So, here’s the thing about metastatic breast cancer treatment: you usually get one drug at a time. We call this single agent therapy. So, like, I’m on Xeloda right now, and that’s it. We get one drug at a time, and when that one stops working, we switch to another one, then another, until all the drugs are gone and then we die. This sort-of made sense when chemo was all we had, because being on multiple chemos at once makes you feel horrible. Wait, that’s not a strong enough descriptor of what it’s like, so picture this: vomiting every day, being to weak to get out of bed so you shit yourself, rashes, mouth sores, being able to die of a cold because you have no immune system to speak of…and that’s not even all of it. 

So, since you’re going to die anyway, I mean, why would a doctor put you through all that? The answer is, they wouldn’t. Instead, they try to buy you a few months here, a few months there, without ruining the average 33 month lifespan you have after your MBC diagnosis. 

This all made sense to me until I read The Death of Cancer, which blew my mind. Do you know why Hodgkins has a high cure rate nowadays? Because some doctors said “Fuck this, let’s just poison the shit out of this cancer until it’s GONE.” And they gave patients not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different chemotherapy drugs at once. It was called VAMP for short, and guess what? It worked. Because instead of just attacking cancer one way, they attacked it on multiple fronts at once. Instead of seeing the patients as terminal and trying to make them comfortable, these doctors saw the patients as people who should get to live normal lifespans, and they set about to make it happen.

After reading that book and talking to some smart cancer researchers, I’m now convinced that combination therapy is where it’s at. I see how the story ends for my friends who run out of drugs to try, or whose bodies become so fucked up by years of continuous single agent chemo that they can’t tolerate any further treatments. Fuck that. I don’t want to slowly decline for another year or two and then die. I want to send in all four branches of the military to fucking destroy the cancer.

I realize that this requires a dramatic shift in thinking for oncologists. Y’all have been trained that single agent therapy is the way to go because combination chemotherapy is brutal. And I bet it’s really hard for any of you with a conscience to watch your patients go through what combination chemotherapy can do to them. But, let’s talk about how little the outcomes have changed by just doing single agent therapy: in the last 40 years, the average lifespan after MBC diagnosis has gone up about a year and a half, most of which is spent feeling like shit anyway because even single agent chemo is pretty shitty. That’s it, 40 years of research, 18 months in improved survival. And, now we live in the era of substantially less toxic immunotherapy drugs. The time is ripe for a change of philosophy, from extending life a few months to turning our disease from a terminal one to a chronic one.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this is a good idea, because I read today that Pfizer is planning to study a triple combination of immunotherapy drugs on patients with advanced cancer. IT’S ABOUT FUCKING TIME. I hope other Pharma companies and researchers will take this approach more often, so that it can start happening in the clinical setting ASAP. 

As always, my touchstone for cancer activism is how the AIDS movement made it possible for people with AIDS to live a normal lifespan. Know how they did it? Combination therapy. But it took them demanding better drug development and getting the people in power and the Pharma companies to listen for combination therapy to come about. I’m prepared to scale the walls of the FDA or the NIH if that would make the change happen–but I hope that it won’t be necessary, and that researchers will stop seeing us as dying, and start helping us live.