In the Chemo Room: A guinea pig

Never did I imagine I would be walking through the Phil Anschutz-funded doors of the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora volunteering to be a guinea pig for cancer research.

But that's what I did on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday when I went for my first screening and scan appointments to enter a clinical trial for a drug called MEHD7945A, sponsored by Genentech Inc. out of San Francisco, which I suppose wants to manufacture and sell the drug once it is cleared by the FDA.

The consent forms are pretty clear: "You are being asked to take part in this research study of an investigational drug called MEHD7945A. The study drug is being looked at to see if it could be a treatment for advanced cancer. "Investigational" means that the study drug has not been approved by the U.S. Food and  Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA is the U.S. government agency that reviews the results of research and decides if a drug can be sold in the U.S.

"You are being asked to be in this study because your tumor has grown or spread during or following chemotherapy or other treatment, or there is no standard therapy for your type of cancer.... The purpose of this research study is to determine the safety of the study drug and to determine the highest tolerated dose ... that can be given to subjects safely.... This is a Phase 1 study. This is the first time that MEHD7945A will be given to humans and is in a very early stage of development.... Please carefully read the sections on risk and benefits below."

The forms went on to describe known side effects, which so far have been mild in most subjects, but the forms don't rule out death or some lesser cataclysmic personal reaction to the drug and they schedule your first infusion (mine is on Wednesday) as a 10-hour day to make sure you don't have one.

The scans taken this week are done to establish a baseline for growth or reduction of the colorectal cancer growing in my lungs. The best results the researches will tell you about, however, is a possible stabilization of the growth and spread of the tumors. That's one reason entering the trial is considered one way a cancer patient who has gone through "standard" treatment and not defeated the disease can prolong his or her life beyond the time it would take for it to kill you if left unabated.

Dr. Wells Messersmith, the "study doctor" in charge of my treatment, told me July 8 that I don't look like someone who has cancer -- I've been gaining weight lately -- and my hope is that I keep up those appearances (and energy) while this new drug stabilizes my disease.

But none of all that is what amazed me most as I walked through the doors of the Anschutz cancer pavilion this week. What amazed me was the beehive of economic activity represented by the center during what has been the third of probably the three toughest economic years in the state's history.

Patients and employees alike hurried in and out of the pavilion; cars fueled by $3 gas, big buses and small carts ferried people in and out of jammed parking lots; hospital shops and cafeteria, information desks and check-in outposts were hustling with an assured, customer-service oriented dispatch.

I never thought I would have to be grateful to Phil Anschutz, but the marvel that has been created by The Anschutz Foundation -- which has contributed more than $100 million to building the center -- the University of Colorado, the city of Aurora, the state of Colorado and the federal government calls forth a deep sense of relief over having available to me the very best opportunities to beat my disease.

I don't mind feeling like a guinea pig.

Maybe my participation in this clinical trial, like all the work being done at the medical campus, will save a few lives down the road. 

Regis-based Capital Congress reaching out for small business

I just posted two ideas to a website being run by the Colorado Capital Congress, a new advocate for providing capital to small businesses that need it to survive in today's harsh economic climate.

That's a big chore to take on in Colorado, as Karl Dakin, executive director of the Sullivan Chair for Free Enterprise at Regis University, well knows.

He and "some other guys" tried to convince the legislature last session to create a public/private entity that could capitalize startup businesses to the tune of $25,000 to $250,000. They were turned down on a party-line vote in a House committee.

"They didn't want to see another government entity involved in funding" private business, Dakin told me in an interview Sunday. So Dakin took his ball and went home to Regis where last month he and Paul Alexander, director of the school's Institute on the Common Good, founded the Capital Congress.

On June 29, the pair held an organizational meeting with Denver-area business owners, some business financiers and at least one state legislator, Pete Lee, D-Manitou Springs, where they outlined a process for the congress to vet new ideas for accomplishing its cause: filling a shortfall of up to $10 billion a year in capital funding for Colorado small businesses.

The Colorado Capital Congress, www.ColoradoCapitalCongress.com, will collect, improve and then vote on ideas submitted from the general public, and then bring that agenda to next year's legislature with an assurance to elected officials the ideas have the backing of some of their constituents and represent a dire need for businesses in the state.

Capital, or cash, is always what most small-business owners lack if they can turn their attention from survival to actually strategizing about growth.

The growth of small businesses in Colorado is the largest single contributor to job growth in the state, so if politicians are sincere about finding jobs for Colorado's unemployed they will at least give a listen to Dakin and Alexander's suggestions when the next lawmaking festival rolls around in January.

"Business-friendly" is a descriptor many elected officials adopt for themselves when trying to persuade voters to support them. When the time comes to actually do something for voters who have believed in the descriptor, many state officials in Colorado do a free-market shuffle and beg off the issue.

