We took at trip to Boston yesterday to start laying the groundwork for Orion's treatment over the next six months. Cold and clear before another storm we traipsed the Freedom Trail with an unflagging guide (Sally). We even spotted a Boston terrier on the Common but it wasn't half the beauty that our little Darcy is. My favorite moment of the field trip was when Orion was moaning over how bad the tea was at Bruegger's and over his shoulder we could see the historic hall where Bostonians met to rally against the tea tax.
Dealing with the surgeon Ziv Williams is always a delight to me because he seems so genuinely fond of Orion. The fact that he found some physicist to help him with cognitive questions to test Orion after failing to stump him with all the standard ones was a kindness that Sally and I needed. Since Orion aced those as well I expect another ramp up in April when we see him again.
As usual we are pleased and comfortable with MGH's teaching hospital methods of involving teams of doctors ranging from senior attending researchers, clinicians, rank MD and PhD Fellows, and visiting doctors. The entire neurological and oncology staff seems thrilled to be helping Orion who they constantly refer to as "extremely high functioning". The fact that he is on the verge of an Honors physics degree from Swarthmore and has plans for grad school excites them in a way that lengthening the life of an 80 year old guy with prostate cancer or even, dare I say, a child who is all promise and no track record cannot.
This seemed all the more apparent when they invited us in to see the
proton accelerator, a monstrous machine, a deus ex machina, where the Harvard cyclotron accelerates protons to 70 to 250 MeV and smashes them into the cancer cells, sucker punching their DNA. Orion, junior physicist, interested in high energy particle physics, meeting them personally.
His biology has failed him and physics will save him.
No comments:
Post a Comment