January 2011

I had meant to update this blog a little sooner. The news remains very good.  A new PSA result, 0.4 ng/mL, shows me to be in a very good place. I feel good and I have not adverse symptoms. I still am on Flomax (actually a generic Tamsulosin). If I don’t take it I have restricted urination but with it is better than I have ever experienced peeing in my life. So I stay on it.

I have received a number of comments asking questions. I am more than happy to respond personally but I need to know an email address.

In the last few months I’ve gotten a series of request for a comparison between the facilities. Please remember I’ve spent a lot of time at Loma Linda three years ago and there have been huge improvements since I have left.  At the time of my treatment the hospital said they have spent over $200 million since they started the facility in re-building and refurbishing and modernizing equipment. This was money spent before they had started installing robotic positioning equipment in the gantries.

As you know I also visited the MD Anderson facility and the Florida Proton facilities. Although both are fairly new I know less about them. Not being an expert in this type of technology it is not within my capacity to adequately compare them. That said I could comfortably say the equipment that I saw in all the facilities is top notch. There is an amazing number of people in technical fields, physicist, engineers, programmers, and others besides the doctors to just operate, support and manage these complex systems.

One experience I had when I was visiting MD Anderson gave me great confidence these doctors from different hospitals are working with each other surprisingly well considering they are competitors. When I sat in the patient lobby of MD Anderson doing my due diligence I sat with patients waiting to take there turn in treatment. Although not to frequent, there are delays to the appointed time of a patient’s treatment. Usually it is some sort of equipment malfunction or something that is drifting out of spec. In this case it was a patient who as he entered the treatment room announced he had received a pacemaker the weekend before. The delay was trying to figure out what were the possible effects of having a pacemaker inside the treatment room. The MD Anderson docs were in a teleconference with Loma Linda to figure out the approach.

Although I don’t know what the outcome of the call,  I felt very comfortable with an industry willing to talk among competitors to attain the best result. The bottom line to me was it made me feel very comfortable about the attitude of MD Anderson and Loma Linda.

One other thing I did was to listen to a medical symposium held in California in the fall of 2007 (published by Oncolink on iTunes). It was led by the head of the Florida Proton. Doctors and researchers from many proton centers universities gave talks of the issues of proton centers, their medical goals, their attempts at improvement of treatments and what research was targeting for innovation for improved treatments. This also gave me confidence not one of these centers was operating as an island but they were working as a community to bring treatments to us as patients. My final decision was not made on equipment but rather who might have the best institutional experience that I connected with.