Is anyone still getting immunotherapy after 2years and 20 treatments?

Hi Stagefour,

On 22nd November 2022 I had my 80th (3-weekly) infusion of Pembrolizumab. I went to a UK hospital and it was paid for by my health insurance because my consultant was an if it ain't broke don't fix it better safe than sorry first do no harm hang the expense type. The scans didn't show any changes over the extra years of treatment but did give enough certainty that there wasn't any further spread to get me reassessed as stage 1 when another tumour sprouted in my lung. (Cancer can mutate to dodge immunotherapy.) A lower right lobectomy later and I'm 2 years cancer-free.

With hindsight the extra years of infusions certainly did give certainty on my prognosis regarding further spread - any stray cells wandering around my system would surely have been mopped up by then. They did not make any difference to the primary tumours, which after 2 years had reduced to scar tissue. Going without the extra infusions would, in my opinion, have made the scans way more important and may have left me eventually looking at chemo instead of the surgery that has left me cancer-free.

The side effects of prolonged immunotherapy might have subsided now though the jury is still out on that - I still get flare-ups of them even now, which is a small price to pay for being alive.

My insurance premiums are eye-watering. Going private without insurance will cost you around £7k every 3 weeks for as long as you can sustain it. That's Merck's list price, so it won't change a lot elsewhere for the genuine stuff, in-date and prepared on-site which you might not get from a bargain-basement outfit.

kind regards
Steve