In March 2015, I had gotten a promotion at work. I was engaged to be married to
my wife Katie. I was playing golf. I was playing squash. I'd run a half marathon,
and life was good.
And then six weeks later, I'm told that I have stage 4 cancer. And, it was it was a
blow. My name is Crispin Vary. I'm 31 years old.
I was treated at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital for metastatic
melanoma. I was on the nivolumab ipilimumab joint clinical therapy, and
as of right now, I am in the clear. I
work for a company called CEB. It's a management consulting and research firm.
2014, I had been having a series of crazy chest pains. And March of 2015, I
had one searing chest pain one night that I just couldn't get past. I went to
the hospital to try to figure out what was happening with me and got a series
of tests run. And, it wasn't until I got a biopsy done a couple weeks later that
they actually figured out what was wrong with me. I had two large tumors. The
diagnosis was metastatic melanoma which I figured was just a skin lesion, but I
learned thereafter it was much, much more than. Didn't really know what to do
for course of action, so I went back home, had a pretty rough couple hours with my
family to let it all sink in. The next morning got on the phone and began
calling people. Everyone basically said for what I had there were only a handful
of places who had the right treatment for me.
And, we met the Georgetown folks the Tuesday after I was diagnosed. The very,
very cool thing for me was that I had my two doctors and my two nurses in the
room with me. I saw my team stand there in front of me looking at me and smiling.
I was like you're my team that's gonna save my life. So I knew I wanted to go on this
clinical trial. He confirmed that I could, walked me through the corresponding risks,
benefits, side effects, and it was pretty clear with me on what to expect for the
whole process. So, many tumors put up defenses that diffuse the immune system.
And what the immunotherapy particularly, checkpoint inhibitors, do is take down
those defenses to allow the immune system to become reactivated and
actually identify and destroy the tumor cells. I began a trial, and I only had two
infusions. And unfortunately, had some side effects with my liver and my thyroid, so
I was actually pulled off the treatment in July. So from July through August, I
just had no treatments going into me, and I still had my scans planned to analyze
my success in August. So, went into those scans with little to no optimism
because I'd gotten two infusions and that was it. I thought nothing had
happened, if not, it had gotten worse. And he pointed at my torso, and I
literally saw like a big black void. And he kind of smiled and was like it's
pretty well gone. And I began to just like cry right away because I was like it's
working on me, these things work on me. And turns out that in actuality the
treatments had an amazing effect on my tumors, so I had a pretty crazy
response to the therapies. So through all this, I was engaged to my now lovely wife
Katie. I got married on September 12, 2015, so I'm grateful. I know that it could
come back at some point in my life, and if it does, I respond to it with these
treatments. But it teaches you to always look out for how you're feeling and when
you're not feeling great, you know, seek treatment and get better. And I found
the teammates to do it. So, Georgetown is the place to be.