I was relieved I had cancer

Synopsis

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer the first week of 2020 and my prostate was removed on April 21st.  I shared the news only with my immediate family and a couple of compatriots who coincidentally had had the same diagnosis.

That time between my diagnosis and surgery was filled with many memorable moments that made me forget about those rogue cells dividing within me.  It was not an intentional effort to look for diversions, I was just busy doing the things that I enjoy.   We visited our grandchildren for fun outings and hung out with friends;  A couple of my PhD students defended their PhDs; I did some of my own work in the lab with my own hands, interacted with my students on research projects, and developed new ideas for future research.  In addition, I wrote several papers and spent almost one day per week working on my cabin in the wilderness.  I enjoyed playing floor hockey and ice hockey -- ending the season as the highest-scoring player in the league.  I even squeezed in a ski trip with friends.

So, in heart and mind, I did not feel like someone with cancer.  I did not give myself that label.  The impending procedure was in the future akin to an upcoming tooth extraction – an unpleasant event, but because of the good prognosis, a relatively short period of recuperation and a wonderful life to return to afterwards.  I was not in denial; I just did not want to spend time discussing it as you might not care to talk about your upcoming dental visit or physical.  That would have been a distraction from all the fun I was having, especially in my work, pondering the beauty of physics.

I was tense over the wait, not at the dread of the surgery but by the possibility that it could be postponed.  Much can happen in four months, as it did.  COVID raged and accelerated, postponing elective surgeries.  I was lucky enough to have my surgery deemed a necessity due to the life-threatening nature of cancer.  What if my surgeon got ill?  What if he broke his wrist during his spring vacation?   I was vigilant in taking precautions from getting sick, not so much out of concern of getting COVID, but avoiding symptoms that would postpone my prostate’s date with a 6-clawed robot.

The surgical procedure and recovery put my life on pause for a few hours.  I was carted off to the operating theater a little before noon by the anesthesiologist, with whom I discussed the tastiness of Philly cheesesteaks.   I was extolling the virtues of fried onions bathed in Cheese Whiz as he placed the plastic mask over my nose and mouth.   An instant later I found myself in post-op at around 3:00pm, groggily lazing about with several other patients, some of them groaning.

On my way to surgery

The kind nurses gave me lots of saltine crackers and soda for the nausea, which soon subsided.  The catheter was a great convenience that allowed me to drink heavily without needing to get up to use the bathroom.  I fired up my iPad at 5:00pm (at about the time the morphine finally wore off) to answer work emails and to text family and friends (no visitors were allowed because of COVID), then walked almost a quarter of a mile around the hallways of our hospital wing by 7:00pm.  My roommate was a heavy snorer, keeping me awake most of the night so at 5:00am the day after my surgery, I took a three-quarter mile walk in the dark hallways, pushing my IV pole in front of me – the squeaky wheels grabbing the attention of nurses at their stations as I walked by.  By the third circuit, they smiled in my direction as I passed by.  I was discharged shortly after noon and was working at my computer at home by 3:00pm.

Getting in the car after being discharged

Most of you never noticed.  The day after I was discharged, I had a couple Zoom meetings.   The first several days after surgery we ran into several of you while taking a walk around Pullman.  A week later, just after the catheter was removed, some friends visited to drink beer and snack on our back deck to provide social distancing.

Just had my final test results a week ago, and things are looking great.  One needs to be clean for 5 years to be considered cured, but I will not be holding my breath.  Rather, I have already returned to the pleasures of life and my work without any thought as to what lies ahead not because I am actively fighting negative thoughts, but because the joys of thinking about physics and doing research, spending time with family and friends, and working on our cabin in the wilderness keep me occupied.

The Details

``You have cancer.”

I was relieved.

Early 2018, my PSA results alerted me to the possibility that I had prostate cancer.  My MRI showed a dark spot that the radiologist determined was likely cancer, a result that I got on my 60th birthday.  That meant a biopsy was needed, which turned out to be an intensely unpleasant experience because the local anesthetic did not take.  Each of the 12 spring-loaded needles bit through my prostate, gouging out a long thin cylinder of prostate tissue.   On the bright side, a week later I was told, “No cancer!”

