I’m awake now. Fourth night in a row. This time I think we’re losing the universes where I died of the tumors that were treated in that episode. It’s just about the time they would have finally closed up both my respiratory and gastrointestinal systems and shut me down absent drastic and effective treatment courtesy of Greater Baltimore Medical Center and their awesome throat cancer specialty shop.
Good riddance. I’m happy to put up with a week’s lost sleep to have that whole slab of universes where I’m about to be mourned, or not, depending on the paths that got me to the point of death-by-throat-tumor, fall away into someone else’s existence.
But that does leave us looking up at the enormous stack of universes that plod forward from here.
Interesting things are stirring in the world of cancer therapy. This week, the University of Ottawa and a private biotech company published stunning research results. Patients with advanced liver cancer were given intravenous injections of a bioengineered virus derived from a now-archaic smallpox vaccine designed to trigger immune response. 87 percent of the recipients had viral replication in their tumors and none in their normal tissues. Six of eight patients in the highest dose group had their tumors stabilize or shrink. Side effects were minimal. Larger, more statistically valid trials, are planned.
Awesome. This is technology that bypasses the blunt trauma cascading from radiation and chemotherapy. Radiation and chemo work because there is a very, very slight tendency for tumorous tissue to be more susceptible to the destructive toxins than non-malignant tissues. The procedure is brutal, but often effective. If sufficient radiation and toxic chemotherapeutic drugs are administered to bring healthy tissue to the verge of collapse, then malignant tissue perishes slightly sooner and the patient can be saved at the last instant when that sensitivity delta has been exploited. Thus my trip to the hospital. The radiation and chemo slapped my otherwise healthy body to the edge of death by dehydration and anemia. Along the way, it burned down the mutated tumorous tissue.
This week I got the formal report from the imaging center. My preliminary assessment per last week’s entry was pretty much on target. The report documents that they gave me 19.2 millicuries (I assume that’s what mCi means) of fludeoxyglucose 67 minutes before they imaged me. They compared the images from this round with the pre-treatment imaging from 8 March. The “impression” is “resolved tongue mass and resolved adenopathy in level II region and right tonsil”. That means the tumors, both primary and secondary, are gone. More ominously, “there are two persistent areas of increased uptake, one in the right anterior mid tongue and one at the right anterior tongue base which are of undetermined significance. These could represent areas of post irradiation change although recurrent or residual malignancy cannot be excluded...the scan is otherwise unremarkable…”. I believe that Doctor Z, the radiation oncologist, thinks the “persistent areas of increased uptake” are unhealed devastation from the radiation, not residual malignancy. But I think this is what the surgery is for.
The docs didn’t call about the surgery last week. I’ll have to call them next week. Got a busy autumn coming up. Major technical report due, plus SETAC in November, then it’s Thanksgiving, then the winter holidays.
Damn, it’s great to be alive!
New stuff up around the weblog horn this week. Be sure, if you have a few minutes, to visit http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for an essay on environmental consequences of armed conflict, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for the natural world, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for the best in modern culture. Thanks for stopping by!
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