My mother had stage 4 diffuse gastric cancer. She was on FOLFOX as a palliative type of chemo. When the side effects started getting worse, they usually wore off after a few days. Since her cancer was past the point of a cure, this chemo did extend her life and gave us more good months with her. This was in 2020.

My husband had stage 4a gastric adenosquamous carcinoma. In his case they did exploratory surgery and decided to treat him with curative intent beginning in 2021. He went through eight sessions of FLOT chemotherapy followed by six weeks of chemo radiation. All of this did have side effects that he found very difficult to tolerate as time went on. He managed to get through it. Then, he has surgical resection of his entire stomach (meaning they removed it). After that, he had many many episodes of recalcitrant strictures at his anastomosis (where they stitched together his esophagus to his small intestines). Many times they tried stretching it out and even two or three stents. It was very unpleasant and he was losing too much weight. They ended up doing a total revision surgery (meaning they cut the scar tissue out and did it over). After that, he had a feeding tube temporarily and got his weight up. I am happy to report that he is still living his new normal. Life without a stomach has its challenges but at least he has had no recurrence and has been back to living life for two or three years now.

My husband also had Lynch Syndrome, as determined by genetic tests, so he alerted his family. One of his brothers also had stomach cancer, discovered at stage 3. He lives in Venezuela so I will have to ask my husband if you want any specifics about his treatment. In his case, he got some kind of chemo and also had his stomach removed. The main difference, down there, was that they put in a plastic connector of some sort rather than stitching his esophagus right to his intestines. This was also in 2021. He is still living his new life without a stomach, too.

Please feel free to ask if you have any questions about any of these three. I hope something I have written may be helpful. None of them got any type of immunotherapy or targeted therapy. I believe all three were HER2 Negative. Treatments could have changed since 2021.