[Leica] OT: Health report

[Howard Ritter]

As a medical oncologist, I’d be a little unsettled by the length of time it took to get a diagnosis, but of course I wasn’t there, so I’m not criticizing anyone. In fact, I’d applaud the orthopaedic surgeon for counseling that everyone take their fingers off the panic button, the decision to have Interventional Radiology do a little needle biopsy, and the oncologist’s restrained advice for minimally noxious treatment (anti-testosterone drug and radiation therapy–which, administered to a bone lesion in an extremity, is as you now know virtually symptomless). 

I’m happy to hear about your good response and the apparent “indolent” (as we say in oncology) nature of your cancer. I hope the femoral metastasis was a lone wolf. Best wishes for a cancer that is absolutely dependent on testosterone to stay alive so that anti-androgen therapy (of which there are multiple varieties to use in succession, usually maintaining control for many years) keeps it at bay for as long as you need.

—howard


> On Apr 19, 2015, at 10:24 PM, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote:
> 
> 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