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Physiology & Medicine / What happens to the content of tumors after they have been destroyed by chemo?

« on: 05/09/2009 01:48:06 »

My grandson is 18, just graduated from high school in June and moved to South Dakota to live with his mother and stepfather to attend college there. He has always been very health conscious - works out regularly and eats healthy. (He eats milk products eggs and seafood, but has never eaten meat.) A few days after he got out there, he got gastroenteritis and my daughter took him to the ER.  They noticed that his neck was swollen and when they xrayed him found him to have a tumor that is wrapped around his carotid artery and jugular vein - he has another quite large one in his chest that is around his aortic arch and heart, and a third smaller one just starting on the other side of his neck.  The dx is Hodgkins Lymphoma, Stage 3 (I still can't believe it.) He will not have surgery on the tumors, but will have chemotherapy every two to three weeks until January, followed by six weeks of daily radiation treatment.

Since he will not have surgery to remove the tumors, what happens to the tissue they contain after they have been killed by the treatments?  I picture this big rotting mass in his chest the size of a brick and wonder how the body is able to rid itself of this without causing a massive infection?

It goes without saying that I am worried sick, regardless that Hodgkins has a high cure rate...

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Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology / What are the geological consequences of the meteor impact at Chesapeake Bay?

« on: 27/08/2009 14:10:50 »

Hi y'all,

(The classic greeting given by a GRIT - Girl Raised In The South)

 I'm new here, a baby-boomer, and am particularly interested in Geology.  I live in Southeastern Virginia, USA, and on top of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater, the top of which is approximately 400' below the surface. At the end of this post I have attached a link to a USGS website about the crater.  More technical papers are available, and more research has been done since it was created, but it is the most comprehensive and easiest to understand of all the sites, and has wonderful graphics which will enlarge with a "click".

I have been studying the crater since 1996, and have met (and been encouraged by) several of the geologists who discovered the crater. They have even allowed me on the drilling sites and allowed me to help pull a core (one of the highlights of my life, to be the first of two humans to ever lay eyes on sediments laid down up to 65 million years ago).

People have always been perplexed as to some of the goings-on around here.  For example, why is it, that no matter how well houses are constructed, or the quality of the foundation, plaster walls crack? Why does sea level seem to be rising here faster than it does in other places?  When a well is drilled, why is it that the water withdrawn may be 1.5 times saltier than the ocean? Why are exposed strata in various localities tilted even though the area is aseismic?

Even more perplexing to early hydrologists and geologists, when they examined well tailings below 400', why were telltales age markers form 35 to 65 MYA intermingled? Cederstrom, a USGS hydrologist, named the intermingled strata the "Mattaponi Formation" and suspected it was caused by a catastrophe, but his theory was not accepted. 

In 1983, the Glomar Challenger retrieved a core off the New Jersey coast that contained both tektites and shocked quartz - indicators of an impact. Forams contained in the samples dated the event at the late Eocene, 35 million years ago.

Then, in 1986, cores from boreholes from either side of the Chesapeake Bay revealed the presence of breccias - what had come up in Cedarstroms well tailings could be seen intact, and they were amazing - chunks from the size of bricks to automobiles and of all ages from Cretaceous (oldest sediments in SE VA) to Eocene were randomly interspersed in a muddy slurry the consistency of jello!

The following is the summary from "Chesapeake Bolide, Modern Consequences to An Ancient Cataclysm" - which can be found here on the USGS website:
http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/epubs/bolide/index.html

During the late Eocene, the formerly quiescent geological regime of the Virginia Coastal Plain was dramatically transformed when a bolide struck in the vicinity of the Delmarva Peninsula, and produced the following principal consequences:

The bolide carved a roughly circular crater twice the size of the state of Rhode Island (~6400 km2), and nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon (1.3 km deep).
The excavation truncated all existing ground water aquifers in the impact area by gouging ~4300 km3 of rock from the upper lithosphere, including Proterozoic and Paleozoic crystalline basement rocks and Middle Jurassic to upper Eocene sedimentary rocks.
A structural and topographic low formed over the crater.
The impact crater may have predetermined the present-day location of Chesapeake Bay.
A porous breccia lens, 600-1200 m thick, replaced local aquifers, resulting in ground water ~1.5 times saltier than normal sea water.
Long-term differential compaction and subsidence of the breccia lens spawned extensive fault systems in the area, which are potential hazards for local population centers in the Chesapeake Bay area.

A final note, when Dave Powars and Scott Bruce had proved the existance of the crater, they looked up Cederstrom, the geologist who first suspected its presence.  He was in a nursing facility nearing the end of his life, but they were able to talk with him and show him the evidence that proved he was right, and he was able to understand what they told him.

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