The short answer is YES!!!! Everyone is different, everyone responds differently but treatment has come so far in recent years, there is every reason to be hopeful.
My sister is clear of tumours as of a scan two weeks ago and her onc admitted, when asked, that her tumour burden was just about the highest she had ever successfully treated. At the start she was dealing with 11 spinal mets, 7 other bone mets we knew of (ribs, femur, shoulder, ankle), 8 lung mets, 5 in the liver, multiples in the spleen and pancreas and a massive tumour in the omentum that we watched spread across her abdomen in only a few days. That was before the mets hit her brain – once there, they were declared "innumerable, too many to count" and I have since learned that when they say this, what they're actually seeing is an onslaught of micro-mets that number in the hundreds. She also had sub-qs (in the skin) everywhere – never bothered to count those.
She also has an area of partial lung collapse now as you do – the onc says it may or may not reinflate but it doesn't cause her any breathing difficulties.
For those who are BRAF+ as my sister is, often a targeted drug therapy combination, Tafinlar/Mekinist, is used first to knock down the tumour burden and once it's stable or reduced sufficiently, treatment is switched to immunotherapy, though there are those who respond so well to Taf/Mek, they reach NED status on it. Taf/Mek isn't normally used long term because, for most, the mel finds a way around it. Immunotherapy can give long term results and the overall survival rate is growing all the time.
So, yes, much to be hopeful for and I wish you the very best of treatment and outcome!! Please let us know how you are doing from time to time!!!
Barb
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