I met today with Dr. Bosse, who is another medical oncologist with the Ottawa Cancer center, to review my treatment plan going forward.
At this point my creatinine levels are still slowly climbing, therefore they cannot keep giving me immunotherapy as it risks further damaging my kidneys.
What appears to be happening with me is the immunotherapy has kicked started my own immune system to attack cancer cells, but it is also attacking my kidneys (immunotherapy can lead to attacks on other organs). The only option when this happens is to settle down the immune system so it stops attacking my kidneys or other organs.
The only way to stop the immune system is with steroids.
I will start with very, very high doses of steroids for 5 days, then for the next 40 days will slowly ween off the steroids all together.
The difficulty I will have with the steroids are maintaining my blood glucose (the steroids will completely throw them out of whack and they will go very high - I will manage this with insulin), water weight gain (the weight gain will be moderate, but temporary. Once the steroids have stopped, the weight will return to normal), I will probably have trouble sleeping, and I may have arm and leg pain.
Although being on the steroids will not be a great experience, it will at least, hopefully, calm down my immune system, and my creatinine will start to come back to normal.
I will be checking my creatinine levels once a week for the next 6 weeks.
Comments