Catch-up 2: Dad status update

I posted this to another popular social media site, but thought it might be worth putting here, too.

While I was home in Seattle, several people asked about how my father was doing, which made me think perhaps I should provide a more general update. All in all, 2016 was an eventful year. Early in the year, a follow-up monitoring MRI scan indicated that a small liver tumor had reappeared - I believe it was one that the liver surgeon was unable to find during his prior liver surgery or ablation procedure because chemotherapy had shrunk it. At that stage, the most appropriate action was "wait and rescan," which is what my parents did. Well, in the subsequent scan, there was an agonizing period where it sounded like another new liver tumor had appeared. My dad's oncologist said this suggested his cancer was incurable, so he would be shifting from "cure" mode to "care" mode and would start chemotherapy again. But then in another follow-up shortly thereafter, they discovered that this second tumor was actually the original one. Someone had misread the MRI. So he had a second tumor ablation procedure (they stick in a probe and fry the tumor), and no more chemotherapy. They haven't found anything new this fall, and he has recovered a lot of strength and energy in this post-chemotherapy era.

Having a close friend or family member go through this sort of health situation is challenging, but as some have pointed out, it can also be an occasion to realize gratitude. I am grateful to have a supportive community, and to have a chance to share at least one positive story for 2016. Also, hug and visit your loved ones every chance you get. :^)

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..and as a brief follow-up, my Mom notes his next scan will be in February. I think it's important to recognize that if a person goes through an experience like my father's, there simply won't be a return to life as it was before the diagnosis. One lives with the spectre of the thing, which simply reinforces the notion that one must make the most of the present.

Science synopsis

[As posted to other social media]:

As you undoubtedly know by now, one of my favorite George Pocock quotations is: "No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it."

Nonetheless, at the end of a long day of data quality-control and analysis I find it satisfying to tally up some numbers.

So far, this circadian experiment has involved gearing up to run time points 45 times, across a 5-month period. I've poked and dissected 393 crickets, and we'll wind up using data from 211 of them. In some respects this is a far cry from the 6 different radiotracer experiments from 2015 (averaged ~250 crickets/experiment), but of course there are some major qualitative differences between experiment types. Overall I would say the radiotracer experiments were less grueling.

And regardless, that's a lot of crickets to have poked. Thank you, crickets.

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Also, I suspect I'm not quite finished with it all. I'll take my current analyses and will run with them for now because I'm giving a conference presentation in one and a half weeks, but I am thinking that I'll have more confidence in these results if I boost all my sample sizes to closer to 9 crickets per morph per tracer per timepoint (so 9 crickets x 2 morphs x 3 tracers x 5 timepoints = 270 total). The good news is that if I decide to proceed, I at least have my cricket-rearing protocol in good shape, so completion should be straightforward. In addition, I'm feeling fairly confident about my method for characterizing lipid oxidation.

It has been quite a ride.