Marshall's Cancer Updates

Giving Thanks, November 2023 In my last update a couple weeks ago, I wrote about needing to make a decision about next steps for second line therapy -- whether to go with the Pragmatica-Lung Clinical Trial, a prospective randomized study of Ramucirumab plus Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in a 3 hour IV infusion every 3 weeks for 2 years (or until it stops working or becomes hypertoxic) or to go with standard of care, which is Ramucirumab plus Docetaxel chemotherapy for two years or until hypertoxic. In messaging with our primary oncologist, Dr. H., we learned that if I start another round of chemotherapy, I will be disqualified from joining the clinical trial. In that case, it would make more sense to start with the Pembrolizumab trial first and then switch to Docetaxel later if that's not working. Of.course, if I end up in the control group, I'll be prescribed Docetaxel anyway. When pressed about whether to join the clinical trial at UM in Ann Arbor or one of the same trials at ...

MRI: Not quite sure what I'm looking at here, but I thought the eyeballs looked cool.  Teaching   There are only a few active weeks left in the semester, and my students in creative nonfiction have been incredible. They're a small group of very talented and self-motivated writers and have been gracious about my lapses. I've nearly caught up on scoring and commenting on their work, but there's also a lot of peer feedback and they are all quite skilled at that. Nearly all of the students are writing consultants in either the writing center or the embedded writing specialist program. We had a fantastic face-to-face session this last week with Curtis Chin , author of the new memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant .  Curtis Chin. That's me in the (back left) corner. I'm thinking that this might be my last semester of teaching, and what a good class to go out on. I'm looking into extending my paid medical leave through May, taking summer of...