Terminal Engineering A blog of a cancer fighting engineer
Short stacked
An analogy for poker players… In poker, you sometimes find yourself having so few chips left that you are vulnerable to being wiped out on the next hand played. Call this being short stacked. In tournament-style house games, most players end up in a short stacked position, sometimes early in the game. This is a difficult position to recover fro... Read more 29 Dec 2020 - 1 minute read
Update: December 2020
Above is a graph of CEA, a serum tumor marker. This is difficult for me to say, but I am not in a good position right now. In the past, the marker rising above 80-90 has been very uncomfortable. As of two weeks ago, it was 74. With my cancer resistant to EGFR targeted therapy due to the EGFR T790M/C797S mutations, I have been riding my second r... Read more 20 Dec 2020 - 2 minute read
Cell lines
On 3/31, I went on a lab tour at MGH. While I’m interested in seeing the labs, what really brought me here was seeing the patient derived models lab. Here, my cancer cells are being grown and studied to find effective treatments for me and for patients in the future. The patient derived models project at MGH creates living cell lines from piece... Read more 14 Apr 2016 - less than 1 minute read
Science and the treatment of serious illnesses
Note: This is a edited version of my submission to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) call for public comment on changes to the Common Rule, which governs research on human subjects in the US In April of 2015, at the age of 29, I was diagnosed with advanced EGFR+ lung cancer. Although this condition is rare in a person lik... Read more 24 Feb 2016 - 7 minute read