Cyber knife treatment, mobility improvements and hand coordination loss - 9/19/25

For those  interested in my cancer journey here are a few updates from today

In the morning, I zoomed into the class I'm coteaching and watched my coteacher, Elijah, deliver an excellent lesson on algorithms for proving the validity of Theorems in the full first order predicate Logic. He hit all the main points clearly and got the students engaged. I hope to be giving some of the lectures starting in early October. That's my main goal once the brain metastases have been eliminated and I start on Keytruda immunotherapy!

This afternoon, two of my PTs, Mandy and Shelby, taught me how to use the wheeled walker to  leave my hospital room by myself for the first time and walk to the end of the hall and back, about 50 feet total. The trick was to use my left arm to presson the walker bar and use it to raise my shoulder to take the weight off of my unresponsive left leg so I could use my abdominal muscles to swing that leg forward and stand on it, I also used my right arm to lean my body to the right to take more weight off of the left leg.. lots of work, but I'm slowly getting independently  mobile again. Yas was there to learn how to support me.  I may need to ask my kids to help too, initially.

The other big deal today was my first Cyber Knife treatment, with 4 more next week.  The technicians, Danielle and Joe, took me in a gurney to a room in the basement where I laid on a treatment bed with warm blankets and rested the back of my head on a small molded platform. They put on the tight fitting mask they made for me last week; it has holes for my eyes, nose, and mouth, but when attached to the platform, keeps my head completely immobile. I asked  for nature sounds during the 30 minute treatment, which was very relaxing, like meditation.  The cyber knife itself is an x-ray box that moves around my head and send beams through my brain at various angles but that all pass through the target areas of suspected cancer cells and about a 1mm additional margin. The beams are about the radius of a pencil and a computer controls the radius, position and angle of the beams following a plan carefully designed to minimally impact healthy tissue but destroy the DNA of the cancerous cells.  I enjoyed being so tightly held by the instrument as it attacked the cancer in my brain.  It was a very pleasant and rewarding experience and I get to do it 4 more times next week. Yas kept me company in the waiting room before and after the procedure, which was comforting.

One complication of the cyber knife procedure is that the initial treatment can generate some temporary inflammation around the target area making my symptoms temporarily worse and, indeed, my left hand is very difficult to control it stays immobile and slightly curled unless I focus intently to move individual joints. they will move but only very slowly.  It is such an interesting experience like turning on a slow motion switch in the brain and having to consciously attend to the motion of every joint in my thumb and finger knuckles, wrist, elbow, and shoulder. Hopefully when all the cancer in my brain is killed by the cyber knife x-rays and the steroids eliminate the inflammation, I'll have full return of my left side strength and coordination.

Yas was with me in the early afternoon, and Caitlin stopped by to chat in the early evening before her DJ gig. My family is taking shifts to keep me company which I appreciate and I need to nap a lot too. I'm thankful for these amazing medical tools and for the amazing medical team I have. It makes it easy to trust that everything will work out and to know that if new challenges arise I have the team and social support to meet them.

Here is a video of my  new walker technique!