Medical Update: 3rd Official Opinion, Clarification
I am writing from Penn Station in sunny Baltimore, MD. There is a big art festival here today, and the town is clearly bracing for a massive flood of humanity, but it’s early enough that no one has showed up yet (not even the exhibitors). So here I sit, enjoying the calm before the storm.
Before I go investigate a car shaped like an old-fashioned telephone, I figured I would post a medical update.
Issue 1: Tumor Histology Controversy: when I was first hospitalized, a sample of my tumor was taken through an incision in my neck. The biopsied tissue was analyzed by the pathology lab.
By far the most important question was: is this lymphoma? Even without a microscope it is possible to know that a mass is lymphoma. I know this because I was conscious while they sliced my neck open, and the head surgeon described how to differentiate between teratomas, neck and glandular cancers and lymphoma to a resident, using me as an exemplar. Once “yes/no lymphoma” is resolved, the logical question becomes “which kind of lymphoma” – and there are several: Hodgkin’s, Non-Hodgkin’s, Burkitt’s, B-cell Lymphoma, Mucosa-Associated Lymphoid Tissue (MALT) Lymphoma, and others. It is actually fairly easy to distinguish Hodgkin’s from other types of disease. For decades, scientists knew that Hodgkin’s existed, and knew that radiation and certain kinds of chemicals (based on chemical weapons used in World War I, interestingly) would kill it – but they did not know whether it was a cancer. This is why it is sometimes called Hodgkin’s Disease, rather than Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Two scientists resolved this by noting that under a microscope, it was possible to see very large, distorted cells that impacted and distorted nearby healthy cells. These abnormally large cells were named after their (independent) discoverers and are called Reed-Sternberg cells. You can see them here:
1 year ago • 0 notes