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Keytruda for Head & Neck cancers
Hello people. We are half way through our first normal week after Christmas/New Year. New Zealand is still partly shut down though. Schools don't start till end of this month - some not till Feb.
I'm just easing my way back into my volunteer "work". Wrote my first blog post of the year about Keytruda after emailing the Merck representative in Auckland. Keytruda is not registered for head and neck cancer in New Zealand yet. That means it is not funded in our free hospital system and people who want it have to pay a private clinic. Merck expect it to be registered this year and when it is they will apply to our funding body, Pharmac, for it to be supplied in public hospitals.
I've been reading about biomarkers that might suggest a person will respond well to Keytruda or not.
Has anyone here used this drug?
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I have the jinx idea fixed in my head too. Best of luck with the Mayo appointment. Sounds like a terrific place to get your treatment in but a bit far away for me. Funnily enough, Adrienne, now that at I am a somewhat elderly cancer "survivor" and have no children to bring bugs home from school, I almost never get a cold. Uh oh. Maybe I jinxed it:)
Did your husband have any side effects from the erbitux? My son is on it and his face becomes very red and burns.
It’s been a while now since the erbitux. As I recall he had some nausea, but the worst side effect was his fingertips and toe tips became very sensitive - as if they had been rubbed on fine sandpaper, and they cracked. It was quite unpleasant.
He passed in September 2021. I really must get started on the book. I had forgotten about the fingers and toes until just now.
Thank you for your reply
I’m sorry to hear he passed . My 37 year old son has tongue and neck cancer. He is responding well to erbitux however the effects of it to his face are pretty bad. It’s very very red, hot and burns. They have tried a few things but nothing seems to help. He does have the finger tips issue but not that bad. Thank you for sharing .
Hi, I'm in a clinical trial for pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for squamous cell tongue cancer. After diagnosis (it took quite some time to get to someone who actually knew what they were seeing, and by then it was pretty bad) I was enrolled in the study in August 2024. I had 3 radiation treatments and 3 pembro (which shrunk the tumor VERY nicely), then October 24 I had surgery. I had almost half my tongue removed, and replaced by a graft and artery from my left forearm, bilateral neck dissection (64 lymph nodes removed), trach...stage 4A, but no lymph nodes involved. My surgeon was so happy--he came dashing in, saying "It worked!" I was pretty out of it, but he was joyous enough for the both of us! 🙂 There was only 5% living cancer left in the tissue they took out, all the rest dead tissue. Clean margins. 🙂 It was quite an ordeal, but now, June 2025 I am doing SO much better! Still on pembro infusions every 3 weeks and various weird stuff that comes up to be dealt with, but all in all, I'm doing great. Working on trying to eat enough calories by mouth to maybe get rid of my feeding tube at the end of summer, but I'm in no big hurry about that. Eating is a chore and I'm not too interested. I've had no issues with pembro. I'm wiped out for a few days after the infusion, but I can still function. Just keep falling asleep! I was very itchy after the first couple of treatments, but no rash. Other than that, no side effects that I know of. My blood pressure has been wonky (sometimes very low, sometimes a bit high) and some swelling in left foot and ankle a few times, and neither of those has ever happened before all this, so who knows? Can I blame the immunotherapy? Nobody knows. I have heard you can experience side effects even down the road after treatment is over. I think I have 3 months left of infusions, then they will watch me closely. The last scans I had showed no evidence of cancer!! My surgeon is thrilled!! (Me too!) I have a port for infusions and blood draws because I have only one arm they can use (after they removed the artery in the other one) and that one has a lot of scar tissue in the veins, so hopefully I can keep that for awhile.