Thanks for that perspective, I now realize in my mind I completely glossed over the fact that my dad ultimately got proton therapy instead of traditional radiation because of my research. I found a paper comparing proton vs gamma radiation for soft tissue sarcomas and went down a rabbit hole. His oncologist at OHSU was very supportive of the idea and it all seemed to perfectly fall in line with my coping strategy believing technology had to have advanced somehow somewhere and we just needed to find it.
No way to know for sure whether that actually improved his quality of life vs gamma or was more effective but I believe it had to have helped and gave him and us more confidence he was getting the most cutting edge treatment modern medicine had to offer.
My dad was an early adopter of basically every technology trend going back to the first handheld sized cell phones and I could tell it gave both him and I some comfort being able to endlessly read about this brand new promising tech. And gave him some new optimism he might not inevitably lose his entire quality of life like his mother’s last few years of miserable chemo before her cancer ultimately killed her. The combination of Keytruda and proton radiation took a toll on him but he was still able to keep up with his routine of jogging and swimming a couple times a week which meant a lot to him.
Looking for proton centers then led my parents to the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle [1] who both had a proton therapy center and were conducting research on soft tissue sarcomas which led to enrolling him in the Keytruda trial that was desperate for eligible patients almost overnight.
My parents felt so much more trust and confidence there vs his original OHSU oncologist who made of point of emphasizing that my dad’s subtype of cancer wasn’t something they really had experience with or a specific treatment plan beyond the generic cancer treatment checklist.
I guess I ultimately did find something tangible and my medical techno optimism wasn’t purely escapism. So maybe it wasn’t as futile as it felt by the end, re-reading the same research over and over for months on end and still unable to form a mental model of the severity and most likely outcomes/survival odds for my dad.
No way to know for sure whether that actually improved his quality of life vs gamma or was more effective but I believe it had to have helped and gave him and us more confidence he was getting the most cutting edge treatment modern medicine had to offer.
My dad was an early adopter of basically every technology trend going back to the first handheld sized cell phones and I could tell it gave both him and I some comfort being able to endlessly read about this brand new promising tech. And gave him some new optimism he might not inevitably lose his entire quality of life like his mother’s last few years of miserable chemo before her cancer ultimately killed her. The combination of Keytruda and proton radiation took a toll on him but he was still able to keep up with his routine of jogging and swimming a couple times a week which meant a lot to him.
Looking for proton centers then led my parents to the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle [1] who both had a proton therapy center and were conducting research on soft tissue sarcomas which led to enrolling him in the Keytruda trial that was desperate for eligible patients almost overnight.
My parents felt so much more trust and confidence there vs his original OHSU oncologist who made of point of emphasizing that my dad’s subtype of cancer wasn’t something they really had experience with or a specific treatment plan beyond the generic cancer treatment checklist.
I guess I ultimately did find something tangible and my medical techno optimism wasn’t purely escapism. So maybe it wasn’t as futile as it felt by the end, re-reading the same research over and over for months on end and still unable to form a mental model of the severity and most likely outcomes/survival odds for my dad.
[1] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/patient-care/treatments/proton-...