It Might Get Messy

It’s always been an object of (my) faith that life needs death. And of course it bugs me that the concept is like a self-help mystic selling cheap salvation (as the Swimming Pool Qs put it) from the back of a comic tabloid. But the essential character of life is adaptation, and absent death-as-room-to-move, where are we gonna get the adaptive changes? 


Maybe there ARE alternatives. Butterflies pack themselves up into a chrysalis, liquefy themselves, then reconstitute into happy and healthy adults. Somewhere in that chain of processes, that insect is essentially, if not actually, dead. Gotta be. It’s just a few milliliters of syrupy goo with no recognizable features. So maybe there’s an alternative to that need for actual death as the giver of life. 


And just maybe that’s where modern-day therapies for difficult malignancies line themselves up. As a cell-by-cell disease, cancers could exploit that butterfly chrysalis trick to hijack whatever the hell cells they want. Or, or perhaps it should be and/or, we the susceptible and potentially treatable could exploit the transformation to unglue the disease from its genetic anchors, cut it adrift in a pool of syrup, and end its life cycle right there.


In a way I’m guessing that’s where my doctors are heading. 

remember in most browsers you can double-click on the figures to zoom for better visibility

This first figure is the schematic sagittal section of my head scribbled by my radiation oncologist a couple weeks ago. The ladder-like structure on the right is the vertebral column of my neck, the open semi-circle to its left is my tongue, the big scribbled mass at the base of the tongue is the primary tumor (one per side, and, yeah, all the docs have been impressed with its size). The smaller scribbled mass is the satellite tumors of the salivary, parotid, and lymphatic glands. The rough triangle is, I believe, the thyroid. Apparently all these glands, or almost all of them, are going to roast into raisins when the radiation and chemicals start to hit them. 


Now, this second figure here:

Is pretty much the GIS map from “here” to “there” and the timeline itinerary needed to make the trip. The Hopkins people say they don’t like the “usual procedure”, that they get much better results doing it their way. Which is 2X daily radiation—show up in the morning, be packed with the rad sources, wait 6 hours, be packed again, go home, show up next day for more of the same. Oh, and those arrows on the timeline? That’s the chemo cocktail. Every couple days. I mean, while you’re sitting there being basted by the radiation, you might as well get the chemical marinade, no?


In the middle of that timeline, between the 16 day and the 12 day fighting rounds, there’s an X—a week off. I gather the entire process is just a tad too intense for human physiology, and you need the time off to be able to survive to the end. 


Icky is right. But here’s the payoff. See this 86% down there? 

That’s the 5-year survival Hopkins gets with this procedure. If you poke around the otopharyngeal cancer sites on the web and match ‘em up to my tumor stages and distribution, you come up with 30% to 50%. I’m in for the Hopkins people. Tomorrow I’m up in Baltimore for additional diagnostics. Anything interesting shows up, I’ll get you a bonus entry tomorrow evening. Thanks for stoppin’ by, and don’t miss such satellite blogs as 
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.com/ 
Thanks again!


Oh. And the 86%? Well, that sure as hell sounds good to me. I'll see you all on the other side of that event horizon because I really like those odds….