Adenocarcinoma NSC Lung Cancer Stage 3. Advice? Success stories?

My stage 3a lung cancer was cured using Ablation and Immunotherapy by the doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester this summer. The whole thing was almost outpatient, however, no THC or CBD during and for a year after treatment.

Why no THC or CBD? Assume you are including gummies?

The day I started Chemo & Immunotherapy, I asked the doctor if he was going to give me a script for pot. I told him that I had always heard that people on Chemo were given pot to help with the sick feelings from the treatment. The doctor said NO, that was only for people with stage 4 cancer. He said they were going to fill me with poison and cure my cancer, so no THC or CBD in any form during treatment and for a year after treatment because Immunotherapy keeps on working that long.

Hi @nonobaddog My mom was diagnosed with stage 3B (possibly 3C) NSCLC in Feb. She had a tumor of 7cm in her lower left lobe and mets to mediastinum lymph nodes. She did 5 months of targeted therapy with Dabrafenib and Trametinib, since she has the BRAF 600E mutation. That shrank the tumor to 3cm in Aug. She just finished 30 sessions of proton beam therapy plus 6 weeks concurrent Carboplatin and Paclitaxel a week ago. That's the same treatment as you! My mom has Sjogren's Syndrome, so her oncologist is concerned that she might get peumonitis and don't recommend doing immunotherapy next. Instead, continuing with targeted therapy of Dabrafenib and Trametinib was recommended. I am really curious if you have any adverse side effect with the immunotherapy of Durvalumab. Could you comment?

Hi @rockpine, Your poor mother has really put through some obstacles. I hope she is feeling as well as can be expected.
Here are a few comments, from @nonobaddog about Durvalumab that you may or may not have seen. It looks like they did experience a thyroid issue.
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/comment/810515/
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/comment/860477/
All of our treatments come with their own set of side effects. How is she tolerating the targeted therapy?

Thank you Lisa! After reading the lined posts with @nonobaddog's personal experience on side effects of immunotherapy, it has really sunk in that we really need to take into consideration the downsides of immunotherapy.

My mom was doing relatively well in the first 3 month after starting Dabrafenib and Trametinib in end of March 2023. She has a couple days of >98 degree fever and was brought to urgent care and went through chest CT and echocardiogram besides blood tests. Nothing really stood out and her fever was gone after taking some Tylenol. But her ALT started to creep up over time. She was getting more and more tired as time went by and she lost quite a bit of appetite. She was down 3 lbs after 5 months. In early Sep, right before the start of proton beam therapy with concurrent chemotherapy, her ALT and AST were both above 100. We were really concerned about her liver function because of that. But she was instructed to stop the targeted drugs before the proton beam therapy. She had weekly blood test while doing proton, and the ALT and AST numbers continued to drop each week and went back to normal at the 4th week.

We are about to resume Dabrafenib and Trametinib for her because one of her oncologist is adamantly against adjuvant immunotherapy (after proton beam therapy) because of mom's autoimmune related mild ILD. We will have to monitor her liver function very closely this time though.