Purpose of this blog

My name is Cor and this is my story dealing with mucosal melanoma (MM) in my nose which was diagnosed on 10 Jan 2017. I am married and have 2 kids. I write and update this blog to reach out to all my loved ones far away with updates and my state of mind and also to share information with other patients.

Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Choice of location for the clean-up surgery

When my wife visited the National Cancer Center in Chiba for a second opinion, she was very pleased with the well organised method of cooperation of specialists as a team.
Our experience in Singapore was that we had to get ourselves educated quickly in order to be able to ask the right questions to reach the best conclusion.

In Japan, the specialist were all gathering and openly discussed the options with my wife. They concluded that the cleanup operation was not possible due to size of the tumour.
The proton beaming would be possible once the tumour had reduced in size by medicines.

The new immunotherapy drugs from the US were judged 'killer medicines' but the top oncologist present. He stated that the publications were not giving a true picture of the effectiveness of the new drugs as they were administered in conjunction with surgery. The effect of the surgery would have influenced the outcome, and he also questioned if all non-successful cases were included in the results.

So we were left with no choice then to proceed with the clean-up operation in Singapore and hope for the best. The proton beaming could then follow in Japan after 4 weeks of healing to minimise inflammation which had proven to make it impossible to discern malignant melanoma from inflamed tissue in the PET/CT scans.

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