Back on Chemo Sabe!

Sorry for the overly long "radio silence"!  I didn't mean to neglect my blog posting duties, but somehow I never got around to posting anything on my blog since the day after my surgery!  So much has happened since then!  Where to begin?  Well, I've recovered sufficiently from my 12 hour HIPEC surgery to be back on chemotherapy!  Even as I'm writing this blog post, 5.2 ml/hour of 5 Fluorouracil is being pumped directly into my jugular vein through my Bard Power Port-o-Catheter by a little battery-powered pump in its own little fanny pack, my constant and somewhat annoying companion for 46 hours from when I left M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) yesterday around 1:30PM until I return there to be disconnected tomorrow morning around 11:30AM, right after church at Grace Episcopal Church!  Because my colorectal oncologist, the amazing Dr. Shureiqi, feared that the peripheral neuralgia side effects from the Oxaliplatin that I'd been getting in my 5 previous chemo treatments with FOLFOX, and that I also got during the HIPEC perfusion during my 12 hour surgery, might become a permanent chronic condition, I'm now on a slightly different chemo cocktail, FOLFIRI, which is an alternative chemo treatment that has similar effects on colorectal cancers that FOLFOX has, substituting Irinotecan, a topoisomerase inhibitor that prevents DNA from uncoiling from the histones it's wrapped around thereby inhibiting rapid cell growth typically found in tumor cells, for Oxaliplatin.  The side effects of FOLFIRI can be somewhat different than the side effects of FOLFOX.  For example, unlike FOLFOX, FOLFIRI does not cause peripheral neuralgia in one's extremities such as numbness and tingling in one's fingers and toes and feet and hands.  FOLFIRI also, thankfully, does not cause the weird and uncomfortable feeling in one's throat when one consumes one's favorite iced quad espresso beverage from Starbucks!  In some cases, FOLFIRI has been known to cause loss of head hair and bouts with diarrhea, which is why I've stockpiled lots of Imodium!  So far, knock on wood, I've been spared these side effects, but it may be way too early for any of these side effects to have shown up!

My hospital stay at MDACC was not bad at all and was blissfully and miraculously short and sweet--I was discharged one day shy of 2 weeks after my surgery on April 12, 2011, on Monday, April 25, 2011.  The only minor complication I had was a couple of places along my cubit-long incision (stretching from my breast bone to my pubic bone, skirting around my innie belly button!) that had somehow become infected.  The infection was quickly tamed with IV antibiotics administered while I was still an in-patient at MDACC.  I did have to leave MDACC tethered to a portable Wound Vac, which continually sucked out discharges and debris from the two fairly sizable wounds, both over 2 inches (5.08 cm) deep, that were dressed in a special type of dressing that had to be changed every 2 or 3 days by a home healthcare nurse, in my case a wonderful woman named Abby!  When I was first discharged from MDACC, Caroline and I stayed at my parent's home in Meyerland.  Caroline was working during the day, so Burr and Cynthia very kindly nursed me back to health with copious heaping helpings of tender loving care!  Much to my delight (and recovery) I discovered that you can go home again!  Even if only for a short while!  At first, because of my incision and its healing wounds, it was a bit uncomfortable for me to lie flat on my back in bed at night--the hospital bed was always inclined at a slight angle!  Fortunately, I discovered that the reclining chairs in my parent's living room were quite comfortable and I was able to sleep many a happy hour there in the chair!  In addition to pampering and spoiling me, Burr and Cynthia were also very good about encouraging me to get up every now and then during the day and go for a walk in the neighborhood, at first just up and down Darnell, but eventually extending all the way around the block along Carew back to Darnell!

All in all, my recovery has been nothing short of miraculous!  I attribute all the healing to the plethora of prayers and positive thought energies being offered on my behalf and being sent my way!  Thank God our God is a consummate God of healing, wholeness, and wellness!  I have truly been blessed in countless ways!

I was especially blessed by all the wonderful cards and flowers and balloons and plants and, most of all, in person visits while I was in the hospital at MDACC--you have no idea how welcome you all were and how happy you all made me (and you all know who you are!)--it really makes a world of difference!  The doctors and nurses and all the staff and the volunteer corps at MDACC couldn't have been more attentive and more helpful than they were--I almost didn't want to leave!  They had me up and walking the very next day after the 12 hour surgery, amazingly enough!  In seemingly no time at all I had graduated from a pure "liquid" diet, to the "soft food" diet, and on to the full "regular" diet!  My internal plumbing apparently was hooked back up in expert fashion, so even though I was missing the whole right half of my large intestine (yes, I now have a semicolon!), small bits of my small intestines, my traitorous appendix, about 32 or so lymph nodes that had been draining the cecum I no longer had (about 8 of which lymph nodes showed some involvement with the tumors, according to the pathology report, which is a very good reason for me to continue with 12 full rounds of chemotherapy!), and 40 to 50 small metastatic tumors that were surgically removed from my abdominal cavity before the HIPEC perfusion, along with my gall bladder, which was removed not because of any tumor involvement necessarily, but because it didn't look very "happy"(!), all the remaining pieces of my digestive system were functioning excellently in no time at all!  By the way, you never appreciate how much you rely on your abdominal muscles to do pretty much anything like standing up, sitting down, walking, and even ooching yourself over a bit while in bed until you can't use your abdominal muscles any more because they've been cut through so the surgical team can access your innards!  Evidently, in my case, for mysterious reasons, there were a couple of extra inches of adipose tissue that also had to be cut through in order to successfully complete the surgery!  Go figure!  I had asked whether the surgical team could do a little liposuction while they were in there anyway, but apparently that's not one of the surgical options available at MDACC at this time!

