Cancer Ward II: Analyses

“Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” ― William Saroyan

After the first tentative diagnosis, “probable malignant tumour”, the National Health Service burst into frenzied action like a newly-mobilized panzer division. Consultation followed test followed consultation as surely as day follows night, but with greater frequency.

First test after the gastroscopy was a CT , or computerized tomography, scan. Just as a single radar sweep can detect all the aircraft in a plane, so a single X-ray can detect the suspect objects in a plane of the body. By mathematically integrating a series of such planes – a process called tomography – a three-dimensional image can be built up revealing tumours within the body. Pure mathematicians often like to boast that their subject is essentially useless – but quite the opposite is the case.

A similar tomographic technique is used in the more sophisticated PET (positron emission tomography) scan. Recently the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva has been in the news – especially regarding the search for the elusive Higgs particle, which – if it exists – may go some way to explaining how particles get their mass, and the asymmetry between the numbers of particles and anti-particles in our world. An anti-particle is, roughly speaking, the opposite of a particle; if the two should meet – they would mutually annihilate in a burst of energy. That is why we do not come across anti-particles in the ordinary course of events – they have to be produced artificially in accelerators like the LHC. However, the Institute of Nuclear Medecine at University College London Hospital (UCLH) has its own accelerator – in which I was placed while positrons – the anti-particles of electrons - bombarded my body, annihilating themselves against the electrons which were preferably excited chemically in tumours by injection of a glucose derivative. The energy bursts – in the form of photon pairs (light particles) are then detected and integrated by the same tomographic technique as in the CT scan to get a 3-dimensional image of the tumour.
This combination of mathematics, physics and chemistry is truly an impressive achievement of modern science.

Various further analyses followed, including an EUS (endoscopic ultra-sound) – which is essentially a small camera which when swallowed uses sound waves to map the extent of a tumour. But surgeons are never really happy until they explore your interior visually – and this soon occurred with an abdominal laparoscopy – or keyhole surgery – used to get a human’s eye view on a TV monitor of the interior.

After all these tests there seemed little doubt about the diagnosis, cancer of the oesophageal-gastric junction, but it seems that its operable, and at the very least, the scientific approach adopted by modern analytic techniques is something that appeals to me, after a lifetime working in science.

However, as Woody Allen said, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work…I want to achieve it through not dying.”

(To be continued)