By the end of 2022, Idaho resident Patty Hornby had already endured three major surgeries to remove a rare, recurrent soft tissue sarcoma called a solitary fibrous tumor from her chest cavity. So, when a routine CT scan showed more new tumors there in late 2022, the 9-year survivor was dismayed.
“We’d been told repeatedly that surgery was the only possible treatment,” Patty recalls. “But we were also told you could only cut into the chest wall so many times. I was rapidly approaching that limit. We needed an alternative.”
A family friend suggested that Patty and her husband, Tod, reach out to MD Anderson. Once here, not only did they find new treatment options. They also found hope.
New treatment possibilities make MD Anderson ‘a whole new ball game’
At MD Anderson, Patty and Tod met with Neeta Somaiah, M.D., a medical oncologist who specializes in the treatment of soft tissue sarcomas.
The first surprise she had for the couple was that she actually had experience in treating this very rare disease. The second was that surgery was not, in fact, Patty’s only treatment option.
“We had done a deep dive online before coming to MD Anderson,” explains Tod. “Everything we read seemed to back up what we’d been told about surgery. Just meeting someone with experience in this type of cancer was more than we’d encountered. So, to hear Dr. Somaiah talking about chemotherapy and radiation therapy made it a whole new ball game.”
‘They really gave us some hope’
First, Dr. Somaiah recommended a chemotherapy regimen with bevacizumab and temozolomide, a drug normally used to treat brain tumors. She also recommended regular infusions of an anti-angiogenesis agent, which inhibits the formation of new blood vessels. This would reduce the tumors’ ability to create their own blood supplies. Finally, she wanted Patty to meet with sarcoma radiation oncologist Ahsan Farooqi, M.D., and cardiothoracic surgeon Garrett Walsh, M.D., to explore additional therapies.
“Dr. Somaiah said she’d had some good results with this treatment plan in a couple of other cases like Patty’s,” Tod recalls. “That really gave us some hope.”
“I just wish we’d known about MD Anderson sooner,” adds Patty. “If I’d come here before that very first surgery, maybe I wouldn’t have needed any of the others.”
‘We have a lot of faith’
Patty completed those initial rounds of chemotherapy in July 2023. She finished radiation in September 2023 and had surgery in November that same year. When a few new tumors popped up between Patty’s ribs last September, she had cryoablation therapy under interventional radiologist Paige Reed, DO, and resumed her previous chemotherapy regimen in January. Though still in active treatment today, Patty remains optimistic.
“Cancer is not fun,” she says. “It really sucks the life out of you. But Tod and I have a lot of faith, and every time we go to MD Anderson, we discover something new about it to love. Dr. Somaiah is amazing. And she and her care team feel like family now. So, I’m not giving up.”
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