A Picture Worth 10,000 Words!

Sheboygan Dan, a fellow Appendilooza, recently sent a link to this profoundly right cartoon:

Even the timing shown in the comic is about the same as mine!  The cartoonist's "xkcd" cartoons (A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language) can be found here.  Whoever he is, he's a genius as well as being hilarious!  His author's "blag" can be found here.  I ran across this site a year ago or so, and loved it immediately then, but then completely forgot about it until Sheboygan Dan sent the link.  Apparently there's more to this story, as you can discover for yourself by following the link and then clicking on the comic:  

Family Illness

Posted on June 30, 2011

Last fall I posted about a family illness, but didn’t give a lot of details.
In October my fiancée was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. It’s rare for young women to get breast cancer, and she’s otherwise healthy and has no family history, so it was a real bolt from the blue.
She’s been in nonstop treatment for the last eight months, which has been an emotional and physical ordeal that’s hard to describe. We both have all the support we could ask for—including an incredible medical team—and we’ve had some really good moments during these months, but it’s still a terrifying and isolating experience. Treatment is ongoing, and there’s no well-defined end point; things are going to continue to be scary and difficult for a while.
I’m usually pretty private about my personal life, but I wanted to explain why I’ve missed some midnight comic deadlines and have been particularly hard to reach lately. I’ve also spent a lot of these eight months immersed in cancer science, and I want to be free to talk (and draw comics) about stuff I’m learning without the unexplained subject matter leaving everyone worried and guessing.
Thank you so much for your patience, kind words, and all the little flash games you all sent. And all the best to those of you who are also caring for someone with cancer, or who are struggling with cancer yourselves.

I certainly wish xkcd and his  fiancée/wife all the best and hope and pray for her stage III breast cancer to go away completely and permanently!  Along with my appendix cancer!

Finding Chemo (Again)!

I had my 15th chemotherapy treatment (FOLFIRI) today.  We hit a bit of a speed bump on the road to complete cancer freedom with my most recent CT scan, which I had on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.  We were hoping and praying, of course, for a result of No Evidence of Disease (NED our pal!), but instead were told, on April 12, 2012 (ironically one year to the day after my marathon 12-hour debulking/HIPEC surgery!), by my wonderful surgeon, Dr. Paul Mansfield, that there was, in fact, Evidence of Disease.  There were at least a couple of spots in my abdominal cavity that appeared to be growing, probably on my peritoneum, the large membrane that envelops the gut.


In retrospect, looking back at my previous CT scan from Wednesday, January 11, 2012, one of the spots that was clearly seen on my most recent CT scan was present there, too, only it was too small to be noticed if you didn't know exactly where to look!  Apparently, a result of NED only lasts until your next CT scan and can be somewhat contingent on subsequent CT scans!  The odds were definitely in my favor (as Katniss and Gale would say in the Hunger Games), given that 1/3 of HIPEC patients go into more or less complete remission, as opposed to the 1/1000 patients who do who only receive IV chemo!  According to the laws of probability and statistics, even then 2/3 HIPEC patients don't go into more or less complete remission!  But, we haven't given up hope, nonetheless!  I still feel in my heart of hearts that I'm truly an "outlier" and can beat this appendix cancer, yet!  Especially with everyone praying for me and wishing me the best and directing positive thoughts and vibes in our direction!  If God is for us (and I know beyond knowing that He is, in all senses of that affirmation!), who can be against us?


We don't know if these tumor cells somehow evaded the HIPEC sloshing during my marathon 12-hour surgery last year or if they were resistant to the Oxalyplatin used for my HIPEC surgery and the subsequent 8 FOLFIRI chemo treatments I received after I'd recovered sufficiently from my surgery or both (or neither)!  Only time will tell!  Amen!

On My Continuing Fascination With Units of Measurement!

