[Leica] OT: Health report

[Herbert Kanner]

I now have the nearest I can get to a final report. Remember, it all started with a lesion in my left femur, whose only symptom was what I thought was a strained muscle in my thigh. The first physician who saw the X-ray was told by three radiologist (so he said) that my hip was on the verge of breaking, and that I should be wheeled immediately to the emergency room as the fastest way of getting into the hospital (Stanford). Eventually an orthopedic surgeon saw the X-ray and told me to go home, that there was no immediate danger of a fracture, and that I would see an orthopedic surgeon the following Tuesday. 

Things then went from bad to worse, because it took about four months to get a definitive diagnosis. The orthopedic surgeon said that drilling for a sample was too risky, and the long wait was to get the critters called “Interventional Radiologists” to do a needle biopsy. This is quite a production, because it is a biopsy guided by a CAT scan, so there is that crew of one or two surgeons, a couple of nurses, a radiologist to tell the surgeons what they are seeing, and a pathologist to tell them if the sample is big enough. They’re all wearing lead aprons. And I’m injected with “happy voice” so that even fully conscious (so it seemed), I feel absolutely no pain.

The result was a very slow-growing prostate cancer, a breed that didn’t raise the PSA. The specialist-in-prostate-cancer-oncologist felt that any treatment more than a pill that cuts testosterone would be over-kill. The orthopedic surgeon, looking at the x-rays that followed two weeks of daily radiation treatments to my hip concluded that the tumor had been sufficiently “killed” that he made the next appointment to see him a year from now.

Herb


 
Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.