Seth Cancer Blog

My Sweet Lord A lot is happening very quickly so I better catch up on the blog.   First the very wonderful delightful news that my tumor showed > 50% regression 2 weeks after treatment had begun based on a PET/CT scan and therefore I had the option to shorten my treatment from 7 weeks (35 radiation treatments) to 5 and a half weeks (27 radiation treatments).   I had this option because as part of my treatment I agreed to enter a clinical trial that was exploring whether shorter treatment was sufficient to maintain efficacy in the HPV positive Stage 1/2 Head and Neck squamous cell carcinoma population. As I had described earlier, the standard 7 weeks treatment duration was optimized for the traditional H&N population that was associated with smoking and was HPV negative. The clinical trial was also investigating several other correlative science endpoints including whether HPV ctDNA was a good biomarker to predict outcome.   Investigators are interested in wh...

Yer Blues It’s been about 3 weeks since my last post.   I’ve been struggling with something interesting to say.   The main narrative has been how to manage mouth, throat and swallowing pain and still push down 2000 calories a day.   That has been a miserable experience and not very interesting.   And I can’t think of any Beatles song titles that fit the experience—such a winsome bunch of lads. But the purpose of the blog was to capture events and memories so I’m forcing myself now to capture the last 3 weeks before I gratefully put it behind me and forget about it. I remember on Chemo Day 2, Monday, September 30, bringing an egg and cheese and spinach bagel sandwich to the infusion room for my lunch and enjoying it.   Ah, the salad days of my treatment.   During the relative honeymoon of my first 2 weeks of treatment I was mostly eating normal foods and still actually tasting them. I remember meeting with the radiation oncologist on Wednesday, Octo...

Helter Skelter According to the National Cancer Institute, and based on data from 2014-2016, approximately 39% of men and women in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetimes. In 2016, over 15 million people were living with cancer in the United States.     So why is a cancer diagnosis so often unexpected and disruptive? Both of my fathers (my biological father and my stepfather) died of cancer.   Why was I surprised and alarmed when I received a cancer diagnosis?   Probably because most of us think cancer is a disease of the aged and not something that happens to us.   And we forget how quickly we age.   I’m 58, old enough for 2 rounds of colonoscopies. In fact, the median age of a cancer diagnosis is 66.   Half of all cancers are diagnosed in people aged 66 or younger—that seems remarkable. About 24% of all new cancer diagnoses happen within the 55-64 age group that I belong to. Based on these data, a...