I enjoy playing Google's "a Google a day," which can help hone your searching skills and almost invariably features interesting morsels of food for thought!  Today's features the expression "the twinkle of an eye" (as in "in a twinkle of an eye"), which comes originally from a Hellenistic Greek expression "en atomE" (the capital E represents the Greek letter Eta, thought to have been pronounced with a long "A" sound, as in "hey," for example), which literally means something like "in an atom [of time]," meaning a period of time so short that it cannot be cut up into any shorter time period (Dr. Sheldon Cooper of "The Big Bang Theory," a brilliant theoretical physicist who's a little more nerdy and OCD than I am, could tell you that today this would be understood as the Planck time, approximately 5.39106(+/-0.00032)x10^(-44) seconds, the time it takes light to travel one Planck length, about 1.616199(+/-0.000097)x10^(-35) meters, in a "vacuum"--until Sheldon or I or anyone else comes up with a viable quantum gravity theory, that's the smallest unit of time we can meaningfully imagine!)--apparently, in medieval times (Spoiler Alert!  If you haven't already done today's a Google a day and you still want to, don't read any further!), a "twinkle of an eye" was taken to mean (1 minute)/376 = 0.1595744 seconds = 159.5744 millisec or so.


Today's question asks how many "twinkles of an eye" it takes you to get to the Renaissance festival if it takes you 20 minutes to drive there.  I reasoned thusly:  if there are 376 twinkles of an eye in 1 minute then surely there must be (376 twinkles of an eye/minute)x(20 minutes) = 7,520 twinkles of an eye in 20 minutes!  Which, in fact, is the right answer in the real world!  However, when I submitted "7,520 twinkles" as my answer, the Google of "Do No Evil" fame confidently informed me that this was not the correct answer!


Somewhat gobstruck, I went ahead and clicked to see what Google World thought the right answer was and this is their "answer":  a "twinkle of an eye" is (1 minute)/376 = 160 milliseconds and there are (20 minutes[=1,200 seconds])/(1 millisecond[=10^(-3) seconds]) = 1,200,000 milliseconds in 20 minutes and (1,200,000 milliseconds)/(160 milliseconds/twinkle) = 7,500 twinkles!


Of course, Google's "answer" is certainly in the right ballpark and is pretty darn close to my correct (and exact!) answer of 7,520 twinkles.  But, to assert that 7,520 twinkles, which is the right answer, is not the right answer and to go on to say that 7,500 twinkles is the right answer when it clearly is not is just plain wrong!


That happened earlier today when I first tried to submit the correct answer (7,520 twinkles).  In the meantime, someone at Google must have discovered the problem, because when I resubmitted my correct answer just now as "7,520 twinkles" (I didn't use quotation marks, though, I'm just using them here to indicate exactly what I resubmitted!), this was now recognized as a correct answer!  The marvels of modern technology!  I guess Google didn't do evil after all!

Random Ruminations and the Like!

Occasionally you run across something (on Wikipedia, for example) that is enchanting and interesting and coincidental and completely meaningless.  A case in point happened today--while looking up data related to Earth's Moon on Wikipedia (what did we ever do before Wikipedia?!)--for no particular reason I noticed that the volume occupied by the Moon (V_Moon) is about 2.1958x10^10 km^3 or 21,958,000,000 cubic kilometers.  Why did I find this intriguing?  Because when I went to memorize that value, I realized with a shock that it will be ridiculously easy for me, in particular, to remember all five significant figures of this value, either because it encodes my birthdate (2/19/58) or my birthmonth (2/1958)!


Usually, it is standard operating procedure to memorize the radius R of a substantially spherical body and then calculate the volume V using the well-known formula for the volume of a sphere (known to the ancient Greek Archimedes long before Newton and Leibniz independently invented the infinitesimal calculus):  V = (4/3)[pi]R^3, at least in 3 spatial Euclidean dimensions!  Using this formula "in reverse," as it were, I can now always calculate the radius of the Moon (R_Moon) whenever I wish to, as long as I have access to a good enough calculator!  Not to keep you all in undue suspense, the Moon's radius R_Moon is the delightfully palindromic 1.7371x10^3 km!


