50
Jason Rises
It was March 13, a Friday, when Beth drove the shell of Jason for his first treatment of nivolumab.
He sat in that same chemo chair he’d sat in dozens of times. But this time the clear fluid dripping into his central line was not napalm but nivolumab, the product of decades of profound random investigation and learning about the immune system.
That night Jason attended his nephew’s basketball game with a former teammate who wondered if the Steel Bull would make it through the night. He did. And the next. Beth stayed with him, his partner to the end. This was hospice, in effect, with a drug that wasn’t yet approved for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was anyone’s guess. Jason made it another night, and then another.
About ten days later, Beth woke up and looked at Jason’s back, where the lump had once so protruded she had lovingly called him Quasimodo.
“Jason, get up!”
“What?”
“Jason, you’re not going to believe this!”
He wiped sleep from his eyes.
His tumor was disappearing.
Beth, Jason’s girlfriend, used her phone camera to chronicle the disappearance of Jason’s tumor after he underwent immunotherapy treatment. (Beth Schwartz/New York Times)
Dr. Brunvand’s note reads: “Jason was given three doses of nivolumab”; subsequent PET and CT scans performed on April 27 “revealed a complete remission.”
That’s the medical speak. Here’s how it sounded in human terms when Jason went for his follow-up appointment. Everyone had a different exclamation, many with expletives.
“What the f*** happened to my cancer? It went away!” he told Dr. Brunvand.
Beth asked the nurse why Jason had lost so much weight. “Because his tumor has gone,” she was told. “Oh, right,” Beth said, “it really was fifteen pounds.”
“There was this tiny, nonscientific part of me that thought, if this crazy story is going to happen to anybody, it’s going to happen to Jason,” said Maikovich-Fong, his therapist. He “just has this spirit.”
“In all my years,” reflected Poppy Beethe, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Dr. Brunvand offered up his response. “I watched the moon landing in 1969, and it was a similar sense of awe,” he said. “It was with that same sense that we’d crossed a threshold. “I’d just seen the power of the immune system.”
It was at this point that I picked up my pen. Could this be real? Could someone rise from the dead? Not just someone, but a close friend, someone I’d come to cherish and connect to, a person I’d watched fight and wither, and now soar into the realm of miracle. I felt like I’d seen cancer’s Neil Armstrong, and a giant leap for mankind.