Making a list

Posted by Sari

There are about a dozen subjects I have thought I should blog about during the last week or so, but I tend to forget everything when I am actually in front of the machine. Some of them however are:

1) Google Trackbacks. Most of ours are very mundane and logical kind: people who know about the blog and try to find it, or people who are looking for information about cancer in general or lymphoma in particular and stumble to the site on the page four or six or whatever on google. One of the most popular click-throughs has resulted from the fact that there are other people in this world besides me who tend to misspell Caribbean and get sent here in search of info an a certain movie. But then there are the few quite original ones. Like "Liver and hair growth" and "feeling like shit".  I can proudly inform you that looking for the latter in Finnish (paska olo) Muffins is the second hit in Finnish google.  I am also thinking that the someone who was directed here by a search of roughly something like "held prisoner in bed" did not exactly get what s/he was after :-)

2) A paean to Dr James. She (yes she, this time I am not making a pronoun mistake. James is her surname, but somehow we just got into habit of calling her just James)  is just the greatest doctor we could wish for. Its not like our doctors one through four and six were in any way bad, quite the contrary, but with James, we both just "clicked". She has a great sense of humor, seems interested in her patients and is very good at inspiring confidence. So go James, say we :-)

3) Ultraviolet. Has any of you seen this British vampire series from 1998? I just borrowed the DVD from Tarja few weeks back and thought it was excellent.  Dramatic tension and ambiguity held through all six episodes and, despite going all technobabble on vampire mythos, the series has that indefineable British feeling of "real" that American series lack. And for my fellow Austenites: the female lead is played by Susannah Harker. Now if they only had had English subtitles for hearing impaired I would have been completely happy. As it was Jack Davenport mumbles so badly that sometimes I just could not understand what he was saying...

4) Prince of the Rockies Rocks! I know this has been mentioned before but I just want to reiterate how much fun the film (and the making of it) was. This is the amateur western our friends Petri and Hannele shot last summer. Jukka plays a really stupid sidekick to the villain; Mika P (purveyor of excellent H.A.D -ware) was a tribe of Cheyenne indians, my mother (aged 69 and with two artificial hip-joints) was the stunt rider for the production, and the horse (of course) was our Palantir. Rio Bravo it ain't but even after seeing a number of rough cuts, the finished end-result is nothing to be ashamed of. The priemiere yesterday was a resounding and deserved success.

5) I have been reading up on how exactly does chemotherapy stop cells from multiplying, heady stuff for a humanist I can tell you. Anyone know a good primer to cellular biology? Anyway, and now I have to switch to Finnish because no way in Hell am I going to translate this. Eli sivuvaikutuksiltaan ehkä rajuin Jukan saamista systostaateista on Doksorubisiini josta Farmakologia and Toksikologia teos sanoo luvussa "kasvainten kemoterapiaa" mm. seuraavaa (obs PDF-dokkari): "Keskimmäisten renkaiden kinoni- ja hydrokinonirakenteen takia doksorubisiini voi luovuttaa ja vastaanottaa elektronin ja muodostaa vapaita radikaaleja, jotka reagoivat hapen kanssa muodostaen superoksidin." Toisesta sytostaatista, Syklofosamidista samainen tietolähteeni sanoo seuraavaa: "Sellaisenaan syklofosfamidi on inaktiivinen, mutta maksan mikrosomaalisen sytokromi P450 -järjestelmän avulla se aktivoituu useiksi metaboliiteiksi. 4-hydroksisyklofosfamidi ja aldofosfamidi diffundoituvat hyvin intrasellulaaritilaan jossa niistä muodostuu fosforamidisinappikaasua, sytotoksisen vaikutuksen kannalta tärkeintä metaboliittia."  Tapani voi ehkä kertoa mitä se oikeasti tarkoittaa mutta Jukka oli lähinnä hyvin otettu siitä että hänessä on siis sekä vapaita radikaaleja, superoksideja että sinappikaasua. Hän on jo suunnittelemassa uutta supersankariuniformua...

Okay, not exactly a dozen but  it is a start.

Comments

[Linnéa]

One of my favourite search word combinations that yielded a hit at Néablog was "high priestess having sex" - no, not as a phrase, thank you very much, but on http://nea.pp.se/blog/archives/2003_10_01_blogarchive.html all the words can be found and someone was looking for that. Go figure.

[Tero]

Ultraviolet: hieno sarja! Katsottiin Tutkan videoillassa pari vuotta sitten, ja tuntui jakavan mielipiteitä aika vahvasti. Vähän yleistettynä kaikki, jotka eivät lähteneet parin jakson kuluttua kotiin, tykkäsivät kovasti. Vähän niin kuin Pimeyden ytimessä, vaikkei sinnepäinkään.

[Tapani]

Moi,

Ilo kuulla etta kasvain saatiin tuhottua.
Sytostaatit tappavat logaritmisesti eli esim. eka kierroksella 99% syopasoluista kuolee. Tauko jotta potilaan luuydin toipuu. Toka kierroksella 99% soluista kuolee. Jne. Monta kierrosta vaaditaan jotta vihoviimeinenkin pahis on kuollut.

Syklofosamidi sitoutuu DNA:han ja estaa sen kopioinnin -> solun jakautuminen estyy. Jukka voi valilla huonosti koska sivuvaikutuksena ruoansulatuskanavan epiteelisolut (jotka lisaantyvat sangen usein) eivat uusiudu normaalisti. Hiusten uusiutuminen karsii koska hiustuppien solut eivat jakaudu normaalisti.

Doksorubisiini on ns. interkaloituva agenssi. Suomeksi sanottuna se kiilautuu DNA:n emasten valiin ja estaa sen kopioinnin -> solun jakautuminen estyy. Hairitsee myos topoisomeraasi-entsyymin toimintaa solussa mika edelleen estaa DNA:n monistamista.

Luulisin etta Jukka saa kahta sytostaattia jotta yhdelle sytostaatille mahdollisesti vastustuskykyinen yksittainen solu ei ehdi lisaantymaan.

Terveisin

Tapani

[Linnéa]

Incidentally, it seems likely that I'll be attending this: http://www.helsinki.fi/jarj/ufy/symposium/puhuttelusymposium_fin.htm — my professor tells me it's relevant and I suppose I have to trust her! In any case, you may want to make sure your valuables are safely locked up.

[Sari]

Hee! Nea is coming to Finland! (Doing a happy dance and trying not to jinx the trip). Any chance you could entice Johan to come along? You could sit in your boring seminar while we trawl through Helsinki bookstores ;-)

Is Kytö your profesor? The organising committee has at least two of our people on it. Our being in this case Department of English, not history. Though I have always thought that combining historical and sociolinguistics methods might produce some really interesting results.