Good days

Part of the solution to the philosophical problem concerns the concept of "good days". When I meet people they ask "how are you?", the answer to which question would sensibly take a PhD thesis. But in my state there are bad days and good days.

Take last Friday for example. That was a bad day. Exhausted after an all-night bowel obstruction, I dragged myself, along with an equally exhausted Miang, to my hospital oncologist who completed the exercise of knocking me senseless by sharing the horror show of my PET scan, as if the radiologist's report wasn't enough. Seriously though, he is a wonderful man, and I wanted to see the images. He ensured that I got an immediate IV litre of saline, then called up the radiation oncologist who put the proposal for some palliative electrons, whisking me off to radiation physics to have a planning CT scan done for beam irradiation to start within days. The care cannot be faulted.

On Sunday the obstruction exercise repeated. But on Monday night, after a day recovering and aided by morphine, I had an excellent sleep, waking to one of those magical clear, calm, warm, blue-sky days which we locals refer to, ironically, as "a typical Wellington day". I called in at the office, at Magritek, and to each and everyone who questioned me I was able to cheerfully reply, "I am having a good day".

Good days are to be relished, and what better way to round one off than to go fishing. We headed out to the Days Bay wharf and threw in our lines. Miang immediately caught a fish, a small fish to be sure, but one worth a photograph. It was a balmy evening with kids jumping off the wharf and swimming from the beach. I had another excellent sleep last night.

Today I had the electron beam for the first of five successive days. As I lay under this marvellous instrument with its multiple axis control, laser beams flashing in all directions to ensure my correct positioning, I noticed that it was made by Varian. Russell Varian carried out the first Earth field free induction NMR experiment in 1954 and founded the company, famous for its NMR spectrometers as well as its medical accelerators. I carried out the first Earth field spin-echo NMR experiment in 1981 and helped found Magritek which began by selling Earth field instruments. I felt at home with Russell looking over me.

My radiation oncologist likes his job and enjoys his technology. They use a a very powerful 64 bit computer which morphs the PET-CT and planning CT scans into registration, precisely calculating the electron radiation dose in a contour map across the xiphisternum tumour, and
neatly avoiding damage to nearby bowel, so he assured me. We pored over the saggittal, coronal and axial plots (I show the axial one here). They are impressive. Not only did I like the machine. I liked the software which drives it. And in the end, the exercise of lying flat for 10 minutes wasn't too unbearable. Morphine is a fine drug.