Hello Elchmake and thanks for posting this question which might not be quite as simple as all that,
Because there is an eye proton radiotherapy service in the UK at Clatterbridge Hospital, I took a look at their patient information to see what they say and noticed this statement "The treatment works by sterilising the tumour cells so that they can no longer grow". I wondered if you had already seen this hence your question.
The intention of any radiotherapy, including proton beam therapy, is to damage and hopefully destroy cancer cells and as a result shrink a cancerous tumour. But ocular melanomas seem to take a while (sometimes several years) to shrink (regress). A delay in shrinkage doesn't mean there are viable cancer cells (which can reproduce) remaining which I think it why the word 'sterilise' is used in the Clatterbridge hospital information.
I expect the intention of your treatment is to control any local growth of your ocular melanoma which may or may not shrink at least to begin with. But do talk this over with your specialist team.
Give us a call if you want to talk anything over, our number if Freephone 080 800 4040 and were are here from 9-5, weekdays.
when i was still having checkups in liverpool i was told it had shrunk from 3.2mm to 2mm,
I have 2 checkupd baclk home and when i ask about shrinking they just look at me and say well its not growing (good i know) i sort of feel that it is so rare that i might be the only one they have seen.
By specialist team I just meant the eye doctors, they may not have seen all that many ocular melanomas but some doctors just aren't very forthcoming. From what I can gather local control of the melanoma is what matters so, as you say, not growing is good.
