Nine Down, Three to Go!

I'm very pleased to report that I've successfully received 9 rounds of chemotherapy treatment and only have 3 more chemo treatments to go to complete a total of 12 rounds of chemo!  I'm even more pleased to report that I haven't suffered any side effects from the FOLFIRI chemo treatments!  Praise God!  All the myriad prayers being offered up for me must be storming the gates of heaven, indeed!  I am so very blessed and I joyfully thank God every day for the wonderful daily bread of my existence!  There's nothing like a potentially life-threatening illness to focus your mind on what truly matters the most!

I go to MD Anderson Cancer Center here in Houston, Texas, every other week to receive my chemo treatments.  According to my current schedule, if everything goes as planned, I should be finishing up my 12th round of chemo treatments by mid-September 2011!  My next CT scan is scheduled right after Caroline's and my 14th wedding anniversary on August 30, 2011!  Hopefully that CT scan will show what my most recent CT scan, taken after I'd recovered sufficiently from my 12 hour HIPEC operation, showed, namely, nothing at all, and, in particular, no signs whatsoever of any tumors anywhere!  Approximately one-third of all patients who undergo the HIPEC surgical procedure have a complete and total remission of their peritoneal cancers (at least for 5 years or so) and I naturally assume I'm in that group of the one-third of all patients!

I am also very pleased and proud to report that I was recently offered (and accepted, of course) the position of in-house Patent Counsel/Physicist with Muons, Inc., a scientific research and development company dedicated to "innovation in research" that specializes in coming up with improvements for particle accelerators used in a plethora of industrial and medical and fundamental scientific research applications.  One example of the wide range of research interests of Muons, Inc. is the development of accelerator-driven sub-critical nuclear waste transmuters that are fully capable of generating significant amounts of safer, cleaner, and greener thermal and electrical nuclear power while transmuting large quantities of harmful and dangerous high-level radioactive nuclear wastes from conventional nuclear power plants into much smaller quantities of much less harmful and much less dangerous low-level nuclear radioactive nuclear wastes!  I'm very excited by the challenges and opportunities afforded by working with Muons, Inc. and optimizing their intellectual property protections and burgeoning patent portfolio!  It's a great position, amazingly well tailored to my background in both physics and patent law!

By the way, in case you were wondering, muons are fundamental subatomic particles that are identical to electrons in every respect, except that they are about 207 times more massive than electrons and decay into electrons and neutrinos (both electron-type and muon-type) with a half-life of about 2.2 microseconds!  Another focus of the research interests of Muons, Inc. is the development of viable muon colliders!