vaccine that is currently being used at Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University (where we took my dad for treatment, although he got a different type of treatment, not a vaccine). 

Another reason that I am so interested in this film is that I personally interacted with Ben Williams through email correspondence during the time that my dad was sick.  I connected with Ben when I came across his story on a website called Clinical Trials and Noteworthy Treatments for Brain Tumors during one of the many late-night Internet searches I was desperately conducting.  I sent him a message through the website with a brief description of my dad's medical information, closing by saying "We want to be as thorough as possible in looking at treatment options for both now and in the future.  Your story is among the few things keeping us going as we begin our battle with this terrible disease.  I would love to get your advice if possible."

He emailed me in response later that same day:

With that, he and I entered into a fast-paced exchange of emails, with the communication mostly consisting of me asking questions and him providing more in-depth advice and information about what the data in the research had shown about various treatment regiments, including the use of several types of chemotherapy other than what my dad was taking, off-label use of medications like calcium channel blockers, and various vitamin and herbal supplements.  He had a remarkable way of explaining very complex scientific and medical issues, like gene segments and pharmacological cross-tolerance; I felt like I had access to someone who knew something that might possibly save my dad's life.  I read and reread every email he sent and made long lists of questions which I later posed to Dad's oncologist.  Instead of thinking "Why him? How did he get this horrible disease when he seemed to have everything going in his favor?" I began to catch myself thinking, "Why not him?  Why can't he be the one to beat the odds like Ben has been?"  I believed that we would find a treatment that would work for him, and I believed that he would be ok.

But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Dad didn't get better; in fact, he was getting worse by the day at that point.  Four days after I got the last email from Ben, which included specifics about what he felt we should ask the oncologist to consider, Dad was taken again by ambulance to the hospital, and, although we did not know it at the time, we were propelled into what ended up being the beginning of the end.

The Right to Die

This is a follow-up to the previous post, Without a Sound:

There’s a lot that bothers me about the handling of the news about Brittany Maynard, the 29 year-old woman who chose to hasten the end of her life after she was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM).  Probably the thing that disturbs me the most is the confident way that so many people have commented on her story and her decisions, as if they have any idea what has really been going on behind closed doors in her life.

As someone who was there on the scene for most of the 75 days between my dad’s diagnosis of GBM and his death, I feel like I have a fairly good idea what was going on, but I also know as a result of my experience that there are some things – even in highly publicized cases like hers – that anyone on the fringe or further out cannot know, and that’s the way it should be.  Health issues are private and personal.  The fact of the matter is that even with as healthy as Brittany looked when her image appeared in the news just days before her death we don’t know what the cancer inside her brain was doing to her, and we don’t know the intricacies of her diagnosis or prognosis.

Another thing that disturbs me is the way the media has portrayed Brittany as a hero, as if she was a crusader of sorts because of a personal choice she made to make another personal choice public.  To me, it seem like this implies that a person who does not make the same choices that she made is not as important or as courageous.  I'm glad that Brittany and her family had the opportunity to make the choices that they made, but I also think that people in other situations need an equal amount of respect and compassion. And my bet is that she neither viewed herself as a hero nor wanted to be viewed as one; like the rest of us, she was probably just doing the best she could to get through life and the hand that she was dealt in life.

The tricky thing about commenting on such an emotionally charged topic is that logic often takes a back seat in such a situation, as does respect for the views of others. I have had a hard time figuring out exactly what I want to say about Brittany’s story because I see the irony in producing commentary about the error I think others are making by commenting about the case.  The potential for expressing bias as fact, judgment, condemnation, shaming, and labeling is huge; this is what we tend to resort to when threatened or frightened -- and there's not much, if anything, in life that's scarier than facing pain and the end of life. When I think about the many comments that have been made about how Brittany chose to handle her medical condition, most of which have seemed judgmental and harsh to me, I can't quite get past the hypocrisy of saying "Shame on you for shaming someone else" or the irony of judging someone for being judgmental.

Here’s a confession: when I read about Brittany’s success in doing some of the things on her Bucket List, I felt jealous and even a little angry.  My dad had a Bucket List too, but he wasn’t able to get to any of the items on his agenda because of what GBM took from him from the moment the condition revealed itself.  I also felt jealous that Brittany’s medical team seemed to have communicated with her clearly about her options … or maybe she was just more able to figure out what her options were because the cancer in her brain hadn’t impaired that cognitive skill in her … yet.