I hope this Congress will hold some political cold feet close to the fire. 

Media Salad: Tossed into business

Christine Tatum was president of the Society of Professional Journalists for a year before she left the Denver Post to go into business, eventually for herself, as the founder of a Denver-based firm that provides competitive intelligence to other small and medium-sized companies.

She likes the fact she is taking journalism on a new route, that she is hiring fellow former journalists to provide her clients the information they seek, and that, while doing so, she and "the fellas" are still fulfilling the "calling" they answered when they became journalists.

"Which was to give people useful information," she said, information that can "enlighten" business decisions that are made every day. She calls the firm Media Salad Inc., and describes it on her website as: "a rapid-response research and reporting service that works on demand to deliver Market Intelligence so our clients can make informed strategic decisions faster.

"Our professional reporters and editors will work from around the globe to put independent findings in your team's hands for quick action."

Christine Tatum

Tatum, like many other reporters who have fallen out of the news business because the news/advertising model imploded, has created a new model for journalism based on the skills and craft she learned as a reporter, which she is now taking to market as a business owner.
Ironically, she believes what she has created could be taken inside a newspaper or other large news organization, providing a new client-driven revenue stream that puts a higher price on more targeted business information than what can be passed along in a general news story.

New revenue streams are what newspapers, magazines and most other media, including broadcast television, need to survive. Right now, traditional, general media has a hard time reaching the small niche audiences their once mass audiences have been broken into on the Internet.

"The information is not customized enough for these people," she says of her clients and the news industry. It's too generalized. "Sometimes a news story that is written raises more questions than it actually answers for you, and you can't call the reporter up and say, 'Hey, I'd like you to get rolling on that follow-up story.'" The newspaper reporter will "tell you where to get off," said Tatum.

But her "reporters" can start digging deeper at that point to "track competitors, vendors and donors; find and background potential partners; identify new market prospects; ... [and] track changes in regulation," she says on her website.

At the same time, Tatum says she hasn't forgotten how to tell someone where to get off.

"I make very clear at the outset," she said, "we give you the good, the bad and the ugly because we would not be doing our jobs for you if we didn't."

"And if they decide they can't swing it, and they find us obnoxious or all of a sudden we're telling them things ... or flagging things that they think: 'Oh my gosh, I just can't deal with this every day,' ... if they can't swing it, then I don't want to work with them. I just don't. I'm not interested in the money."

That sounds like the old technology reporter Tatum was when she worked for the Post or the Chicago Tribune before that. She's not afraid to tell stories of getting burned by the first business that hired her away from the Post, nor of her own dissatisfaction with the technology the Post was trying to use to build it's digital offerings at Denver Post.com.

Strangely, in terms of business, Tatum is not driven by a desire for great profit, which like many journalists, might disqualify her and them from the bruising, no-holds-barred world of free-market enterprise.

"I would be very, very happy if I just accomplished modest financial goals," she said, "as opposed to, 'Oh, we're going to be acquired by Google next week,' ... or, 'Oh, we're about to win like all of this massive investment.'"

Instead, she she'd rather know she helped a struggling fellow journalist feed his family, or make a tuition payment with the supplemental income she provides her independent contractors --her "reporters."

"Call me crazy, but I think that a lot of journalists have also answered a calling; it's not that you decided to go off and make lots and lots of tons and tons of money. You answered a calling, and in a weird way, I view what I am doing and continue to do professionally is answering that calling."

In other words, practicing a specialized, small-company journalism, independent of the big media dollars that no longer support as many journalists as once was before. It's the new journalism of the 21st century. Taking your writing craft into your own small business.

You may have heard that before on this blog. It's the pitch for my own small business.

Anti-tax pols should look to the Greeks

Any U.S. Republican or Democrat who believes we can cut the deficit and balance the budget without a tax increase should listen closely to Greek protesters who ask "Why me?" when their government insists on austerity measures.

The Greek poor have a good argument if they haven't benefited from the huge debt their society built up before going bust over the last decade.

On the other hand, the hypocrisy of anti-tax politicians in Washington resounds all the louder because they ignored and allowed the speculative practices of Wall Street bankers and traders who got America into the mess we all find ourselves in today.

President Barack Obama took to the White House press-conference podium yesterday to scold Congress when he said, "These are bills that Congress ran up. ... Now they are saying, 'Maybe we don't have to pay.'"

Instead, the congressmen and women who oppose raising taxes -- mostly Republicans but including some Democrats -- want to cut government spending to the bone, which means they want the burden of curing the deficit placed squarely on the backs of the middle class and the poor.

