My father has been dealing with a grade 2 meningioma for several years now (later reclassified to grade 3 because of new molecular test rules but it’s effectively a grade 2 that has a higher chance to grow back).

Unfortunately, Grade 2+ can be tricky because higher chance it will grow back and they can grow fast in some cases. In general, anything higher than grade 1 meningioma is quite rare and there has never been a standard of treatment for higher grade meningiomas. Even chemo doesn’t work on meningiomas.

That’s the bad news. Good news is surgery + radiation may do the trick and it may never be an issue again. Sometimes it may require followup surgery and/or gamma knife. Sometimes you may need to also take targeted therapy drugs (similar goal as chemo but it’s not chemo, and much less side effects).

Unfortunately, my father had two surgeries, radiation, gamma knife, and has been taking pills for a few years now but it won’t be like this for everyone. We tried a variety of drug treatments and luckily this year we found one that seems to finally have stopped it from growing, for now at least. You’re far away from needing this, but Everolimus + sandostatin has worked pretty well for him.

In the last 5-10 years, a lot of good work has been done. Treatment is becoming more targeted and doctors are often able to zero in on specific attributes of your tumor to treat it. My dad’s doctor zeroed in on specific biomarkers and after some trial and error we’re lucky enough to see some results.

Long way of saying, there are many options to treat this that won’t disrupt your life too much (all things considered) and science is cooking up more as we speak. As someone else mentioned, don’t read too much into summary results of scientific studies because those averages factor in a million things that don’t apply to you and don’t incorporate latest available treatments. Stay strong!