We met with my miracle-worker surgeon, Dr. Paul Mansfield, on Thursday, May 12, 2011, 4 weeks and 2 days after the grueling 12 hour surgery on Tuesday, April 12, 2011.  He thought the incision wounds had healed enough that I didn't need to be tethered to the Wound Vac any more and he also, thankfully, decided that I no longer needed the "G-tube" to my stomach that I'd had ever since the surgery in case I ever got nauseated and needed to empty my stomach contents other than by the usual route, which fortunately I never did!  The G-tube, even though it was never used, still had to be flushed with 30 cc's of tap water and redressed every day, not to mention the fact that the proper stopper for the G-tube had somehow gotten misplaced while I was still in the hospital at MDACC so that there were a couple of accidental and messy leakages from the G-tube before I figured out a foolproof way to tape the substitute G-tube stopper so that it couldn't just blithely pop out!  Dr. Mansfield was able to extract the G-tube right there in the examination room in the Gastrointestinal Clinic before I even knew that he'd done it--truly a wizard, indeed!

You'll be pleased to know that I've continued my assiduous studies into the wonderful and sublimely mysterious world of number theory, having worked my way through all the exercises in Robert Daniel (R.D.) Carmichael's masterful (and free, thanks to Project Gutenberg!)1914 (safely in the public domain!) classic entitled The Theory of Numbers, which I'd downloaded as a PDF file onto Paddy the wondrous iPad!  You'll also be pleased to know that I have nothing further to report regarding Furlong's Conjecture (see previous postings, one by that name and another that's incredibly long and virtually impenetrable!), which, as some of you all may remember, narrows Brocard's Conjecture significantly (Brocard conjectured that there were at least 4 prime numbers between successive squares of odd prime numbers--a prime number being, of course, any number greater than 1 that has 2 and only 2 divisors, namely 1 and itself, whereas I conjectured that there were at least 2 pairs of "twin primes" between successive squares of odd prime numbers, where "twin primes" are prime numbers separated by one and only one composite, non-prime number--if my conjecture is ever proven to be true, then Brocard's Conjecture follows as a necessary corollary, since 2 pairs of "twin primes" necessarily includes 4 prime numbers!) in that Brocard only requires 4 prime numbers that could each be separated from each other by some number of composite numbers while I specifically require my 4 prime numbers to be arrayed into 2 pairs of "twin primes"!  I have yet another conjecture involving "twin primes" that narrows Legendre's Conjecture, but it's a little more complicated to state.  Legendre conjectured that there will always be at least one prime number between successive square numbers (for example, between 1^2=1 and 2^2=4 there are the prime numbers 2 and 3, and between 2^2=4 and 3^2=9 there are the prime numbers 5 and 7, etc., etc.), but I go on to conjecture that there is at least 1 pair of "twin primes" between successive square numbers greater than 1, or, if not, then there will always be at least 2 pairs of "twin primes" between neighboring successive square numbers!  For example, you can easily verify that my conjecture holds true between 2^2=4 and 3^2=9 (the pair of "twin primes" being 5 and 7), between 3^2=9 and 4^2=16 (the "twin primes" 11 and 13), between 4^2=16 and 5^2=25 (the "twin primes" 17 and 19), between 5^2=25 and 6^2=36 (the "twin primes" 29 and 31), between 6^2=36 and 7^2=49 (the "twin primes" 41 and 43), between 7^2=49 and 8^2=64 (the "twin primes" 59 and 61), and between 8^2=64 and 9^2=81 (the "twin primes" 71 and 73).  Note, however, that there are no "twin primes" between 9^2=81 and 10^2=100 (the only primes between 81 and 100 are 83, 89, and 97, none of which are "twin primes").  Therefore, since there is also no "extra" pair of "twin primes" between the neighboring square numbers 8^2=64 and 9^2=81 (the one and only pair of "twin primes" between 64 and 81 are 71 and 73!), in order for my other, more complicated conjecture to hold true, there better be at least 2 pairs of "twin primes" between the other neighboring square numbers 10^2=100 and 11^2=121 (and, sure enough there are, the "twin primes" 101 and 103 and 107 and 109!)--I've checked successive squares up through 31^2=961 and 32^2=1024 and as far as I can tell, my other, more complicated conjecture holds true at least up to 1024, which is a lot smaller than countable infinity, but at least it's a very small and modest step in the right direction!