Health Topics

Hope for the Future

Andrew Schorr:

All right. I want to get a comment from Darren Latimer who wants to go home to his family. Darren, first of all, thank you for joining us, and I'm so thrilled that you are doing well. And I know you're running and you're biking and just doing stuff with the kids and your wife. That's just a blessing and that you can continue to do work that you really care about. But there are people listening who say, gee, I don't know if I can ever get to that point. I hope I can. What would you say to encourage them because, let's face it, you mentioned about the radiation you went through, you've taken a lot of medicine, you take medicine every day now, and you went through big-time surgery and a lot of scare when it started even before the emergency room. What would you say to them to maybe help them keep on keeping on?

Darren:

It may sound corny but if it gets you through, every night you lie down and you're okay, smile and go to sleep. Every morning you wake up and you're okay, smile and get up and start your day. This is the reality. This is where you are. This is who you are. And good things happen. Good things happen all the time. And I'm not this all optimist. I'm not the person whose glass is half full and not half empty. You can have bad days, but you know what, if you're here, smile at the things that you love and make you smile, and you'll figure it out.

Andrew Schorr:

You are quite the well spoken businessman, Darren. We want to let you go, but I want to thank you so much for joining us. We want to wish you, Allison, and the girls all the best. And I want to thank you just on behalf of cancer survivors and our listeners for what you're doing in trying to help the various cancer institutes, specifically Northwestern's brain tumor institute grow and do the research they can so that hopefully these cancers can be routinely cured. Wouldn't that be great?

Darren:

That would be great. With the help of Dr. Raizer and his team, you know, they get closer every day. So I want to thank you for making me part of this, and I appreciate the opportunity to participate, and we'll be here tomorrow and the next day and the next day.

Andrew Schorr:

Very good. We'll go running along the lake, okay, Darren? I'm going to look you up.

Darren:

I'll be there. Thanks everybody.

Andrew Schorr:

Thank you. Thank you, Darren Latimer for joining us. So, Dr. Raizer, that kind of testimonial must help propel you and your team that here's a guy, serious issues from brain cancer, and I know you say you can't predict who will do well and who won't, but when you hear this man return to his work life and his family life that must be an inspiration for you.

Dr. Raizer:

Certainly it's what we strive for. I mean, you know, certainly like the patients some days are harder than others. If we've got a lot of patients whose tumors are coming back, but if I've got a patient who was supposed to live 12 months who lives five years or six years and they may ultimately lose the battle or lose the war I feel like I've accomplished a lot for them and their family. And I often portray this whole thing to patients that this is really a war that we're in, and we just try to keep winning as many battles as we can along the way. And I think every time we win a battle and jump another hurdle we extend the life of those patients. I know what happens if I'm not going to be aggressive. I certainly can't predict what's going to happen when I am aggressive, but there's a better chance that I'm going to extend somebody's life and their quality of life for much longer than if I take a much less aggressive approach.

Andrew Schorr:

Now, I wanted to pose a couple more questions to you before we're done. Patricia wrote in and she said she's new to all this and she isn't know where to turn. She says she was diagnosed with something called a skull based tumor a year ago, and her doctors have told her that it's too risky to remove or try to shrink and to just live with the side effects. And she has extreme daily headaches, and she actually doesn't have speech anymore, and she does know what to deal with. Skull based tumors, I've heard of it, but I've also heard that there's some innovative ways to try to get at them now, too.

Dr. Raizer:

Sure. There's certain kinds of tumors, something called like a chordoma or a chondrosarcoma, and there's even metastatic tumors from breast or lung that can go from a skull based, or prostate is a common one. Again this goes back to our discussion before. Just because one person says you can't operate on it doesn't mean other people cannot operate on it. And importantly you can always biopsy something to make a diagnosis even if you can't completely remove something, but at least you can figure out what it is by taking a small nibble of it, and that can be done in almost any patient and any tumor type. And once you have that you can then come up with a treatment plan that maybe this is the kind of tumor that will respond well to radiation.

I've never heard of anybody who couldn't get radiation so I don't understand the story, but if someone wanted to send me the records I would certainly be glad to look at them and see of we can help out in that sense. But I think this is a case where you've got to go to a major center that has skull based neurosurgeons that do a lot of surgeries to really assess this. Again it may be correct that it's not resectable, but I would bet it certainly could be biopsied and treated with radiation. I have not seen anybody who can never have radiation, so that aspect doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Andrew Schorr:

Well, these are very good points and I just want to underscore as sort of a patient advocate because I get to interview experts such as you from around the country, many, many from Northwestern, and there's some themes. So here's the consumer side of me, and it worked for me too. And that is, if you're diagnosed with a cancer, any cancer but certainly brain cancer, so your life is on the line. And so you have to go the extra mile and you can't just take one person's word for it. And if you understand as we described with Dr. Raizer earlier that there's an art to this, then you definitely want to have a consultation with a team that specializes in what you have.

And then part of the discussion now as we're trying to do better in the treatment of brain cancer is are there trials that should be considered that might make a difference for me. So we talked about Darren and medicines that came into play for him are Temodar which has been around for a while, but also then using Accutane, an acne medicine, to help that treatment do better. And it has been doing better for him. Well, that was in a trial. So is there a trial like that or whatever future medicines may be, is that available to you? Might it be available let's say even only at Northwestern?

And a lot of research is going on at your institution too, right, Dr. Raizer? It's not just what's happening in the exam room or in the surgical suite, but there are labs and there's a lot of work going on there too, right?

Dr. Raizer:

Correct. I've been there five and a half years, and in that time we've grown, there's two of us now, we'll probably need a third neuro oncologist pretty soon. We've brought on two researchers. One of them is working in one of the labs that are already here who is one of the neurosurgical residents who will probably stay on, but we now have three active labs looking at brain tumor stem cells, looking at the signal transduction pathways within the tumor cells, looking at mechanisms of resistance. One of these researchers who I've collaborated with and Dr. Chandler and others to design a study, will actually treat patients, take out their tumor and see if a drug can offset these resistance pathways to understand if this is a way of trying to get better tumor control and get better outcomes for our patients. So it's really trying to tie in the science to the patient at the end of the day, sort of bench to bedside kind of dictum that we often use in medicine, to try to sort of do that, and I think ultimately that's going to be the way of the future.

Andrew Schorr:

All right. Well, I wish you the best really with your work and continuing to make inroads and in helping people have a longer, healthier life in spite of a diagnosis of a brain tumor. Thank you so much, Dr. Raizer.

Dr. Raizer:

Thank you.

Andrew Schorr:

I want to mention, and he mentioned, the other co director of Northwestern's brain tumor institute is Dr. James Chandler, and he is a surgeon who specializes in all this. He'll be with us in two weeks. You'll learn a lot about all the surgical approaches and the way they do it at Northwestern to try to cut out as much as they can of the cancer, give you the best chance of fighting the brain cancer and then also working as part of a team. So all that is coming up. I want to thank Northwestern Memorial for being our long time sponsor of Patient Power. Reminds me of the whole library in the ihealth section of nmh.org. I'm Andrew Schorr. Remember, knowledge can be the best medicine of all. Good night.

Please remember the opinions expressed on Patient Power are not necessarily the views of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, its medical staff or Patient Power. Our discussions are not a substitute for seeking medical advice or care from your own doctor. That’s how you’ll get care that’s most appropriate for you.