Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday. It feels like forever since my last blog, so I’ll provide a quick update on what has happened over the past two weeks. As the last part of her birthday present Harriet and I left for the Florida Keys for a week on the evening December 21, and spent the first night near the Fort Lauderdale airport before winding our way down to Marathon Key on the 22nd. The surprise was revealed when we checked in to the place we had rented; Isaac was dancing in the family room and out came his parents and our other kids. Planning this effort required only slightly less effort than D-Day (or so it seemed to me). I made a couple of tiny slips in the day or two before we got down there, so while Harriet was not entirely surprised, I do think she was very pleased. We had a simply great trip. We spent an afternoon in Key West, took turns cooking terrific meals, visited the dolphin sanctuary that was home to “Flipper” and also spent time at a Sea Turtle hospital. And we watched the fabulous sunsets over the gulf, one of which occurred during a lovely visit to the nearby campsite of Jeff Toretsky and his family, who spent part of that week scuba diving and sea kayaking All in all, it was a wonderful chance to be together; those of you with grown children no doubt will agree that as they get older and busier with their own lives, it is especially sweet to all be together.
Of course, Isaac’s mom is also a cancer bioinformatician, so I would be lying if work didn’t come up from time to time. Actually, we had a great time with a data set recently generated in my lab; she gave me a pretty in-depth tutorial on how to approach complex data sets. That may not sound like the stuff of a dream vacation to everyone, but I thought it was great. We all departed on December 29, and so were back in town for New Year’s eve and New Year’s day. I did have a chance to catch up on a lot of pending work, and began working on the renewal of one of my grants, which is due at the end of March. Having time to think about the renewal and where I want to direct my lab’s research was truly invigorating. So, when I got back to work I was rested and recharged. Plus, my back felt a lot better so I resumed my aerobic conditioning work on Monday. I must say it felt good to be back in action.
When I walked into the office I had my first pleasant work-related surprise of the new year; Beppe Giaccone was chatting in the office suite, as this was his first day of work as Lombardi’s AD for clinical research and co-leader of the Experimental Therapeutics Program. We spent a good deal of time talking, and he is already looking at the ET program write up. We’ll be having a reception in his honor in the next couple of weeks, so please be sure to come by and meet with him, or chat with him if you already know him. Stay tuned for a formal announcement. Wednesday was otherwise a catch-up day; the work highlight was a MedStar-Georgetown Network conference call where we decided to place an announcement in the major journals to recruit a large number (up to 10) medical oncologists – a mixture of replacements and new hires. This is a pretty strong signal of commitment from MedStar to cancer in this region, wouldn’t you agree?
On Thursday I resumed my strength and flexibility work at the gym, and that too felt great. I had a couple of meetings that morning, followed by clinic that afternoon. I also spoke with my young patient with metastatic colon cancer; his cancer worsened last month, and his blood counts have been too low to allow him to move on to the next treatments. I’ll be seeing him this Thursday, and hopefully he’ll be good to go. But it has been a hard month for him and his family.
On Friday, I had a chance to meet the Grand Rounds speaker, Victor Velculescu, and found his work to be exceptionally interesting; his genomic mapping studies might give us hints as to what drives cancers like the one my patient is fighting. I very much enjoyed Victor’s seminar, though I would have loved to hear more about how genomic mapping can be linked to actual signaling to better distinguish driver and passenger mutations in colorectal cancer.
We then had a pretty busy weekend, going to a lecture at Politics and Prose on Friday night with Mike Atkins and his wife Susan, and then going to friends’ homes on Saturday and Sunday evenings – I guess our transition to DC living is now complete! We watched the Redskins’ painful loss with our friends on Sunday; it was so sad to see brilliance extinguished so swiftly. I do hope that RGIII recovers fully to the form that made him the talk of the NFL by the start of next season; that will take two fully functional knees.
I have a crazy couple of weeks coming up, with CCSG preparations mixed with many other activities. 2013 promises to be very eventful!
Have a great week.
