My mother was diagnosed with MM 2.5 years ago. She lives in Kansas and her husband insisted she be treated locally for her cancer. They seemed to control it for a while and yet in May of this year, she had a severe relapse involving kidney failure and spent the next 2 months in the hospital. She was recieving Revlimid chemo treatment at this time, with very severe side effects.
After researching Multiple Myeloma, I insisted she come to the MM Center in Little Rock Arkansas for further evaluation and treatment. After 1 week of extensive testing, the bad news was that she had apx 2-4 months to live, continuing on the same treatment schedule.
Mom stayed to recieve their "experimental" treatments, and despite her very frail health at the beginning in August, she has now gone home for a break in treatments and is virtually cancer-free. Her invasion rate was 40+% in her marrow with 42 identifiable lesions. She now has 0 abnormal blood cells, 0 lesions, and just a trace in the marrow. Drs. Penada & Barlogie believe she will be in 100% remission after her first transplant. She will return in two weeks to continue the treatments with her first melphalan and stemcell transplant. This, despite two severe problems caused by the weakness she had when she arrived at the Multiple Myeloma Center.
Believe me, this is not a commercial for the MM Center. Just a statement of what has happened. Anyone with MM should inquire. In my opinion, they are head and shoulders the best to treat MM. They, of course, do not use the Cure word, but they get over 80% of their patients into full remission.
Now my question-
When my sister came to clean my mom's house the day before she returned home, she saw the phone was full of messages. She listened and began to delete unimportant ones. One though, was from her local oncologists' office. It said "When you get home, please call us because there was a bad batch of Revlimid out earlier this year and you recieved some of it. It created severe side effects and we know you were have such problems with the Revlimid, so please call us". Now the really odd part. When they got home, mom's husband went by this doc's office to inquire about the Revlimid problems and everyone, even the person whose voice is on their machine denied knowing anything about a bad batch of Revlimid.
Has anyone heard of a batch problem with Revlimid?