Luc V’s Immunotherapy Story

In 2006, they found a small melanoma on my ear. They removed it surgically with a certain safety margin. I regularly went to the hospital for checkups and everything was fine. After 6, 7 years, nothing had spread inside my body so we were very confident that the problem had been solved. And then, all of a sudden, in September 2013, I felt that the lymph nodes in my neck were swollen, so I went to the hospital. They started doing CT scans and then they found out that it was stage 4. It was in my lungs, liver, bladder, on both sides of my neck…I think in total on the CT scan I had about 40 tumors. I was in a lot of trouble at that point.

I’m not a doctor, but I am a scientist, and can read a scientific paper. So I started reading about immunotherapy and that’s when I decided I would do this. If you only look at classical ways of treatment, 10 months is more or less what you get when you are diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma. And I’m now at month 7 since September [2013] so I’m still on the good side of this story.

Well, it’s not scientific; the scientific thing I leave to the oncologists in the university. But on the side, I have the idea that your brain is capable of putting a lot of organic natural products in your body. I think my brain is a very good pharmacy for my body—in addition to what I am getting from Bristol Myers-Squibb.

I don’t know what is working, but something is working and it’s working very well for me. I had some swollen lymph nodes in my neck area. In the beginning, they were quite big and on top of each other. I could already feel during the first week they were getting smaller. And then we had the scans. And if you compare the scans, the reduction was quite spectacular. Three or four times in a row, I had quite spectacular improvements. The most spectacular one was in my lungs.

I’m really hoping that I can beat the odds. To be very, very honest I have never been, let’s say, mainstream. Sometimes it was extraordinarily on the bad side and sometimes it was extraordinarily on the good side, but my life has never been mediocre. I’m hoping that I can, even though the odds are very bad against it, be one of these miraculous survivors. That’s my ambition.
 
There’s a saying in English: swing hard in case you hit. That’s my motto as well. I’m going to try to live life to the fullest with my family and all the sports I’m doing. And I’m going to swing hard and who knows, maybe I hit it and then it will be out of the ballpark. That’s the way I live, right now.

I would really encourage anybody to do this, if you see how good I am. I see a lot of people in the clinic getting chemo. They lose their hair, they look really pale and weak, and they have far fewer tumors than I have. And they get these bad chemo treatments, which is I think not a very smart tool. It kills everything, the chemo—both good cells and bad cells. I’m not an expert, but I think that immunotherapy is a far sharper tool than chemo. That’s also why I’m doing this TD 5 Boro Bike Tour for Cancer Research Institute, so that they can keep on supporting research.