Wheels A-Spinning

The Houston doc concluded the last meeting with a comment: you're starting to spin your wheels. Come up with a plan and get on with it.

(Photo: Shiloh battlefield)

Easily enough said, but there is a process involved here, and his elements of the process aren't finished. Bureaucracy, moving records around, back burnering... all contribute to the pace, which seems somewhere between slow and glacial. But no one wants to come up with a plan and get on with it more than I do.

It does appear that I'm in the final act, meeting with the radiation oncologist at Barnes on Wednesday. It could be an interesting conversation. His counterpart at MD Anderson, when advised of the radiation approach suggested by my surgeon at Barnes, said he'd never heard of it. For MD Anderson, either it's nothing (rarely, and not in my case) or it's ear to ear. The neck-only, limited treatment coming from my surgeon in St. Louis has not made it to the Gulf. I do not yet know the details, and when I talk to the radiation guy at Barnes I will find out if I'm breaking new ground.

I'm trying to understand the science, and recently asked Barnes if they thought an article by one of their pathologists was relevant. It's here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a6643g41362nvt1q/fulltext.pdf. They haven't told me, and maybe they never will. If I had a client who was citing me legal cases, it would piss me off.

Reading the article and similar academic stuff is work, a little like translating from the French - I do it with a dictionary. Reading Rimbaud was better.