Not only did the poor draw no benefit at all from the wealth generated on Wall Street before 2008, but companies all across America whittled away at the middle class by eliminating jobs; cutting salaries; pushing people into part-time, no-benefits positions; increasing health-insurance co-pays and deductibles; and forcing employees out of defined-benefit pensions into 401ks where their retirements were put at risk by the same Wall Street traders who caused the 2008 crash.

But the "cut-spending-only-crowd" has yet another motive. Opposing increased revenues for government today essentially means the rich will escape paying the government back for Bush tax cuts that made them even more wealthy over the past 10 years. Anti-tax pols have but one constituency it seems: the people who fund their re-election campaigns year after year.

Because George W. Bush promoted a lack of dissent as the only true expression of patriotism in America while all that was happening, neither the poor nor the dwindling middle class took to the streets to protest their lot.

But the Greek rock-throwers offer a glimpse of what could happen in America as more of the poor get poorer; more of what's left of the middle class gets pushed into poverty; and the rich inexorably keep getting richer, as seems the goal of the current Republican majority in the House.

Revolutions get started in the back streets of any nation; and the middle class in the U.S. elected Obama to change things for the better, not worse. If anti-tax Republicans and Democrats believe the population of their country will remain somnolent forever they should look to Greece and the Arab Spring, then remember the anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations of the 1960s.

The people here are not afraid to peacefully stand up against their government. They just have to be pushed hard enough.

In the Chemo Room: Colon Cancer Alliance national meetup

I walked three miles today, more than I have been able to exercise since they but a bag on my belly and took a tumor and my rectum out of my bottom in September 2007. It felt good.

I was following some of the primary advice given colorectal cancer survivors -- about 60 of them -- attending the national conference of the Colon Cancer Alliance at the Marriott Denver City Center on Friday. The advice I heard most often was: Keep exercising. It will prolong your life.

Which is what all those survivors are looking to do. Some, like me, still have the cancer and are still fighting it. More than half of the 60 had survived the disease for more than five years, and some had passed the 10-year mark. Most of those looked pretty fit. And many of them walked in the Denver Undy 5000, a 5K and one-mile fun run and walk held this morning in City Park.

It didn't take long to be told on Friday that exercise was one of the best anti-cancer drugs. Dr. Tim Byers, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Cancer Center in Aurora, opened the day-long conference with a keynote address packed full of statistics that showed declining death rates for both men and women treated for colorectal cancer.

Why?

"We don't really know," Byers said, striking a tone that held throughout the conference: a forthright realism about everything from ordinary doctors' lackadaisical endorsement of colonoscopy, the most effective preventive for colon cancer, to the lingering effects of "chemo brain," a loss of memory and other cognitive function after prolonged chemotherapy.

Another University of Colorado Cancer Center doc, Stephen Leong, lent credence to cancer survivors' complaints of "chemo brain," and suggested it was one of several persistent side effects doctors need to pay more attention to as increasing number of survivors live cancer free for longer than five years.

Other speakers noted lengthening survival times tend to make the magic five-year mark less meaningful. Cancer changes your life, many speakers agreed; but after-cancer realities are often magnified: money problems from long-term loss of income, relationship problems from a lack of a sex life, reassessment of career goals and capacities, all make surviving cancer a new life challenge.

Byers said at the outset that researchers believe all cancers, including colorectal cancer, like car crashes, are caused by a variety of factors -- genetic and cultural, environmental, behavioral, "What we run into in life" and simple "bad luck" -- that often combine in multiple and unpredictable ways.

Colorectal cancer, however, remains the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States after lung cancer, and part of the reason is that it strikes both men and women and most of it occurs sporadically, meaning the victim's cells mutate randomly.

Still risk factors for colorectal cancer are listed as:

•  Age, gender, race/ethnicity
• Family history
• Inflammatory bowel disease
• Diet
• Body weight
• Physical activity.

But an estimated 40 percent of colorectal cancer can be attributed to four specific risks: obesity, lack of physical activity, fruit and vegetable intake, and consumption of red meats.

"For colorectal cancer, brisk walking can take down the risk factor dramatically," Byers said.

So the next morning, I decided instead of standing around at the Undy 5000, where runners and walkers wear underwear over their exercise outfits to designate the geography of the colorectal problem, I would indeed walk the three miles to see if I could do it.

It seemed the best and cheapest therapy available.

I did, and it felt good.

Tommy More tales: Vodka, lemonade and laughter don't mix

In honor of my friend Bill Clair, who died June 16, I've also posted this on my poetry website: www.robertschwabpoet.com.

It is the first in a series of "Tommy More tales" I hope to post in the future if contributors will e-mail me stories I can rewrite and post for everyone's entertainment. I believe the statute of limitations will have run out on all but the most serious crimes.