I played floor hockey the night after my morning biopsy, ignoring the blood that was accumulating in places that I am too polite to describe.  I was more than annoyed at the graduate student who taunted me for not being as fast as usual – you know who you are.

About thirty percent of the time, all twelve cores of a standard biopsy miss the cancer, giving a false negative.  To avoid the trauma of a second biopsy, I was administered a genetic test, which starts with a vigorous prostate massage on a full bladder (mine was on Valentine’s day) to induce the appropriate secretions that are collected in a urine sample, which is a huge relief to provide.  The result: Low Risk!  Chance of cancer <2 again.="" br="" i="" nbsp="" relieved="" was="">
But my PSA continued to increase so another MRI was ordered, which showed the dark spot had noticeably grown over 16 months.  To make a long story short, an improbable sequence of events got me an appointment with a highly competent urologist in Spokane who specializes in oncology.  He looked at the MRI and immediately concluded that it was cancer, that it was localized and that it should be easy to treat.  “Of course the biopsy was negative,” he said, “because the cancer is in a place that normal biopsy needles don’t reach.”  He scheduled a 29-core biopsy to get plenty of samples and he would use the transperineal procedure, which would reach the suspicious region, but was invasive enough to require general anesthesia – fine by me!

I had the procedure early in the morning of December 31st, 2019, celebrated the new year with friends – who were unaware of the blood once again pooling in many places of my body.  We then visited our son and his wife and their new baby girl in North Carolina the rest of the first week of January.  On our return, we visited my daughter and her family then saw my oncologist for the results.

``You have Cancer,” he said, and gave the details.  I was relieved to finally have a definitive diagnosis.  Now the facts could be used to determine the best course of action, which ended up being a radical prostatectomy.  I am pretty much back to normal aside from the occasional pang of minor pain in my gut or the itch from one of the 6 incisions on my abdomen.

I am cleared to play hockey again.  Cannot wait to start, so watch out!

A Small World

I always marvel at what we call science.  I am not referring to a collection of knowledge that is catalogued in textbooks, but rather the dynamic collective intellect that lives in the minds of its practitioners, able to adapt like a powerful fluid, tackling tough problems and seeking to understand the most profound puzzles of the universe and existence.

Science is built on a world-wide network of individuals who have a passion for the truth and work tirelessly in its pursuit.  Much of the work is done in solitude, with occasional interactions with others that leads to new ideas and insights that diffuses through that network.  This global mind greatly exceeds that capacity of the sum of its parts.

This morning I got an email from a senior colleague that reminded me of my privilege of being a small cell in this magnificent organism.  That email included two photos of me as an undergraduate working at Fermilab in the summer of 1977.  In those formative early years, my mind was drinking that wonderful nectar of physics at the quickest rate ever and built the foundations that I continue to call upon.

The work at Fermilab might not seem all that glorious.  I strung cables through conduits under hot, dusty and humid conditions, operated cranes that moved multi-ton detectors, cut my hands while working sheet metal to shield the detectors and calibrated photo tubes.  The point of it all was to study the interactions between quarks, and that made the work glamorous in my mind.

In today's post-fact world, this email reminded me of the glorious bubble in whcih I live, only occasionally surfacing to be disgusted by current events.  Below is that email and the photos are shown here to the right.  The only correction is that I was an undergraduate at the time, not a grad student.

To all my fellow scientists, I appreciate you all!

On 3/26/2020 4:30 AM, Manolis Dris wrote:

Dear  Mark, I  remember  you  from  my  years with the Univ. of Pa.

I  was stationed at Fermilab, working in the group of  the  late  Walter Selove.

I returned to Greece 1980.

I retired several years  ago from the National Technical Univ. of  Athens. I  work with the ATLAS experiment at  CERN, now  not  much.

I  am Professor  Emeritus (my  age  77+  years). I  remain  at  home  and  decided to organize  some  of  my  old  photographs.

I  found  your  name  from Wallter Kononenko (UPenn).

I  have  two  pictures of  you  one  with Larry Cormell and  the  other  with  me (my  face is  not  visible).

