Bile Duct Diary XVI

9 January, 2009


Dear Diary Readers,

There has been enough activity recently to justify another Diary. As you know, an MRI scan detected a metastasised tumour near the top of my spine, which led to a referral for 5 sessions of radiotherapy and these were completed just before Christmas. The treatments are entirely painless but because tissue is damaged and irritated, this stirs up a fair bit of back pain, which, three weeks later is finally beginning to ease.

Everybody’s best guess is that the microscopic cancer cells will reappear sooner or later in one site or another, and this scenario makes me eligible for joining an experimental drug trial group. So, today Jane, Briony and I went along to the British ‘Mecca’ of cancer research, the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton, south London, to meet the team headed by a Maltese consultant, Dr DeBono, whom we discovered spent some of his childhood in Siggiewi, the same small town where Jane’s parents lived….you can imagine the squeals of disbelief that immediately bonded us like glue.

If I pass the physical exam criteria, the plan is to put me into a ‘First Stage’ trial group, to try out combinations of new drugs, and closely monitor the outcome. It sounded a bit like: ‘last week we injected these drugs into white mice, and this week we’ll inject them into David Campbell’. It’s not clear yet how all this will be administered but it means a few overnights in hospital and a trip to the hospital at least once per week, and I should be able to carry on working through this, unless side effects are disabling. It seems to boil down to how my liver and kidneys will bear up under this, if they do, the treatment carries on, and if they don’t then the trial stops. All depending of course on whether I pass their MOT for road worthiness.

This is a time when Jane and I have to ask: ‘what are the options?’ And when I answer that by saying the option to the trial is just to wait for nature to take its course, then I feel the trial is the right thing to do both medically and emotionally. I think it will be stressful but I hope it will feel good to be able to be ‘doing something’. The consultant said my type of cholangeal cancer is rare,(it’s similar but different from pancreatic cancer), which is the main reason research money has not been provided to find a cure, and there have been no advances in curing it for 100 years. But there are, from the researcher’s point of view, no doubt, some exciting new drugs coming along…..So I suppose that’s a fair expression of our dilemma: ‘keep trying but don’t get your hopes up too high’. This is the plan, anyway……. we’ll see.

But one plan we can count on is Jesse and Zeyana’s wedding on Sunday the 18th at Dulwich College. They were planning on a big wedding in September, but very sweetly brought their original date forward so I would be fit and well, so there will be a smaller ceremony now followed by a larger event on the 13th of June. And Briony starts her MA in photojournalism next week, so there is a lot for us to celebrate in 2009, and although I am sure it will be a tough year for most of us, let’s send each other best New Year wishes !!

Take care, with love

David (and Jane)