Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2015/04/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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.