We had to take my car in yesterday morning for service and MoT (it got through with no problems) and stopped for the long walk in Admiral's Park on the way back - which I did again with just a stick rather than a walker. That also means that my watch does a proper step count, which it won't do if I'm pushing a walker, the movement is too smooth for it to pick up. That makes for a useful check on the Activity count I get from the ring, and keeps me loosely in touch with what I used to do before all this started. The only problem with all this exercise is that I do collapse afterwards - I can put it off for a while but an hour or more asleep always comes at some stage.
Watched a very good Cambridge Alumni video about early detection of cancers, and blood cancers in particular "Revolutionizing medicine through early & rapid detection of cancer" - basically about detailed genomic analysis going back many years before symptoms develop. A curious aspect of this is the parallel between one of the two main speakers and my nephew David, currently employed at Columbia University and the Genome Centre in New York (when not Working From Home, of course). To quote from my sister:
"A quite different and fascinating aspect of Dr Blundell is that as we were watching, I was thinking this chap can’t be much older than David, and also that he shares with David’s unusual combination of a background in physics and machine learning applied to biomedicine and genomic research. It came out that he’d done his undergraduate degree at Sidney Sussex and that he had spent some time at Stanford. I looked him up afterwards, and found he did a post-doc at Stanford, starting in 2012 - exactly the year David did. So yesterday I asked David whether he knew him, and David says, Oh yes! He knows Jamie well, they were friends, but not close friends (which I suppose is why I didn’t feel we had heard of him before) David adds that he’s a good guy, and the only person he knows who overlapped with him in all three stages of undergrad, post-grad, and post-doc!"
Small world...
Obviously the ability to spot very early pre-symptomatic genetic changes from blood, urine, or even breath tests a decade or more before development of symptoms would be a splendid thing, opening up a huge window for early (and probably less expensive) treatment. My own interest is perhaps the more immediately practical one of getting in early with correct diagnosis rather than "bad back" etc. once symptoms do appear. That's mainly about making GPs more aware of myeloma. I'm lucky in that my GP spotted the possibility of bone cancer being behind my new back pain and did blood tests which showed MGUS and put me on the right road towards myeloma diagnosis when the infamous 6cm hip lesion developed and made such a mess of my walking.
That's all for tonight. 10mg of dex in the morning...
First day for a long time that I've had no pain or other trouble from my many finger splits. It may be the warmer weather, it may just be time, but it's been very welcome.
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