Well, we got the results back from my most recent CT scan last Friday, January 4, 2013, and the results were not good! Evidently, the 3 FOLFOX treatments I'd gotten before Caroline and I left on our Trans-Atlantic Adventure were no more effective at halting the progression of the metastatic appendiceal adenocarcinomas in my abdominal cavity and on my peritoneum (the all encompassing membrane that surrounds the gut) than the FOLFIRI and Avastin treatments I've gotten since May 2012! Unfortunately, I've now exhausted the state-of-the-art standard-of-care conventional chemotherapy treatments that are used to fight colon cancers, FOLFOX and FOLFIRI, with or without Avastin! The upside of this is that I won't have to subject myself to any more IV chemotherapies! The downside is that there are no more IV chemotherapies for me to use! Medicine has made great strides in the 20 years since Audrey Hepburn was diagnosed with appendix cancer in the early 1990's when 5-fluorouracil (5-FU, the F in FOLFOX and FOLFIRI) was about the only chemo agent available that was useful against colon cancers (appendix cancers are almost always treated as a subspecies of the far more common colon cancers)! However, when you run out of treatment options, the ultimate outcomes are not all that different today than they were in Audrey's day!
Fear not! It turns out that we're not completely out of treatment options after all! Even as we write, we are meeting with researchers here at MD Anderson Cancer Center who are involved in 100's of Phase I clinical trials of promising new "targeted therapies," one or more of which may be appropriate for me and my tumors!
I promise to keep you all up to date on the latest! In the meantime, enjoy another amazing picture from our Trans-Atlantic Adventure, in front of GaudÃ's amazing La Pedrera apartments!:
Happy New Year! Thank God we've made it to 2013! I know I haven't posted since October! I guess I was busy! Life happens!
Caroline and I got back from a wonderful adventure a few days before Christmas. A few days before Thanksgiving, we flew to Rome, Italy and boarded the Crown Princess for a cruise to the Eastern Mediterranean to exotic and amazing places we'd never been to before, like Naples (Pompeii, Sorrento, Capri), Santorini, Kusadasi, Turkey (Ephesus), Mykanos (Delos), Piraeus (Athens, Corinth), Corfu, Dubrovnik, Croatia, and Venice, Italy (we'd actually been to Venice before, on our honeymoon over 15 years ago!)--we enjoyed everything we saw and did! Then, we stayed on the Crown Princess for its tour of the Western Mediterranean and its repositioning across the Atlantic Ocean to Galveston, Texas, visiting Rome (Colosseum, Sistine Chapel), Livorno (Cinque Terre), Cannes (Matisse Museum in Nice, Monaco), Barcelona (Picasso Museum, Gaudi's La Pedrera), Lisbon (Cascais), Ponta Delgado, Azores, and Ft. Lauderdale (Everglades) along the way! Here's a picture of us enjoying the many pleasures of Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera!
Using the insanely expensive satellite connection on board the ship, that makes dial-up Internet service seem like blazing fast broadband, I was able to take care of the patent needs of Muons, Inc. and filed several patent applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from the middle of the ocean! All in all we had a fabulous time!
Believe it or not, I was scooped in my conjecture about an analogue of Bertrand's Postulate for twin prime numbers (prime numbers separated by exactly one even number, like 11 and 13 or 17 and 19, for example)! Hard to believe, I know, but a Google search turned up a Word document by Dhananjay P. Mehendale titled "On Problems Related to Primes: Some Ideas" in which he clearly anticipates a Bertrand-like Postulate concerning twin primes: for some real number x >= 7, there exists at least one pair of twin primes between x and 2x. He gives a plausible heuristic argument supporting his Bertrand-like Postulate for twin primes, but no rigorous proof that would be accepted by the mathematical community, of course!
I go in for another CT scan this coming Thursday, January 3, 2013, and meet with my oncologist on Friday, January 4, 2013. We should be able to get some indication whether the FOLFOX chemo treatments I had gotten before the cruise were any better than the FOLFIRI chemo treatments had been at stopping tumor growth in my abdominal cavity. Stay tuned!
