Cancer Journal

 I am reading The Emperor of All Maladies  by Siddhartha Mukherjee, the celebrated book that bills itself as a biography of cancer.  Seemed like a good idea for me to read it since I have, you know, cancer.  It is so good; the man writes like an angel.  One thing that has been striking me though is how truly awful this thing is.  That has been sobering.  Extended misery and pain, extended decline and then death.  Ugh.   I also have wondered if I haven't been presumptuous in some of my blog entries.  Light and irreverent when I hadn't earned the right to do that.  I claim membership in the club.  Hey, I got stage four prostate cancer, scoring eight on the Gleason Scale (that's aggressive).  My bone scan lit up like a night time satellite photo of the Eastern Seaboard.  If that doesn't entitle me to club membership...  But then you ask, "What is your PSA number?  What symptoms do you have?" and I quiet do...

 I'm pretty sure the algorithm on my aggregate news site knows I have cancer.  I get a lot of stories on advances in the fight against cancer.  I wish the algorithm would learn that I have no interest in the Kardashians but I should not carp. Anyway, I read a story today reporting that they have found a way to revive, "exhausted T-cells" that are embedded in the cancer tumors in mice.  Cancer has found a way to render ineffective these immunity cells that would otherwise be a potent cancer fighting agent.  Scientists in Switzerland have found a way of rejuvenating these cells in mice. This treatment of reviving T-cells has been effective in shrinking the tumors in 90% of the mice. I forwarded this article to my Vitamin C Infusion cancer friend and entitled the email, "Cancer's future looks bad" or something like that. Cancer's future does look bad.  The dominos are falling.  All the ingenious attacks made against it, all the high tech ways that they us...

 I had my PSA# measured again today.  It is still undetectable.   I also met with the oncologist and tried to get a projection as to what the normal expectation would be with my track record of very low or undetectable numbers (it's been going on since December or January).  Couldn't get one out of him.  Simply too unpredictable he said.  Well, OK.  Would have been nice to have something to beat.  And I was looking for an average, not a prediction for me personally.  But, OK.   Regarding the unpredictability of cancer, I commented that that was "part of the fun."  Knocked him off his balance a little.  His default manner with patients is somber and not looking for what's fun with cancer.  He might be a little different with colleagues.  Outrageous is a good way to relieve the pressure of a job like his.  But not with patients.  He did recover enough to note that humor was a good way of dealing with...

 In Blog #31,  I wrote about prayer and magical thinking which prompted some comments which prompted me to comment back.  Jan Carroll's final comment was that I appeared to be in a good place.  To which I respond, "Yeah, I can talk a good game.  Let's see how I actually do," (and I include myself as among those who might wonder about that.)   Let me expand on that and sort of justify myself.  I've said in my church that I don't like the maxim that you should practice what you preach.  It's not the maxim so much that I don't like as its corrollary which is that if you don't practice it, you should not preach it.  I don't like to be restricted in that way.  I like to be able to speak up about my aspirations which I pretty much by definition don't practice.  I don't want to wave some kind of false flag and suggest I currently possess virtues that I don't actually have and there's where the risk is, of course.  Too much aspira...