I  remember  you  as  a  young  man with a  laugh in  your  face. I  noticed  from  your  resent  photo in  your  site that your laugh is  till with  you.

Congratulations  for  your excellent carrier. BRAVO.

I  have  always problem how  to  explain to  students about  photons as  quanta (localization etc) etc

I  advised them  to  wait till  they  learn more  about quantum optics so  they  will  be  able  to learn  little  more. Most  of  us  know  something  about  the  subject

from general physics  and classical more or  less optics.

I  am  proud  to know  you.

Keep  up  the  good  work.

Manolis  Dris

 

 

Dear Manolis,

    Your email has really brightened my day!  Our University is
    basically shut down due to Covide-19, so we are all working from
    home; how wonderful that we can communicate around the world by
    email.  It's nice seeing my younger self and amazing to me that I
    did not look as tired as I recall feeling after working so many
    hours with so little sleep.
  
    I am 61, getting close to 62, and still working.  Physics continues
    to be my passion.  How many people can love what they do after so
    many years?  It must have been great fun working on the ATLAS
    experiment, which had such profound results!
   
    Incidentally, my first graduate student was from Greece and she
    stayed in the US, eventually becoming a senior director at a large
    biotech company.  Hopefully someone will send her future self a
    picture from grad school.  Small world...
 
    I am so happy hearing from you and wish you all the best in the
    future.

 
    Best Regards,

    Mark   

-- 
Mark G. Kuzyk
Regents Professor of Physics
Meyer Distinguished Professor of Sciences
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2814

Phone: 509-335-4672
Fax: 509-335-7816

Web Page: www.NLOsource.com

Health Effects From 5G Networks

5G is a high bandwidth cellular service that is coming to our area, so our local government is holding hearings for community input.  One can argue that the new antennas are ugly, but those that are vehemently opposed to the upgrade on arguments of purported ill health effects don't have evidence on their side.

I wrote an op ed piece for our local paper on the topic, but the corona virus is getting all the attention so my piece might not appear.  I am pasting a copy below for those of you who may be interested in the topic or who are concerned about their health.  In a nut shell, don't worry!

My piece (submitted to the Moscow-Pullman daily News):

Important policy decisions about 5G need to be informed by the science.  Rather than debating the science, we should use the scientific consensus, or better yet, consilience.  But how can the average citizen determine what is true?  What is the scientific consensus?  Which “expert” should we believe? 

The most reliable experts are those whose own scientific careers are dedicated to research areas that have bearing on the topic.  Highly regarded scientists produce knowledge that forms the foundations on which future researchers or technologists build.  The least reliable sources are those that cheery pick data to support their desired conclusions, claim that the consensus view is wrong without proof, or call upon conspiracy theories.

Why do I discount claims that 5G has adverse health effects?

First, I apply the smell test to see if the claims make sense.  In high-density population centers, all human-made sources of electromagnetic waves add up to a mere 1/1000 the light intensity of the sun (also an electromagnetic wave) at the earth’s surface.  Man-made electromagnetic sources don’t have that much oomph.  Or consider cells in our body that are kept at a toasty 98.6^o F or so.  The energy imparted to cells and molecules due to thermal buffeting at this temperature is huge compared with the energy of electromagnetic waves produces by technology.  How huge?  Like a freight train barreling down the tracks compared to a bee leisurely searching for nectar.  How can 5G have adverse health effects if other ambient influences are so huge in comparison?

Next, we can go to the literature.  However, individual papers can be unreliable, and many of the studies report only on correlations.  But, correlation does not prove causation, as can be Illustrated with examples such as the near-perfect correlation with the diagnosis of autism and organic food sales; or the more humorous one of deaths due to falling televisions being correlated with undergraduate enrollment at US universities.  Talking an arithmetic average of the results of such correlational studies also makes little sense.  The task of interpreting the literature as a whole is compounded by the fact that journals are biased against null results; “a black hole is found at the center of our galaxy,” is a much more exciting headline that is more likely to be published than “researchers cannot find any black holes.”

