Another Learning Experience
Next week I’ll be starting again on a new “Cancer” project that has nothing to do with my prostate. The Prostate is fine, the PSA is below 0.1 and it’s been side effects free.
In my youth, I spent years in the sun demonstrating how I could burn myself red and then get the best tan around. That along with driving my car with no sun protection resulted in a few “Basel” cancer cells on the left side of my face that were removed by one of the best, UT Southwestern’s , Dr. Stan Taylor, Professor, MD and an expert at MOH surgery. Then my Dermatologists discovered a Basel cell on the tip of my right ear and once again Dr. Taylor came to the rescue removing that problem with no visible damage.
Now my 81st Birthday present is a “Squamous” cancer cell on the back of my tongue, so off I go to MD Anderson to have that handled by the experts there. On the way I met a remarkable Doctor William Mendenhall, at Shands Cancer center in Gainesville, Florida. He evaluated my situation and convinced me that Radiation therapy was required for this particular job, although to date I have found no one who wants to do this with Protons.
The distance from my home between Fort Worth and Dallas, Texas will not allow me to go to Shands nor Loma Linda so my treatment will be accomplished nearby at M.D. Anderson, Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. I go for the usual introduction next Tuesday, March 22nd and will keep you up to date on how this goes.
You should know that “Radiation” has been around for over 100 years. I read that scientists Becquerel and Rontgen in the late 1800s used radiation applications. Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize winning work with radioactive elements also helped get the ball rolling at the turn of the century.
Scientists and doctors were generally ignorant of the specific reasons why, but the first radiation oncologists cured, from historical record, the first cancer case in 1898.
So, let’s track this along, with a target of about mid-April for the next report.