My dad’s doctors, especially his oncologist, didn’t seem to have an accurate view of what was happening when he went into a downward spiral.  It seems like an oncologist would be much better attuned to medical facts so as not to succumb to the attraction of denial, but that was not the situation in my dad’s case.

I honestly don’t know what my dad would have done had we had all of the facts, had he been able to adequately process things, and had he had an opportunity to make a choice that would not put his family in jeopardy in any way.  I know that it would have been nice to have someone – anyone – ask him, or us, about his priorities.  The medical team was evidently too rushed, too uneducated, or too something to think to ask him, and we didn’t know to ask (or what to ask or how to ask it) or to speak up on his behalf until the very end.

As I've said and written about, the diagnosis of brain cancer, especially GBM, is particularly devastating for many reasons.  As a result of the attention brought to GBM by Brittany’s case, NBC news wrote an article about the unique challenges with brain cancer:

Why Brain Cancer is So Lethal

The neuro-oncologist who called me to announce that my dad’s case had been accepted by Duke University is quoted in the article:  “Brain tumors,” he says, “particularly but not exclusively the malignant ones … are in such an eloquent area of the body that surgical intervention may not be possible and other interventions such as radiation therapy may come with a fierce price.”  Yet another thing I wish I wasn’t in a position to have to know truth of.

Recurrence of GBM, the article says, is inevitable, at least as the treatment options now stand.  As I wrote about in the last post, this is especially true in certain variations of GBM. 

Another thing that bothers me about the coverage of Brittany’s story is the overuse of the phrase “death with dignity.”  Maybe it’s just a weird point of sensitivity of mine, but I don’t like the fact that that phrase seems to imply that there is no dignity in making a different choice – or in not having a choice – about the specifics of an impending death.  That feels like a really sick kind of competitiveness: who did death better???  Even the phrase “the right to die” seems muddled to me: I’m pretty sure that dying is a natural process rooted in science, not a “right.”  I think better terminology is “to hasten the end of one’s life” or something similar that better captures the fact that one's time on this earth is not going to be long with a diagnosis like this, no matter how things are handled.

We can’t know what the specifics of Brittany’s medical condition were, and we can’t know what she thought or felt when the news of the prognosis and the path she would likely have to travel were delivered.  In an instant, though, her choices - and life as she knew it - were stripped away.  I think, like a lot of people with terminal diagnoses who consider “physician-assisted suicide,” that she was desperately trying to gain some control in a situation that was horribly out of control, and I get that.  If you’ve ever seen someone have a seizure, if you’ve ever seen the terror and confusion in the eyes of someone who is aware that their own mental state is impaired, or if you’ve ever seen the look of humiliation and angst on the face of an adult who has wet his pants because he couldn’t make it to the bathroom in time, then you might have a little bit of an idea of what she and her family were feeling.  If you love a person who is having to endure things like this, plus a significant amount of often unrelenting physical and emotional pain - and who is being told that death is imminent, then there’s a chance that maybe you can relate to what it’s like to feel such a desperate need to try to establish order and control. 

I wish I could say that I can’t imagine what it took for Brittany’s family to support her decision; I’ve tried thinking about what it must have been like on their last night with her or in the last hour they had together before what they knew was going to happen happened; it’s a different kind of horror, I would imagine, than what my dad and my family experienced – but, I would guess, the same kind of love.

 This is a song that my dad loved, played by a musician named

Bernard Stanley"Acker" Bilk who died earlier this week. 

Without a Sound

 When a glass or a ceramic plate is dropped, it makes a loud noise as it crashes on the ground.  When a window shatters, a figurine falls off a shelf, or a picture falls off the wall, it makes a noise.  Why not, then, a heart when it breaks?  It doesn’t seem right that something so devastating, so life changing, can occur without a sound.   

A lot of people have asked me over the past few days what my thoughts are about what happened with Brittany Maynard, the 29 year-old woman who is being referred to as the face of “Death with Dignity” after she chose to hasten the end of her life after she was diagnosed with Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM).

