(Was four years ago on Monday...)

Epilog Issue 126

In the words of the Monty Python sketch, “I wish to register a complaint”. Like many of the, shall we say, more mature readers of PCPro, I was born in the 1960s. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to descend into a ramble about how life begins at 40, or even how the wonderful editorial crew of PCPro hadn’t been conceived when I first laid hands on a micro-computer in my distant youth.

No, I am here to complain that science isn’t delivering on the promise. Back in my teenage years, I was an avid watcher of BBC’s Horizon programme, and other science programmes too. However, Horizon always seemed to be the best, the most focussed. It wasn’t particularly consistent, and some episodes were distinctly ho-hum. Others, however were thought provoking in the extreme. As an 18 year old unsure gay man, about to go up to University, their programme about the then-new “gay plague” sweeping San Francisco in 1981/2 was the sort of program that made one sit back and have a really hard think about life.

However, I remember a program they did on the subject of CT scanning – computer tomography, whereby the body is “imaged” using a big ring scanner that looked like a huge mint with a hole. It appeared to “slice” the body into microscopically thin layers, and thus allowed you to peer inside and see what was going on. That wasn’t all – they demonstrated some fantastic three dimensional modelling which enabled individual components of the body to be visualised as solid objects. Suddenly, the body wasn’t a collection of microscope slides stacked on top of each other, but a real thing – something you could almost reach out and touch.  It was probably using some super-large Silicon Graphics monster workstation costing hundreds of thousands, but this was almost the stuff of science fiction. Modelling what was going on was going to take on a whole new capability, and we were moving into a new era for medical diagnosis.

Unfortunately, I was also a big fan of science fiction too. Sitting in the flea-pit cinema in my home town, trying to work out what Kubrick’s “2001” meant when viewed through a scratchy, jumping worn-out film print was the definition of hard work. But there, just a few years hence, was a large spinning orbiting space station, and the music of The Blue Danube was forever changed in the minds of the viewers.

Worse still, Mr Roddenberry had redefined the vision of the hospital of the future – the Star Trek medical center was equipped with beds that you laid on, and an overhead computer panel that went “ping” and “bloop” quite frequently. You know, it looked just like that CT scanner. I never really trusted the whirly illuminated thimble device that he waved around – it’s noise just didn’t seem serious enough for the work it was obviously doing.

So why the reminiscences about childhood television programmes? Well, over Christmas my mother finally lost her battle against cancer – she’d had two primary breast cancers and we thought it had spread to her liver as secondaries. What we didn’t know until almost the end was that it was actually a new and highly aggressive primary cancer of the lower intestine, and wasn’t related to the previous episodes at all.

The quality of care she received, both at The Royal Marsden in London and at the local hospital where I took her via ambulance on Boxing Day, cannot be faulted. You know that they are doing their best when you are prescribed a new research drug from GlaxoSmithKline which is so new it has a few hundred patients taking it worldwide, and it doesn’t even have a name yet – just a long number.

Yet, I spent almost one day a week for some 5 months taking Mum down to the Marsden for tests, including a whole batch of CT scans. When she finally fell very ill, she had yet more CT scans.

In my innocence, my mind harked back to the Horizon programmes. When the doctors said they could see secondary tumors, I assumed they were there on the nice big 3D image, maybe coloured an appropriate tone of bright red as a warning. Indeed, I expected they could tell what she had eaten for breakfast too, down to the name of the free-range chicken who had laid the egg.

It wasn’t to be. Talking to the surgeons, I expressed my surprise and disappointment, both at the lack of hard information that they could offer, and my naiveté for expecting clarity and certainty. At such a time, “maybes” and “it’s likely” and “we believe that” is not the sort of words you want to hear.

They showed me the scans. When they had said “it is like looking through a fog, darkly”, they weren’t joking. My vision of beautifully rendered 3D images was taken away and put in the bin. In an attempt to see anything at all, they inject you with “contrast dye”, in the hope that it will improve the quality of the imaging. And even then, everything comes down to the expertise of the person looking at the images, to spot the things that they are looking for. And therein lies the underlying problem – a CT scanner lets you try to find the things you are looking for. It is hard for it to highlight things you are not.

So this is my complaint. I want machines that go warble and ping. I want CT scanners that produce fully rendered 3D images in real time. Most of all I want a clever bed which can tell you that you have stubbed your toe, had a ham sandwich for lunch, and theres something not so happy in your lower colon. After all, I was promised it as a child and now its time for payback. Come back, Bones, all is forgiven. Even your acting.

Tags: cancer, epilog
Current Location: Lab
Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: The Who -- Geting In Tune