Zytiga

Last Friday, I met my medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering.  He gave me both good news – that Medicare has approved my use of a new drug, Zytiga (abiraterone) - and bad news -   that my cancer has spread to my lymph glands.  Neither news was unexpected.  Medicare has begun to approve the drug, and since the cancer had already spread to the urethra, the bones, the penis, a lung, and the heart, it’s not surprising that it has continued its relentless march through my body.

Prostate cancer is cunning.  The hormone I’m currently taking reduces the amount of the body’s testosterone, which acts as a kind of fertilizer for cancer cells.  So the cancer has begun to manufacture its own testosterone.  If the Zytiga works, it will reduce further the amount of testosterone in the body.  I’m too weak for chemotherapy, my doctor told me, so the administration of Zytiga is the next line of defense.

A bulletin to which I subscribe published the final clinical data for a trial of Zytiga.  Those men who took the drug showed an overall survival rate of 15.8 months whereas the survival rate for those who took a placebo was 11.2 months.  The difference of more than four months may not seem like much until you compare those four months to being dead.

When my wife and I entered my oncologist’s office, my one burning question was my life expectancy.  I didn’t ask, in the end, because it turned out I was afraid of the answer.  But after reading that bulletin, I do have a rough idea.  Of course those statistics are medians, with half the men above and half below.  Still, the answer is a lot more favorable than I had feared.  If I’m lucky and if I’m average, I’ll have more than another year.  Not so bad.