GBM is something about which I, unfortunately, have personal experience and knowledge, as it is same diagnosis that my dad had.  I am not a physician, but I will do my best to provide accurate and relevant information about this diagnosis below as I think it’s important to know the facts about this diagnosis before jumping into the arena of discussion about Brittany’s case:

GBM is a primary brain cancer, which means it originates in the cells of the brain, as opposed to a secondary brain cancer, which begins elsewhere in the body and then spreads – or metastasizes - to the brain.  Of the many different kinds of primary brain cancers, all of which are rare, GBM is the most common … and the most aggressive in adult humans.   It is considered to be incurable, and, in the vast majority of cases diagnosed in the U.S., survival after diagnosis is less than two years.  The average life expectancy for an adult diagnosed with GBM is 14 months, and, as my family discovered when my dad died only ten weeks after his diagnosis, sometimes even that is too much to hope for. 

When a mass in the brain is discovered by a scan and a biopsy of the tumor is taken and analyzed in the lab, there are two things the pathologist looks at: 

• the type of brain cell from which the tissue came, which gives the tumor a name like GBM
• the speed at which the cells are dividing, which results in an assignment of a grade for the tumor, such as Grade III [3] or Grade IV [4].  In general, Grade I means that the tumor tissue is “low grade,” or very slow-growing, whereas Grade IV indicates that the tumor is growing at a very aggressive rate. 

To make things even more confusing for most of us, although Glioblastoma Multiforme is a primary type of cancer, there are two types of glioblastomas, the first of which is called “Primary, or de novo, GBM.”  This kind is the most common form of glioblastoma and is highly aggressive from the moment of discovery.  The second type of GBM (misleadingly also classified as a primary brain cancer) is called Secondary GBM; this kind begins as a lower grade tumor and then as it develops gets "upgraded" eventually into a GBM. Secondary GBM tumors have a longer, relatively slower growth pattern – but they are still considered to be very aggressive in that they are very difficult to treat.  This type of brain cancer, which accounts for about 10% of all GBM’s, tends to be found in people 45 and younger.

In the words of the neurosurgeon who handed down the news of the cancer to my family: “All GBM’s are Grade IV.”

                 

Some reports in the media about Brittany Maynard’s case seem to be confusing two different parts of the pathology, though: Tumor grade is not the same as the stage of a cancer. Cancer stage refers to the size and/or extent of the original tumor and whether or not cancer cells have spread to other sites. Cancer stage is based on factors such as the location of the tumor at the time of diagnosis, the size of the tumor, and the number of tumors (or "tendrils") present. There are even more scales of different types used for determining the grade and/or stage of certain types of cancers like pancreatic: suffice to say that there is so much information about cancer in general that it's not difficult to see why there is a lack of awareness - and some confusion - amongst the media and the general public.  In fact, the same goes for the medical community: as far as I know, except for the oncologist and a few nurses on the oncology floor of the hospital ... and maybe the neurosurgeon, the majority of the medical professionals that treated my dad knew little to nothing about GBM. Unfortunately, I don't think this was atypical; not long ago I went to a doctor as a new patient for a check-up and, when she asked me about my family history, of course I told her about my dad's diagnosis of GBM.  "Was he sick for a long time?" she asked me, and when I told her no, that he was in great shape, in fact he was in training for a triathlon, she responded, "Oh, so he probably caught the parasite from swimming in a lake?"  Um, no, GBM is not a parasite, I told her.  But I digress ...

GBM tumors can occur in any area of the brain but are most often found in the frontal and temporal lobes [My dad’s tumor was in his right parietal/temporal lobes].  One characteristic of GBM is that these tumors tend to be infiltrative, meaning they spread into other parts of the brain (usually very quickly).  I remember the neurosurgeon explaining to us that GBM tumors, unlike most tumors that have smooth edges, have irregular borders – and then for effect he held up his left arm with his elbow at a 90 degree angle so that his left hand was dangling down in the air, and then he used his right hand to point to the fingers of his left which he said were very similar to the multiple “tendrils of tumor” in my dad’s brain, “finger-like projections, if you will,” he said. 

As the neurosurgeon also informed us on the day of my dad's diagnosis, although GBM can spread throughout the central nervous system (the brain and the spinal cord), it almost never spreads to other areas of the body.  

