Expressions on queries with regex not working

Dear colleagues
I have been using grafana 5 for quite a long time and decided to upgrade to the latest release. Now I haveseveral queries used in the expression to get the result graph. Every query uses a variable to select a host name:
SELECT non_negative_derivative(sum(“epsattach-imsi-success”), 5m) FROM “mmeSch13” WHERE (“node” = ‘mme-1-1’) AND $timeFilter GROUP BY time(5m) fill(null)
This works fine.
but when i use a regex in my WHERE clause, the further expression with this query shows No Data for some reason. I.e. the query
SELECT non_negative_derivative(sum(“epsattach-imsi-success”), 5m) FROM “mmeSch13” WHERE (“node” =~ /^$node$/) AND $timeFilter GROUP BY time(5m) fill(null)
referenced in the expression gives No Data.
I tried different constructions like “node” = ${node} but with no success. Can you please advice - why it’s not possible that way?
“node” variable is defined as an Influxdb query:
show tag values with key=“node”

Looks like you have it correct with

WHERE ("node") =~ /^$node$/

Maybe try this?

WHERE ("node") =~ /.*$node.*/