Norman Spinrad a annoncé qu’il avait un cancer de l’estomac dans une lettre publiée sur
internet ici. A priori cela s'annonce compliquée.
La voici :
"I have been diagnosed with stomach cancer and told that it is presently inoperable due to involvement of a mesentery lymph node, and my only chance to even live out the year is to undergo prior chemotherapy of one kind or another to shrink the secondary in order to make the primary operable.
I'm in the hands of Sloan-Kettering, which is supposed to be the best there is at least in the US, but I am dubious and skeptical about chemo, at least conventional chemo, which basically delivers toxins of one kind or another to fast growing cells—cancer, but also others, such as hair follicles, which is why your hair tends to fall out—hence the panoply of bad side effects.
And the paradox of it is, except for an anemia which I've successfully been treating with mega Iron and mega B-12, I have no real symptoms. Can't say I feel 100% all the time, but some days I do, and the rest maybe 80%. So I have some difficult scientific and existential decisions to make, and any wisdom or knowledge would be appreciated.
I learned of the situation yesterday, as y'all might imagine, slept badly, and what came to me was something that seemed totally obvious, namely what I called the "cryogenic needle." Real simple, but it is sort of rocket science. Shorn of bells and whistles, it amounts to bringing the temperature of a needle down to cryogenic levels using liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen and sticking it in a tumor to crystallize it. Unlike cutting with a scalpel, zero chance of releasing cancer cells to metastasize, and when the tumor comes back up to room temperature, it's long dead and perhaps even disintegrated.
Dona, who long ago had the process, reminded me that something similar has long been done to remove pre-cancerous cells from the cervix. And today I did a little more research and found out that something like it is already being done on some cancers as front-line treatment.
So if anyone knows more about this, or where I just might go to try and get such treatment, do let me know. Conventionally speaking, and I'm being treated by as good a conventional oncology program as there is, the prognosis is otherwise pretty dire.
Unless, of course, someone out there has an even more brilliant idea."