The name of this tumor is....Bartleby the Tumor! Thank you for the suggestion, Karen Donaghey. Ed McMahon will be coming to your house with your prize!(1)
For those who don't know, Bartleby is the name of the eponymous character of Bartelby the Scrivener, a short story by Herman Melville. Bartleby is an enormous white leviathan. . . No. That's a different Melville work: Bartleby the Whale.
Anyway, Bartleby (the human, not the whale) is a strange young man hired by the narrator of the story. At some point, he starts responding to work requests with "I would prefer not to." He gets more and more passive and intransigent. When he is fired and asked to leave, he responds, "I prefer not to," and will not leave. Eventually, Bartleby stops doing anything at all and dies.
Bartleby the Tumor is descended from one of my own cells. I hired him to do what my other cells in the area did (mostly produce snot). Then (after radiation treatments), when I asked him to produce snot, he said, in the squeaky little voice that tumors have, "I prefer not to," and just sat there growing. Now that I am getting immunotherapy, if all goes well, he will slowly die.
Last week, after the third of my every-three-weeks infusions, I got an MRI of my head. There was Bartleby. And like that other Bartleby, he has stopped doing anything (i.e. stopped growing).
This is actually pretty good news. Sometimes, when it works, all that pembro does is freeze the tumor in place. I can live with that, maybe indefinitely. And it might even shrink.
We'll have to wait another couple of months to find out, but I am hoping that Bartleby the Tumor, like Bartleby the Scrivner, will eventually fade away.
In the meantime, I'm seeing patients, walking my dog, hanging with my family, and feeling OK.
(Apropos of nothing, do you have a favorite microbe name? Mine is Malessezia furfur. It causes a harmless rash, but the name sounds like the evil twin of Winnie the Pooh.)
(1) Actually, I am pretty sure Ed McMahon is dead (not bothering to Google), so that's a very creepy image.
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"Are you finished writing, Dad? Can we please go for a walk now?
