December 31, 2014
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!! I hope the new year brings prosperity and health to all.
Kevin will no longer be on high does interleukin 2 treatments as they did not work for him. On to plan B, which is a chemo therapy drug, taken once a day, called sutent or sunitinib. Dr. George at Duke University Hospital believes the best course of action is sutent for 3 months with the hopes that it will shrink the tumors. If it shrinks it, but not enough, he can stay on it longer until it shrinks it more. Some people have been on this medication for years, keeping cancer in a "controlled" stage. Sutent has a 70% chance of keeping cancer in control, those aren't bad odds. Although a cure would be much better.
If it does shrink them, Kevin will be a candidate to have them removed either by surgery, ablation or gamma knife. Surgery should be able to be performed laparoscopically. Ablation is where they go into the tumor and burn the blood supply to the tumor, therefore killing it. Gamma knife is radiation therapy that focuses a bunch of beams of radiation on the tumor to kill it. It would be wonderful if that would happen and we could get rid of this cancer. Kidney cancer is quite tenacious!
I will start a new blog detailing his time on sutent.
Thanks for reading and following along with us :)
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