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New cancer therapy helps man beat Stage IV melanoma

"It was all over me. It had done got to where I couldn't walk. I couldn't hardly get up."

Cancer made the road to New Orleans a lot shorter to Tommy and Phyllis Butler.

In 2016, Tommy, now 67, was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic melanoma and told to get his affairs in order.

His longtime employer, Elton Kennedy, asked what Tommy wanted to do and offered to call Ochsner Health System’s Gayle and Tom Benson Cancer Center and get Tommy in. The center had also done a "miracle treatment" on Kennedy, Tommy said.

Within days, the Butlers were on their way to the Big Easy. The trip, however, was rough on Tommy.

“When we first met him, Mr. Butler was incredibly ill; he couldn’t walk,” said Ochsner hematologist/oncologist Dr. Ryan Griffin. “We were able to make things happen for him very quickly because of the specialty care we offer and because we have the ability to support patients with advanced conditions who are at high risk of potential complications from treatment.”

"They went to work on me when I went to New Orleans and turned it around," Tommy said.

'It was all over me'

He has worked outdoors his entire life as a heavy equipment operator and farmer in Mer Rouge, Louisiana.

His first brush with skin cancer was more than 20 years ago. He pointed to a spot on his lower lip and said it started as a sore that wouldn't heal up. He had it cut off, then had a similar spot on hit left temple removed years later. He went through 18 rounds of radiation.

Doctors believe that the one on his temple wasn't completely removed, and it spread.

"What noticed me was coughing. I got to coughing and I couldn't stop it. I kept going to my local doctor out here in Mer Rouge, my family doctor, and he was treating me for respiratory — just a cold. And it wouldn't get no better, it wouldn't get no better, and that went on a couple of months," Tommy said.

Finally, he started with a CAT scan in Monroe. Starting in November, they worked to get treatment and were told it was cancer in January 2017.

What originally seemed to be a respiratory infection was Stage IV melanoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer that had spread to his lungs, abdomen, and bones. If not caught early enough, melanoma can be devastating and potentially life threatening.

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"It was all over me. It had done got to where I couldn't walk. I couldn't hardly get up. ... Phyllis had to wait on me hand and foot. My son-in-law, Randy Kellick, pushed me all over Ochsner's in a wheelchair every time we went," Tommy said.

The couple went every two weeks at first, now once a month, and Randy has made almost every trip with them. Tommy said the cancer center tried to help him with the expense too because every two weeks comes pretty quickly.

"When he first went, they did not even know that they could do him any good at Ochsner's, but they said 'we're gonna try,'" Phyllis said.

At first, Tommy'd lost about 90 pounds in a two-month period. He was weak. "But they turned it around, and I've done got fat again," he said.

'It worked'

Tommy still doesn't think his story is that special.

"It ain't really nothing to it, other than it worked," Tommy said. "They done immune therapy."

But the fact that it worked is important. The treatment built his immune system up to battle the cancer.

“Over the last few years, the five-year survival rates for metastatic melanoma have doubled. Cancer essentially evades a person’s normal immune system. With immunotherapy drugs, we’re able to reprogram or wake up the immune system and attack the cancer. These drugs have been a game changer in treating melanomas like Mr. Butler’s," Griffin said.

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Griffin attributes this to recent advances in treatments for advanced skin cancer, specifically immunotherapy.

Phyllis said it's a different world at Ochsner. Everyone on the staff cares about Tommy, keeps him informed.

"Mr. John Ochsner himself come to see me while I was there," Tommy said. "He didn't know me, but he knows the man I work for. ... I'd recommend the place to anybody."

Griffin said most cancer treatment centers offer immunotherapy, but Ochsner's offers a multi-disciplinary setting where several specialists confer on cases.He said the full system will bend over backward to treat patients safely and successfully.

When most people think about beating cancer, he said, they think about chemotherapy. It's very effective, but there are a lot of side effects because it also affects healthy cells.

"Cancer has a way of sort of masking itself so that the immune system does not recognize it as foreign or does not attack the cancer," Griffin said.

Immune therapy reprograms the body to fight the disease. Depending on the variety of cancer, doctors might use chemo in conjunction with the newer therapy.

Butler will take the immunotherapy for the rest of his life to make sure the cancer can't gain another foothold.

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Griffin said research is being done to determine if it's a chronic, long-term therapy or if only certain numbers of doses would permanently kill the cancer. Most cancers, he said, are currently considered for chronic strategies.

"These therapies have really revolutionized how we think of melanoma," Griffin said. Five or 10 years ago, it was a death sentence. Now, it can be a treatable condition.

The therapy is new, he said, but it's increased metastatic melanoma's five-year survival rate from about 10 percent to more than 30 percent, close to 40 percent, over a five-year span.

"From our standpoint, that is a huge change in just a few years, to almost triple the survival rate from metastatic melanoma," Griffin said.

Eighteen months after his treatments began, Butler, now retired, works on his own farm. He keeps timber and hunts deer and enjoys his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

His last three PET/CT scans have shown his cancer to be in remission.

Information from a news release contributed to this report.

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