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@rockpine

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.

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Replies to "Thank you Lisa! After reading the lined posts with @nonobaddog's personal experience on side effects of..."

All of the treatments come with their own side effects, finding one that does more help than harm is difficult especially when there are other conditions in the mix. Cancer is tough, and the treatments need to be tougher, but they need to allow us to live too.
Wishing for the best for you and your mom.