What the doctor didn’t tell us – what no medical professional did – but what I discovered through spending a lot of time researching on my own is that there are certain “prognostic indicators” with GBM, essentially things that speed up the ticking time bomb, shortening the already shortened life even faster: there are a few that did not apply to my dad like pre-existing health conditions and lack of family support – and at least one that did, which was the surgical removal of more than 95% of the tumor [called "the extent of tumor residual"].  One other factor that affects prognosis, one which we never got the chance to find out about in my dad’s case, is a genetic mutation that involves a gene called the MGMT gene.  People with GBM who have had their MGMT gene shut off by a process called methylation have prolonged survival rates. Unfortunately, as in my dad’s case, testing for this gene is not automatically done at all medical centers, and so many people (as occurred in our case) cannot use this as a piece of information for treatment planning or the end-of-life decision-making process.

It is important to be aware that not all GBM’s have the same biologic abnormalities, which is likely the reason that different patients respond differently to the same treatment. And so, even with the amount of information in the media about Brittany's medical condition, there are some things to which the general public is not privy, and some of those things probably affected her prognosis.

Although this information may seem boring or irrelevant to most people, I feel it is important to have access to it when considering Brittany Maynard’s case.  The other thing that I think it’s important to know is that, unless you have been intimately involved in caring for someone with GBM, there will always be certain things that you don’t know - things that may make the choices of Brittany and others look different to you.  As I’ve said before, GBM is a different beast from other cancers, even when those cancers have spread to the brain. 

In the next post, I will try to express my thoughts about some of things that have been discussed about Brittany’s case. 

The Fuel of Hope

I recently came across a video clip of an interview with Dr. Henry Friedman, the Head Honcho at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University.  Watching it brought back memories of the day about a month after my dad was diagnosed, the afternoon on which this same man called me on my cell phone to say that the team at Duke had received Dad's paperwork and had approved him to come in to their clinic for a consultation.

Knowing the outcome as I do now, it feels odd to think back on the day when that call came in with what felt like the best news of my life.  I vividly remember standing in front of my desk at work, hearing my cell phone ringing, and then seeing the North Carolina area code come through on the screen of my phone.  Like a drowning person grasping for a life preserver, I hit the button to accept the phone call and said, “Hello?”  A few of my coworkers, each of whom knew that I had been anxiously waiting on that call, stopped what they were doing and stood motionless, watching my face as I listened as Dr. Friedman responded to my basic greeting by launching into a rapid-fire monologue about how we needed to get my dad in to see his team at the clinic at Duke.  I felt like it was the voice of God speaking to me; I felt like hearing that Dad had been accepted into what we’d been told was the best program for his type of brain cancer in the world was a sign that Dad was going to be ok.  The stream of words coming through the phone line sounded like a pep rally of the highest importance: “We have seen great success with the treatment for GBM that we’ve been doing in this clinical trial,” he said, and for the first time since Dad’s diagnosis I felt Hope. Friedman offered me an appointment for my dad and of course I gratefully accepted, with tears streaming down my face as I stood in the middle of my office.  I thanked him and then we said goodbye; I hung up the phone and turned around to face my coworkers, who broke out into a round of applause.  I felt like I had won the lottery.

Watching this clip, listening to the same voice talk about the horror of brain cancer coupled with the renegade Hope of his treatment plan, I feel such a mixture of emotions.  Although I spent a lot of time after my dad’s death feeling very angry that the Hope that we’d been given hadn’t panned out, I am grateful now that Dad and the rest of us were able to have that Hope for a period of time, because the thing from the video clip with which I don’t agree is the idea that the worst thing one can hear is the word Cancer.  I know now, as do others who have gone through similar situations, that the hardest thing is when the doctors don’t know what to do, when the treatments don’t work, when the Hope has to change to things like comfort and peace - and when even those things seem like a far-reach.  

We didn't actually meet with Dr. Friedman once we got to Duke; we met with some of the neuro-oncologists and other staff members there that he had trained and talked to them about his latest protocol for treatment of GBM.  We felt the support in the fight against the insurance companies as discussed in this video, and we appreciated that and the other resources we were given while we were there.  

Of course I wish that my dad could have had a "good outcome." Of course I wish that my dad could have been one of the people in this video talking about long-term survival.  Of course I wish that he could have been one of Dr. Friedman's examples of how things could go right.  But, failing that, from this vantage point I am grateful for the Hope that we were handed by this guy and his team and for the fuel that it gave us, if only for a short while.