X-Message-Number: 30929 Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 11:22:15 -0700 (PDT) From: William O'Rights <> Subject: 41st doubling --0-952089122-1218306135=:9699 I'm finally getting caught up with my work in my threads at Immortality Institute. I see here that I have some people who need to be thanked, some posts that need to be responded to and I have some corrections and updates, I will try to get to all of this within the this week. My delay in getting here has been largely due to the fight I find myself currently involved in with my cancer. My primary concern has been battling back this cancer to at least buy enough time so that the rescue mission here can be successful. If it were not for the current rescue mission going on over at Immortality Institute any talk of a remarkable rescue here would be moot. There just simply wouldn't be enough time; we are going to at the very least push that October deadline back far enough to give the Society of Venturism more time. Just a short while ago over the 4th of July weekend I returned to the hospital for a several day stay. We were to learn that the cancer had spread, its malevolence knows no bounds. The cancer was in my lung and had spread to my left femur and right arm by January, and recent CT scans over the 4th of July shows that it has further spread to my spine and lymph nodes. I have small cell lung cancer, but don't be fooled by it's rather confining name, it can savage any thing, liver and bone, testicles, the brain, the nose, the tongue, the auditory canal, the salivary gland, eyelid and ejac ulatory duct; heel and heart. It's my understanding that when two normal cells come into contact, they politely stop dividing, a microscopic social grace that has been described to me as "contact inhibition.” But for cancer, no such inhibitions exist. The cancer cell is a wild and totally asocial individual, programmed to proliferate without restraint, to compete with its neighbors for food, and in the end, to destroy the individual at whose expense it survives. Cancer's signal characteristic is not its rapacity, but its restless, seemingly unquenchable wanderlust. Normal cells are well rooted, possessed of a strong sense of place. Even benign tumors stay anchored in the locale where they were born. But my cancer is nomadic, and it has been on the march, boring through tissue and organs one after the other, galloping wildly through my body. Today however I find myself in much better shape than last month. I think I was much closer to death then. How close might I have been over the 4th, well my tumor measured 11.4 at the main mass. Cancer's growth follows a classic geometric progression, dou bling like a zygote. After its thirtieth doubling, it reaches a cen timeter in size, the smallest size at which it can be easily detected in deep organs. It is rare for it to go beyond its fortieth doubling, (a ten-centimeter diameter composed of a trillion cells), before fatal complications set in. By all accounts, my cancer entered into it's 41 doubling. Live Long and Well, William Constitution O'Rights --0-952089122-1218306135=:9699 Content-Type: text/html; charset=windows-1252 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30929