my husband completed 35 rads and 3 mega doses of cisplatin. he has nasopharynx cancer and early scopes showed that the treatment was working very well. Now our chemo dr wants to do an additional 4 weeks of infusion pump chemo. my husband said ok yesterday but now he is wavering. the doctor says that he has done so well and that they have never been able to move to this step with a patient who has been thru what he has. so are we the guinne pig? is it really necessary? how hard is chemo by pump? When is enough enough? our cure rate was 85-90 before this treatment was suggested. Thanks Cindy

Tough one.
My MO also suggested additional treatment after the 7 cisplatin/carboplatin treatments I had concurrent with the IMRT. The idea was to provide additional insurance. Ultimately, I decided against it, since any chemo regimen is inherently risky. It is a risk benefit thing... with the added complication that you do not know what is going on. Both RO and oral surgeon did not see the point of doing it. In my case the decision to continue with chemo treatment or not nearly coincided with the post TX PET/CT scan. I decided the following:

A) if the scan was clean then no more chemo
B) if the scan was ambiguous then get ROs opinion and likely have chemo
C) if the scan was positive... no choice chemo

as it turned out the scan was clean with one enlarged node with no activity. So I chose not to do it. (BWT that node behaved by the time the time I had the second PET/CT). The problem is that you only know in hindsight if that was a good decision or not. Even if you have the additional chemo this is no guarantee against a recurrence.

I have no first hand experience with the pump. My IMPRESSION is, if this is done alone it is not that big a deal (for 5-FU)

see the OC site or
http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=4007#common

Markus

thank you, we just talked to RO and he is on board with the additional chemo and said thar we can stop the treatments at any time. this cancer is so rare that they want to give the extra insurance. so pick line today and treatment monday.

Good!!

Hope that you are sailing through this. BTW is it 5-FU?

M

Well we started yesterday. The doctor led us to believe it would be 4 weeks but looks like more like 2 months. My husband goes to chemo for smaller dose of Cisplatin and follows that with 4 days of 5FU then recovers for 3 weeks and does that cycle 3 times total. I am anxious to see if this is easier than what he has been doing. He has already started to eat thanks to the ENT giving him a mouthwash with steroids and has cleared up his throat. Thanks for any help with this new treatment.