It Might Get Messy

When Adolph Hitler’s mother was dying of cancer, her doctors insisted on soaking her breast lesions under cloths saturated with iodoform and otherwise sort of bathing her in it. According to the Wikipedia entry for iodoform [which appears to be well-researched and informative, BTW] Klara Hitler died of iodoform poisoning and not her malignancies. I presume they used iodoform because the more common chloroform was known to be ineffective, but why the medical profession thought any small halogenated organic would be efficacious vs. cancer is beyond me. Of course, I flunked chemistry [twice] at Rutgers, so may not be the best person to be conducting this inquiry.


I bring this up because cancer treatment technology is, as a former boss and cancer survivor told me earlier in the week, improving dramatically day-by-day, practically hour-by-hour. Jim was given a month to live on his initial diagnosis 6 years ago, he is in complete remission—basically cancer-free—now, and his life is back on high-powered butt-kicking science direction and in a comfortable personal place. He counsels confidence. And Jim, unlike me, is an actual toxicologist who understands the arcane interactions of chemistry and biology.


I sorted through the classification criteria available on the web before I got to Hopkins last week for the actual diagnosis of my otopharyngeal tumors. I called it spot-on. Stage 4 +. Metastatic, primary masses on the base of the tongue, satellites in the salivary and parotid glands and, nightmare of cancer prognostics, the lymph system. In general, nasty. But as the docs were careful to point out, not nearly as nasty as it used to be. 


Depending on what you mean by “used to be”, things are a LOT better these days. At least from the cancer perspective. 


Among dinosaurs, only a single evolutionary line—the hadrosaurs, those duck-billed and quasi-bipedal herbivores, got cancer at all. And then it was only a very few individuals, and fewer still of the known tumors were malignant. 


Jump ahead a few hundred million years. A survey of more than 3000 skeletal remains from across the long human history of what is now Serbia turned up 4 recordable tumors, one benign. 


Of course, this datum should not be taken as an indicator of some kind of Indo-European Eden. The average age of death in the bodies studied was 36. Nobody had TIME to get cancer!


Presently, we’ve got sort of the obverse problem. Plenty of time to get cancer, not enough time to figure out how to treat it. Although, given the few decades that comprise pretty much the entire history of systematic cancer research, we’re really not doing all that bad. 


By the 1950s, we understood the analogy between the evolution of drug-resistance in cancers as in microbes and arthropod. One researcher, Min Chiu Li, actually lost his job because he insisted on treating his patient until their blood biomarkers fell to zero rather than near-zero. His bosses thought he was being pointlessly cruel. 


Then in the 1960s researchers began even more controversial experiments with 4-drug cocktails of the most lethal stuff they had. No panaceas, of course, but further advancements. 


The Hopkins people are proposing to treat me with an out-of-the-mainstream, intensive, debilitating, and at least somewhat dangerous 5 week course of multiple chemicals plus radiation. My radiation oncologist, that’s the large German woman with the massive personality and the swaggering, boundless self-confidence, couldn’t contain her enthusiasm. She shoved me over on the examining table, tore off a meter or so of paper, got out a pen and sketched the whole thing for me, like a John Madden Monday Night Football telestrator or one of my own white-board scrawls to an undergraduate class learning more about sustainability than they really wanted to know.  


I’ll lay this out for you—with telestrator-style annotations on photographs of her lecture sketch—in our next installment here. In the meantime, take some comfort from what Jim reported. Between the day he was diagnosed with a month to live and the time they got his treatment under way, things changed big-time for the better. He’s alive and healthy and will be for a long time.


Please visit the other stops on this weblog tour when you can:
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/


Thanks!


Notes


Regarding dinosaur cancers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/oct/23/dinosaurs.science


Serbian survey of 3000 skeleton for cancers
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0713_040713_skeletoncancer.html


A very, very well-written and poignant description of Klara Hitler’s cancer treatment is in John Toland’s biography Adolph Hitler. I read the 1976 hardcover, and can recall it nearly word-for-word. Now THAT’s a good book!


Finally, the two best books about cancer I’ve found lately are The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy by Mel Greaves. Both highly recommended.