The best summary of the literature can be found in meta studies, which aggregate the results from many publications to extract a more reliable connection between cause and effect.  These studies start by setting criteria for selecting a paper for inclusion, such as requiring a minimum sample size to improve statistics, demanding double-blind studies to remove bias, and excluding work based on surveys in which variables are not well controlled.  These criteria must be chosen BEFORE the researcher looks at any specific paper to avoid introducing a selection bias that favors a particular result.  Such studies show no adverse health effects of 5G.

Finally, I look for experiments that control the cause and observe the effect directly.   Hyperelectrosensitivity, a purported sensitivity to electromagnetic waves, is simple to test in double-blind experiments.  In such studies, subjects are exposed to electromagnetic stimuli at random times and their reactions recorded.  Both the subjects and the researchers are unaware of the timing of the stimulus to avoid cues that are perceived by the subjects and prevent the scientists from applying their own biases.   There is no observed correlation between the presence of an electromagnetic wave and the subjects’ reaction.  But show the subject a cell phone, and they react.  No well-controlled double-blind studies shows hyperelectrosensitivity (see tinyurl.com/rumdkvv).

In response to my letter of February 7^th, George Bedirian points to Americans for Responsible Technology (ART) as “a science-based grassroots organization.” Their website cherry picks publications that support ART’s position and ignores the rest.  One of their founding principles is, “We reject the rush to roll out 5G technology across America.”  No individuals are associated with the website and no reasoned arguments are offered.  The only input accepted from a visitor is a monetary donation.  This is not a science-based organization.

The real benefits of 5G in telemedicine, information and entertainment far exceed the health risks, which are almost certainly non-existent.

November 17, 2005 Time Capsule

On November 17, 2005, when computers did not work as well as they do today, Bush was serving his second term and I was a youngster of 47, I stumbled across the time capsule portal on the Forbes website and wrote myself a letter from that simpler time.  Here is what it said:

Today is the day before my new Megrez Triplet Fluorite refracting telescope arrives.  I am so looking forward to getting it.  Both our children are doing well in college, our careers are successful (but hectic) and the sun is out on this almost-freezing beautiful November morning.

I just had my "optical cantilever" paper accepted by JOSA B, I corrected the proofs of my new PRA paper on the dipole free SOS expression, and I am anxiously awaiting word from PRL about the "ultimate limit" paper.  In the meantime, I am working on the symmetry paper with David Watkins.  All this while teaching two classes and doing lots of service - not to mention my debate with Bob Olson on religion.  Gotta run to a staff lunch. Oh yeh, and I scored 3 goals and had one assist in my ice hockey game two nights ago!  --Mark

It is interesting to see how some things have changed and others have stayed the same.

I still play hockey and coincidentally scored three goals in my last game.

But, my telescopes have been gathering dust.  I was into telescopes at that time and the Megrez is truly an exceptional instrument.  I enjoyed it for many outings and for a while I stored it on our upper deck, which towers above our neighborhood; well, that is, until I got a frantic call from a neighbor that the tarp was acting as a parachute and the telescope was hovering over our roof.  Given that my memory of those times is fading, perhaps it was a different telescope.  But I can state with emphatic certainty that this beautiful piece of art graces our study today and I still enjoy its elegance.  Some of the photos of the heavens that I took at that time can be found on my website at http://nlosource.com/Astro/Saturn2003-12-06.htm.

The PRL paper was rejected, but I found a good home for it in the still-respectable Physical Review A.  The other papers appeared and have done well, especially the dipole-free paper, which has been used extensively since then to take our work to the next level.  What I didn’t mention was that I was sitting in on a class on general relativity and traveled to Australia for the first time to attend a conference in Sydney.  The famous opera house was truly majestic from a distance, but up close its curved walls of white tiles was dirty as a frat house shower.  Though I spent an afternoon walking around town, visiting the government buildings and the gardens, I spent most of my time at the conference and evenings working on my general relativity homework.

What impresses me most about this window into the past is my efficiency, doing so much with so little time.  Now that I have more time, I spend too much of it trying to get everything just right.  Yesterday, I was telling a student that being on a teaching assistantship might take time away from research, but it makes you more efficient – and I was right.  The lesson from my past self is to take on more and worry less about being perfect.  I also need to remain passionate and engrossed in my activities, like working on our cabin in the wilderness.

All right, here I go…