Maine coach Shawn Walsh won’t know for another six-to-eight weeks just how effective the immunotherapy treatments that he received at UCLA in early September and October were in attacking his kidney cancer. The early signs, however, are encouraging.
“I had a CAT scan done that showed that it’s too early to tell whether I’m going to be a responder or not to the treatments I went through,” he said. “The results were inconclusive, but they definitely showed no progression.
That’s what you look for when you’ve got an aggressive cancer, which is what I have. In most cases [it’s aggressive], but in my case it doesn’t seem to be progressing at this point.”
Walsh will undergo another CAT scan in six-to-eight weeks. Until then, his fight remains in a holding pattern.
“That’s the way it is with this disease,” he said. “You just keep dealing with it. There was a cover story in last Friday’s Boston Herald about a vaccine that works against kidney cancer. There are a lot of things that can be a next step. There are [new treatments] that in time are becoming available. That’s why time [in the form of no tumor progress] is good.”
