Maybe one of the most challenging aspects of those first five weeks (before we began to fight back) was "it depends.. "
Half of you will be smiling. This is one of my favourite phrases. But to me in my profession, it is always followed by "...on A, B, or C" - as an engineer, it is my job to identify, understand and act on the impact of a system's context and content. "If A, then B"...". I see the physical (OK, computing!) world in clearcut understandable model driven ways.
How frustrating that the human "system" ain't like that.
For a start, it's hard "to see/get inside". And this was tough to take, when we discovered after the fact that biopsies can be hit-and-miss. While it is very unusual (I must emphasise it is a very very rare outcome), the biopsy on my liver (to confirm the Mets were from my bowel) missed. So a 2nd, this time on the primary was done - it missed too. Quote: "hummmm... Two on the trot... That's a first in 6 years!". And then the 3rd (liver again) only "grazed" the tumour, albeit enough to confirm the diagnosis.
(Thanks to a close friend, who explained how these things happen - you made a difference. And also just to say these setbacks did not delay the fightback in any way.)
And of course treatment/effect is a whole new experience... Pause… um... Maybe not... The high power computing models used to aid the development of folfiri and its friends are far superior to the tools I've had to use in IT systems design!
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