VIDEO: Brain cancer recovery phase necessary to prepare for possible regrowth

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It is a great question, in fact, I was discussing that with a patient because often when you tell a patient, right, "Okay, we have done the surgery, the radiation therapy, the chemo, we have completed the plan, chemotherapy, I don't see any active tumor right now, right? So now we're stopping and I'm watching you carefully." And I always tell my patient, "I'm watching you like a hawk."  And then all the patients are scared. Of course they say, "But we're doing nothing." And really this is not doing nothing when you stop the chemotherapy, it's really, I call this our recovery phase, right? This is the time where we need to really focus on recovering, right, if there was low blood counts or hematologic toxicity from the chemotherapy, liver toxicity from the chemotherapy, if we need to focus really intensively on physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, because of course, our brain tumor patient are all suffering from two diseases, right?

They have a cancer, so it's an oncology process, but they also have a neurologic process. They also have a neurologic disease, so they have speech issue, movement issue. So for my patient, what I tell them is that follow-up phase or observation phase is a phase where we recover, where we rebuild our strength, we rebuild our energy, we focus on the therapy, on the physical, occupational, speech therapy, cognitive therapy, so that if in the future there is regrowth and we know that in most of our patient, right, at some point they will be tumor regrowth, we are ready to go with the next treatment. So for me, this is a phase that is extremely important to give the time to my patient to recover and get stronger.