Bill Clair, Ed Nowak and myself shared a Falco's pizza one night long ago in Bill's garage where he prepared his big red Chevy convertible for a trip to Lake Geneva over Fourth of July weekend.

We were planning to take a formidable supply of pink lemonade mixed with vodka to drink in the car on the trip, and actually started drinking some that night. We wanted a pizza and Bill would have none but a Falco's pie, which I argued was too greasy, having once watched a Falco's cook pour grease (or oil) from a pitcher onto a raw pie before he popped it into the oven.

Palermo's wasn't good enough for Bill. So we ate and drank our fill well into the night before rising for the trip.

We took off in mid-morning and by about 11 a.m. came to a stop light on U.S. 12 north of Chicago next to a tall pickup truck with three other guys riding high and looking down at the jug of pink lemonade we were sharing.

"Where you guys going?" said the driver of the truck, enjoying the sight of three youngs guys already pretty wasted and driving under a hot, summer sun in an open convertible.

"Geneva," I said to him from the shotgun seat. "We thought we'd watch a little National Guard action and take in the bikinis," I added, which cracked up both the guys in the truck and Nowak and Clair beside me. A year earlier, Wisconsin's governor had called out his National Guard and police dogs to quell rowdy youths who were celebrating the holiday too raucously. We three had been there then, too.

 "Why don't you guys follow us and come along," I cracked. "We got plenty to share!"

Now Bill Clair was always known for his smile and easy laughter, and Ed Nowak, otherwise called "Dude," remembers him for the contagiousness of that laughter, especially when Billy kind of howled when things really got funny.

Dude started to choke as he laughed, and then cough -- and then wretch, as everybody else, including the guys in the truck, laughed harder and harder and the choking got worse. Until Ed puked, which was no laughing matter inside Billy's sparkling clean red convertible.

Besides that, Dude's vomit was pretty much marked by tiny bits of green peppers cut in perfect squares, lumps of Italian sausage and other liquid that Bill was very unhappy about seeing spread over the rubber mats of his clean car.

"I told you that pizza's too greasy," I said.

But Bill wasn't laughing anymore; he roared away from the green light, cut in front of the truck and looked for a pullout from the highway so he could quickly get the car cleaned up. And Dude, too.

E-mail me with your tale from Tommy More at rschwab@robertschwabpoet.com.

Republicans, Weiners and my friends

Obama signs health-care bill

A friend -- you may remember Eric Marburger from when I wrote about him last October -- asked yesterday, during a croquet game whether I was planning to watch the Republican presidential campaign debate last night.

I wasn't, and this morning reading about the debate I realized why. It doesn't matter. Look at the potential nominees and it becomes clear not one of them will have a ghost's chance in hell of beating President Barack Obama.                                                    Photo credit: www.sodahead.com

Unless, perhaps, the nominee is U.S. Rep Michele Bachmann, who announced her official candidacy at the debate.

If Republicans nominate her, the country might entertain the idea of electing the first woman president, but then a majority of voters would also reconsider her Tea Party affiliations and vote for the incumbent as the lesser of two evils.

It seems every presidential election comes down to that kind of decision in modern America.

Besides that, by November of 2012, Obama will have proven himself a president who acts in the best interests of all Americans, not leaving out even those who oppose him.

One element of the debate last night proves my contention. I'm depending on New York Times coverage published in the Denver Post when I quote former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney who said during the debate: "What you're doing will not work. It's a huge power grab by the federal government."

That's nonsense and Romney knows it. He was talking about Obama's health-care legislation and even conservative-minded Tea Partyers will realize the benefits universal health-care coverage will provide them by the time the election rolls around. By then, too, all Republican opposition to the plan will be seen for the lie that it is.

Affordable health care for all the people of the United States will be just as laudable a goal in November of 2012 as it was during November of 2008 and all through 2009 and 2010 when the Congress debated the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Obama signed it.

Calling it "Obamneycare" will just remind people that the president, like Mitt Romney when he signed similar legislation in Massachusetts, was thinking of all the people in America, not just the rich and not just the poor, but all the people who make up the great middle class.

We need universal health care in America; the president's plan protected the private insurance industry and offered health-insurance availability to 30 million uninsured Americans. It was a compromise position, but he got it enacted into law, and a grateful electorate will reward him with a second four-year term.

Even the idea of a woman president won't overcome that perception when we go the polls in 2012.

Now, about Weiner. New York Rep. Anthony Weiner made all kinds of headlines except one over the past few weeks. Another friend, I won't say who, suggested I write this headline for a blog post I might write about Weiner: "It really was Weiner's wiener!"

I hope my other readers appreciate my discretion in containing the headline to a single paragraph here.