How does that compare to the Earth's radius R_Earth?  Well, to answer this question, it helps to know (or remember) the very definition of the meter, originally!  In the grips of the French Revolution, the good rational scientific-types in Paris wanted a standard unit of length that wasn't related to the random and variable lengths of some king's foot (foot) or thumb joint (inch) or forearm (cubit), but was somehow more grounded and less variable or changeable!  What they came up with was that one meter would be equal to one ten-millionth of length of the meridian of longitude from the North Pole to the Equator that passes through Paris (where else?!), which means that nobody has any excuse anymore for not knowing that the circumference of our one and only home planet, Earth, is by definition equal to 4.0000000x10^7 meters, which is 2[pi]R_Earth, so that R_Earth is 6.3661977x10^6 meters or 6.3661977x10^3 km!


So R_Earth is 3.6648 times bigger than R_Moon or just a little under 11/3 times bigger or almost 4 times bigger!  In American-friendlier units (as the 1988 Physics Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman said "We're inching toward the metric system!"), since there are just about 5 furlongs in 1 kilometer (as I've shown elsewhere on this blog, exhaustively--see below!), 6,400 km = 32,000 furlongs!  Since there are 8 furlongs in 1 mile, we see instantly that the radius of the Earth R_Earth is very close to 4,000 miles, a nice roundish number!  Similarly, the Earth's "belt size" is 40,000 km, which is 200,000 furlongs, which is 25,000 miles, which is the distance every point on Earth's Equator must travel in a day, which is 24 hours, so that every point on Earth's Equator must travel at a speed of more than 1,000 miles per hour just to stay in the same place (relative to the Earth, of course)!  And that's not even counting the speed of the Earth about the Sun or the speed of the Solar System about the Milky Way Galaxy or the speed of the Milky Way Galaxy in our Local Group of Galaxies or the speed of our Local Group of Galaxies toward the Shapley Supercluster (or Shapley Concentration), etc., etc.!


On an entirely different subject altogether, lest I forget to mention it, my most recent CT scan at MD Anderson Cancer Center was on Wednesday, January 11, 2012, and we are very pleased to report that there continues to be No Evidence of Disease (NED)!  Thanks so much for all your many prayers and positive thoughts and best wishes--they are all deeply appreciated and are definitely working, so please keep them coming our way!  I'm scheduled for a colonoscopy just in time for the one (1!) year anniversary of my 12 hour operation last April 12, 2011.  The preparation for the colonoscopy will be jolly good fun (as ever!), but the whole procedure should take about half as long as before since I now only have a semicolon!  I'm also scheduled for another CT scan in April, before I meet again with my wonderful surgeon, Dr. Paul Mansfield at MDACC!  Assuming there continues to be NED, I may even get put on a 6-month CT scan regimen rather than my current 3-month one.  The CT scans are painless, but each CT scan gives a dose of x-rays equivalent to about 300 chest x-rays or about 1,200 x-ray scans at an airport!  The worst part about a CT scan is waiting to get the results!  And the best part about a CT scan is getting the result that there's NED!

My 1 Year Diagnosis Anniversary (Yesterday)!

One year ago yesterday, on Friday, December 3, 2010, I received my diagnosis of appendiceal adenocarcinoma!  Thank God I'm still around one year and one day later!  With N.E.D. (No Evidence of Disease) as of my most recent CT scan, which I had in early September 2011!  Looking back over my one year and one day of knowing that my useless appendix had tried it's best to kill me off by developing an adenocarcinoma (without my permission!) that had escaped the bounds of my traitorous appendix and was metastasizing all over my peritoneum (also without my permission!), it has been quite a journey, indeed!

Needless to say, I know I wouldn't be here at all without the countless numbers of prayers and positive thoughts and best wishes that have been offered on my account for at least a year and a day!  Please keep it up, if it's not all that much trouble (or even if it is a little bit of trouble--it's well worth the effort), it's really been working wonderfully well!  Prayers and positive thoughts and best wishes are never wasted but are always recycled and reused and continue working their miraculous effects, if not always on the prayee, most certainly on the prayor!  There's only one Multiverse that we all happen to be inhabiting at this moment and we're all in it together!

The Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman once hypothesized that the reason that all electrons everywhere where absolutely identical (so that it's theoretically and experimentally impossible to distinguish one electron from any other electron) was that they were all the very same electron doing an incredibly complicated dance going forward and backward in time (apparently you can go back in time to some extent if you are small enough that your true quantum mechanical nature manifests itself!--an electron going backwards in time appears to us in the macroworld as a positron, an anti-electron, going forwards in time!), a most provocative and seductive hypothesis, indeed!  Extrapolating to all the (apparently) different types of "fundamental" particles, all red up quarks are identical because they are all the very same red up quark also dancing forward and backward in time all over the known (and unknown) Universe, all muons are identical because they are all the very same muon dancing forward and backward in time all over the place, yada, yada, yada!  And, extrapolating just one little theoretical baby step further, since all the (apparently) different types of "fundamental" particles are almost certainly (at least in our theoretical physics dreams!) just various aspects of one underlying super-great-great-great-grand unified Ur-particle (usgggguUp), we're all made up of the one usgggguUp and therefore all intimately connected (entangled!) at the deepest of levels!  Remember that the next time "you" treat "others" in the very same way that "you" would like to be treated!

Still Very Much Alive and Kicking and Glad to be so!

I realize that I haven't posted much lately!  I've been luxuriating in my continued NEDness (No Evidence of Disease)!  I take the lack of evidence of disease to be indicative of being "cancer-free," fully aware that this could all change with the next CT scan, which is scheduled for Wednesday, January 11, 2012.  All CT scans, even the high-resolution ones at MDACC (M.D. Anderson Cancer Center) here in Houston, Texas, necessarily are limited at some level in the resolution they can achieve, whether it's 1 mm or 0.5 mm or whatever--current CT scan imaging technology isn't able to resolve individual cancer cells at the 10 micron level or so, and since the energy of the photons used goes up as the corresponding wavelength goes down (cells and other structures much smaller than the photon's wavelength can't scatter the corresponding photons all that well!), you probably don't want to be exposed to a lot of very short wavelength x-rays (or gamma rays) in order to achieve that kind of resolution!  Perhaps thermal neutrons could be used, however!  They might not damage your tissues nearly as much as the high-energy x-rays (or gamma rays) do!  Nevertheless, psychologically, it's much easier to deal with the idea that I'm completely "cancer-free," even though my oncologist would never tell me such a thing!  To paraphrase that great patriot, Patrick Henry, "Give me cancer liberty or give me death!"

Cancer death is, of course, weighing on everybody's minds, mainly as a result of the passing of Steve Jobs!  The parts of his 2005 graduation address at Stanford that I've seen are very prescient and wise!  Life is, indeed, far too short for any of us to waste much of it living someone else's life, trying in vain to meet someone else's expectations for our lives.  Death can be a gift that makes each and every moment of each and every one of our lives all the more precious and unique!  There are, after all, only 86,400 seconds in each 24 hour day of our lives, so be careful not to squander too many of them in worthless pursuits that don't engage all of your passions!  Do what you love (whatever that is) and love what you do (whatever that may be)!  Love wastefully and recklessly because there's no way in heaven or on Earth that we can ever exhaust the true fount of love!  Not only can love be unconditional, love can be inexhaustible and infinite beyond all imagination and reason!  Thanks, Steve!  I love my iPad, my iPods, and I'm sure I'd love an iPhone, too, if I had one!  Thanks also to Dave and Jo and Brian and Celeste, of course, without whom we'd never have had the pleasure of getting to know and use Paddy the iPad!

Thank God for N.E.D.!!!

We're quite pleased to be able to report that the results of my most recent CT scan show N.E.D. (No Evidence of Disease)!  And all the cancer/tumor markers in my blood are at normal (not elevated) levels!  Praise God!  Prayer works miracles!  I'm good for at least another 3 months or so (until my next CT scan)!  I love N.E.D.!  Better N.E.D. than dead!  We're elated, of course!  I'll find out tomorrow whether I need another chemo treatment or not (I'm hoping not, but if I do need to get one more chemo treatment--icing on the cake, making the rubble bounce [to mix metaphors!], then so be it!)--Thanks again for all your positive thoughts and vibes and prayers and best wishes!  They're all appreciated so much, as are you all!  It's such a wonderful, blessed relief to be free of cancer anxiety for a while!  Doxa soi, Kurie!  {Hellenistic Greek meaning "Glory to You, Lord!"}