When I was being officially told I had an advanced and incurable cancer, I did what most people seem to do on films/TV ..... I asked "how long do I have". The Oncologist said " ... perhaps just months". That must have been quite a shock because for a few moments after that, I heard nothing - my brain was clearly still trying to process those words. The really important bit I missed was him saying "..…
In 2013, just when I thought everything seemed to be under control, I was told I had a ‘lesion’ on the left upper lobe of my thyroid. At the time, it was a bit of a shock as I had already been subjected to some radical surgery and wondered if this was just part of the relentless march of metastatic disease. The thyroid gland does in fact get mentioned frequently in NET patient discussions but many of the conver…
As we approach another festive period, my thoughts return to this time 4 years ago. I had been diagnosed with metastatic neuroendocrine Cancer a few months before and that it was incurable. However, with 'debulking' surgery my prognosis could be significantly improved. In fact, Neuroendocrine cancers are one of a small number of tumours for which surgical debulking confers some survival advantage. Another term…
One of the great things about learning is that it never ends :-) I came across this piece of information about how chemotherapy was invented. I had no idea. It all began with the development of mustard gas and I'm sure we've all seen the awful pictures of solders leading each other from the battlefield having been affected by this 'deadly cloud'. Let's hope we never have to witness this again. This…
My wife and I were in London recently and we took the opportunity to visit the world-famous Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in South Kensington. A particular display caught my eye entitled "Disobedient Objects" and I immediately thought it had a scientific sound to it. Imagining a set of everyday objects which somehow didn't behave as you would expect, it sounded great fun so I wandered in. How wrong…
