In Eight Steps to Happiness Geshe-la says "'Self' and 'other' are relative terms, rather like 'this mountain' and 'that mountain ... 'This' and 'that' therefore depend upon our point of reference. This is also true of self and other. By climbing down the mountain of self, it is possible to ascend the mountain of other, and thereby cherish others as much as we presently cherish ourself."

Sunday, October 17, 2010

My Surgeon's Research Interests - Could Help Down the Road

Now that they have my tumor out, the doctors and scientists can do all kinds of tests on it, to determine exactly what it is and even what drugs it might respond to.

We know already that it's cancerous. We know that it's ovarian cancer (that it traveled from my abdominal area - it didn't originate in my brain). That's all from the preliminary pathology report. In a week or so, the docs will have the final "path" report with more info.

With a tumor in the brain, they try to use targeted radiation, so I'll get that, in addition to the surgery.

With brain cancer, they can't usually do chemo ... [blood-brain barrier, etc. - more coming],
...but they're giving me chemo anyway for my lingering ovarian cancer, so there's a chance my docs can give me something very targeted, just for me (lots and lots of different chemo drugs to choose from).

One of the reasons I chose this surgeon is that he is also into research. He's Greg Foltz at Swedish Hospital:
http://www.swedish.org/Physicians/Gregory-Foltz

I asked Richard's brother Roger, who's a science guy living in Santa Fe to look at Foltz's research.
Here's what he said:

"Your surgeon's research looks fascinating and very much at the bleeding edge of what people are doing. The problem of sorting out the genetic and proteomic and genetic regulatory and cell signaling markers of all the different normal and abnormal cell types in human bodies is very much the longest march that medicine, or any other discipline, has ever undertaken. Every different somatic cell type has its own paths to going rogue, which are tied into the paths which led to it being different from other cell types in the first place, which is essential to us having bodies composed of so many different cell types all, at best, cooperating or, at least, coexisting together. It is a finite set of possibilities to be worked out, but a very large finite set. That your surgeon is so connected to the research means that your tumor's tissue will become part of the body of evidence that will eventually decide the correct ways to treat this kind of malignancy.

I hope your day's adventure went as well as four hours with a brain surgeon could go ... "

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