The Testicular Cancer Ball

Tuesday night Ferlotta and I went to a testicular cancer semen-ar, and what a night it was. It isn't every day you get to have dinner with someone who's fondled Lance Armstrong's balls (unless you hang out with his homewrecker girlfriend Sheryl Crow, or the wife he abandoned).

Dr Timmerman, formerly of Indiana University, now at UT Southwestern was part of the team who treated Lance Armstrong, and has become one of the big names in radiation oncology. Because of a mix-up in the planning, he ended up sitting with us at the peon table, instead of the bigwig table, so I got to talk with him quite a bit. He's a good speaker, and a relatively nice guy (for a doctor), so I enjoyed it. Apart from cancer treatment, we talked Texas high school football, we talked about the "evil empire", and we talked about the difficulty of getting poor folks to comply with medical treatment (he attempted, but completely failed, to apply one of his pet theories, developed in South Dakota, to Tennesse. As one might expect, acted a bit of an ass when he realized he was wrong, but not too badly).

Those of you interested in prostate cancer might be interested to know that he's gotten a grant to start the first ever clincal study on stereotactic radiosurgery for prostate cancer (I was excited because I had tried to research this before, and found that there have been none). Dr Timmerman says the outcome of this could be taking prostate cancer radiotherapy from 8.5 weeks to less than 1 week, AND with fewer side effects. Good luck, Dr T!