‘Most of the mass is gone’
Rosemary Letcher thought “Hetty the hernia” was playing up again when she went for an endoscopy. Instead, it turned out to be “Tommy the tumour” in her oesophagus. “Well, that’s a bonus,” she told the startled doctor. “We came for a hernia and we got a tumour instead!”
It’s that bright sense of humour that carried Letcher through chemotherapy and radiotherapy for oesophageal cancer last year, and again when two new tumours showed up in her lungs after a CT scan in February this year.
More chemo and radiotherapy wasn’t an option and she couldn’t afford immunotherapy. She was given two choices: palliative care or sign up for a drug trial at ACTC.
Letcher, energetic and theatrical at age 76, reckoned there was more life to be lived. When she and her husband, Robert, heard the words “drug trial” they say their eyes literally lit up.
They drive from Orewa to Auckland Hospital for treatment but they’d drive a lot further for Letcher to have this chance at a longer life. “It was a last-ditch stand really. It’s a gamble, I’ve always been a gambler.”
And for Letcher, the gamble is paying off. “We just got the news today. I’ve just about lost all the mass in the lungs.”
After seven infusions of a mixture of an established immunotherapy drug and a new one, a CT scan showed one tumour has disappeared, the other is a small shadow. “It’s really, really good news. Couldn’t be better. It’s like magic as far as I’m concerned.”
Letcher says she is committed to the trial no matter what the outcome. She and Robert will keep driving to Auckland for as long as the treatment is working and “for as long as they need me”.
Right from the start, she told Sanjeev Deva that even if the treatment didn’t work for her, someone else would benefit. “I would never regret coming in. I appreciate that we have been given so much. It’s to help others. It makes the whole blimmin’ thing mean something.”