HN user

borbulon

611 karma
Posts0
Comments126
View on HN
No posts found.

Something is wrong with the whole system of how people are compensated for their work; a Starbucks employee shouldn’t have to rely upon the good graces of their customers (tips) to earn a living wage, either.

That being said, a heart surgeon has a very specific and wide-ranging set of knowledge and skills which not many people could have, not to mention the incredible amount of stress they’re under.

Starting Hospice 2 years ago

I’m sorry for both of you. I thank you for your words. As someone who’s right behind you in line, your words mean more to me (and hit harder, and cut deeper) than I expect they do for many.

Take my love with you both. See you on the other side.

No problem, I don't mind talking about it. It was stage 4 when it was detected. Right lung, pleura, up my lymph nodes to the opposite side. There was a lot of it. And I've had Stereotactic RadioSurgery a few times for metastases in my brain.

Herceptin (trastuzumab) is mainly for HER-2 overexpression, whereas I have HER-2 mutation. However, we did try it last year alongside another chemo whose name I cannot remember, and IIRC that's the combo which gave me neuropathy in my feet (I now take lots of gabapentin every day so my feet don't feel like they're on fire).

Other than the clinical trial drug, which helped for a few months, the one thing that did help but eventually gave me pneumonitis so I had to stop it, was Enhertu.

The biggest thing people who have lost someone close to them have to say is that they start to forget what the person looked like and sounded like. I am doing it - I think if you keep it casual, like "hey, I was just thinking about you and the day you graduate high school, and I'll bet....." kind of thing, you're making it less morbid.

I was recently released from a clinical trial because of too many “newly measurable” areas of tumor. I was offered CAR-T but was told that it comes with a high risk of possibly fatal infections and is not guaranteed to work at all for my cancer (HER-2 positive lung cancer, stage 4). I turned it down. I have a wife and 3 kids, I’d rather spend an unknown amount of time being fully present with them than risk my life today.

What Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) - someone who has the mannerisms and interests of a superficially intelligent person but who nonetheless is unable to self-reflect or deal with nuance, such as the Harvard-educated Ben Shapiro.

I worked in Harvard Square for 5 years (dead center, across the street from Curious George, between the Greenhouse and the Coop), and it was always my assertion that Harvard is full of Well-Educated Idiots.

It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

That and I have dreams about flying, but as soon as I realize I’m having dreams about flying, I wake up and the flying dreams stop.

Your generous explanation seems to run counter to the first part of the second quote, which is that none of Delta’s aircraft are currently flying with unapproved parts. Why would your explanation be true for the first quote and not the second, which is much more directly problematic if false?

I suppose 1 could be true and 2 false, but that seems less likely

even radiation is different for different people - I have had a couple of treatments for brain metastases and due to my proximity to Boston I am lucky to get the most up-to-date treatments available. There's something called Proton Beam Stereotactic Radiosurgery which is a single session, they are somehow able to curve the beam so it enters in three different places and the place where the beam(s) meet is the place that gets the treatment. It's a single session and I don't have any side effects at all.

But yes, when I spoke to radiation oncologist when I was diagnosed 2.5 years ago (and before they had a full picture of what my cancer looked like), he told me to expect to be hospitalized multiple times because the lymph nodes they'd treat were so close to my esophagus and the treatments would burn my espohagus. "Thankfully" the cancer was spread too far and the field was too large for radiation, so the only radiation treatments I've had have been the ones described above.

More info on the different kinds of Stereotactic Radiosurgery: https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/stereotactic-rad...

Having cancer myself, I can tell you that there are a lot of misconceptions about what life “under chemo” is like. I’m in a clinical trial for pills now, but when I was doing infusions, the worst of them had me out of commission for about 4 days - chemo day (which was about schedule, not side effects), then days 4, 5, and sometimes 6 after chemo day. The rest were completely manageable, in fact I looked forward to working.

This is not to belittle his experience or cast him in a negative light; I wish him well and I know that overall it leaves you feeling less than normal, and I can completely relate. But “under chemo” is not always as debilitating as you might think.

I'm sorry to hear about your mother. I have cancer, and I've definitely gotten a few "we've never seen x happen with y drug," but they've always been ready to accept that I'm just in the 0.00001 percentile or whatever that this happens to. They've never tried to treat me for something else, they believed that what was happening, was happening.

I am endlessly fascinated by these finds. The more of these sorts of sites we find, the more we learn. They were documenting not just the animals around them, but their breeding seasons, their migrations if any, and probably a dozen other things we haven't even considered.