A tall man of about seventy, a retired doctor, was diagnosed with advanced melanoma over six years ago. It didn’t appear first on his skin—which is unusual but not unheard of—but instead attacked from inside his body. He smiles as he describes being saved by the Georgetown team and how well he’s feeling now. A stout and healthy-looking gentleman of about the same age brags about the number of beers he drinks on a weekday (over twenty) and on the weekends (over thirty) and tells us about his beloved horses and chickens on the Southern farm where he lives. He has undergone various harsh treatments for advanced melanoma, some without much success, but the latest immunotherapy has worked for him, although he’s developed another kind of cancer. Unfazed by these adversities, he says he looks forward to horseback riding and drinking. A couple seated at the far end of our table has come all the way from Florida, where they’d retired just weeks before the wife’s melanoma diagnosis. The Florida doctors told them she would die soon because there were no viable treatment options. But she found the immunotherapy trial at Georgetown, which has been successful so far, and now they commute to the Lombardi center every few months so she can get checkups and scans before returning to golf in the Florida sunshine.
We watch two short videos of other successful cases—other survivors. A woman in her forties describes how she discovered a large tumor on her thigh that turned out to be melanoma and was informed by her doctor that she would soon die. As she tells her story, her two very young daughters and a stepson giggle and play and hug her. She limps slightly, smiling shyly. A man well over eighty developed a large, scary-looking tumor on the scalp of his bald head. After immunotherapy, he says, his tumor disappeared as if a magic wand had touched his scalp.
As we mingle with the guests, I recognize Dr. Atkins’s nurse Bridget, whom I first met when I entered the clinical trial a year ago. She compliments me on how healthy I look.
“Do you remember that day in Dr. Atkins’s office when you all gathered around me and broke the terrible news that my brain tumors had grown and were pressing on my brain?” I ask her. “That there seemed to be no hope? And then you started to cry?”
“I will never forget it,” she says. “I’m so sorry I cried. I should have stepped out of the office.”
“No, no,” I say. “It was so human, and strangely, it gave me strength to see that other people do care, do feel for me, and would be sad if I died. We are social animals. We should feel for each other, cry for each other. There’s nothing wrong with showing our emotions. I only wish that it happened more often.”
I speak briefly with the wife of a survivor. Her husband, a grandfather of eight-month-old twins, had tumors that quickly disappeared after immunotherapy. She tells me that she’s so happy that he will have the chance to get to know the twins and enjoy being a grandfather. “He is such an optimist,” she says. “I’ve seen him suffering badly from the side effects of the drugs. He almost died from them but he never complained.”
Dr. Atkins gives a short presentation about the immunotherapy with which we, the survivors, have been treated. The immunotherapy clinical trial is very successful, he says; the vast majority of us survivors are expected to live for some time. And only one patient in the trial has died, he adds.
“Several years ago there would be no luncheon like this,” Dr. Atkins says, “because most of you would likely be dead.” His words may strike some people in the room as harsh but he is telling the truth: were it not for the immunotherapy he administered, I would certainly not be here today, and the same goes for many of the people gathered here. Before this miraculous new treatment, the majority of patients with advanced melanoma had no chance of survival. Immunotherapy is, indeed, a miracle cure, and not just for melanoma but for a number of other cancers too. It doesn’t work for everybody yet, and it may not work forever except for the luckiest of patients. But it works. We survivors of advanced melanoma are living testimony.
We have many questions when he finishes; mostly, of course, about our own fates. How can we make sure that the disease does not come back? “There are no guarantees. You’ll need to come frequently for medical checkups,” he says. Since there’s a hereditary link in melanoma, what can we do to protect our children? “Currently there is nothing we can do but protect our children from sun and make sure they always wear sunscreen,” he advises. Do a positive attitude and a strong will to live affect survival? “Perhaps,” he says. “They certainly don’t hurt. We don’t know very much about the influence of will on survival.” How can other melanoma patients—those not lucky enough to be in the clinical trial—afford the extraordinarily expensive immunotherapy drugs? “We have no answers to that yet,” he says. “It obviously depends on the insurance you carry.” How can patients deal with toxic, sometimes life-threatening side effects of this treatment? “We are trying to provide as much expertise from other medical fields as possible to deal with side effects, but sometimes this help is inadequate,” he says.
A photographer takes pictures of all of us with Dr. Atkins and his medical team. It feels like a graduation photo. We have persevered. We have remained functional or usable. We are true survivors.
At the end of May 2016, after several
