Well, its been four years since I’ve conceived, designed and implemented my ideas for a Lymphoid Malignancy Phenome Score. All this came from FAPS…same kind of score for Fanconi anemia. But this was so much more on a greater scale and complexity. When I started, I didn’t know crap about lymphoma or DLBCL the most prevalent form of non-hodgkins lymphoma. I didn’t know crap about clinical lab tests. I didn’t know crap about standard uptake value. I didn’t know MySQL, I didn’t know that much of the statistical programming language R….never heard of tSNE… Looking back, I didn’t really have a much comprehension of multivariate u-statistics. So I had to learn all of this and put it all together. And I did. I was working largely alone…but I definitely had help. I want to thank my German Stat buddy Knut Wittkowski for his stalwart help!
Anyhow my thinking evolved along the way …I started developing my notions of scales and chains. How the genotype to phenotype relation is the chain of information transmission that is really a mesh of percolation…percolation is a concept in graph theory…how epidemics spread and the like. I think that there is an underlying mesh in the organism starting from the intracellular realm outwards…but at the same time getting inputs from other levels, from the environment …kinda like a snowball picking up debris…and arriving at the level where things matter….the level of eyeballs and butt holes…our level!
Anyhow…I’ve hung in there and taken my licks and kept going. Like my old master said to me ….”perseverance furthers”. The interesting thing is that the LYMPS does better at prognosis than the current gold standards. That’s what makes people sit up and take notice.
There is a internal aspect to this a well ….that I have struggled since I’ve started with attention deficit disorder and depression. These inborn brain phenotypes have been with me all along. I got diagnosed with ADHD right at the beginning of my last job and I’ve been trying to get treatment ever since. No luck so far. It turns out that I am a rare variant that does not respond to the usual medications…for example 120 mg of Ritalin doesn’t do a god damned thing to me! I don’t feel it. So I’ve done this whole project up till now without any kind of treatment. That’s in part what’s taken me so long! The way my brain works slows me down something awful! Not a lot I can do about it …but hopefully that will change.
Another thing that got in the way is that my eyes fell apart along the way. I had two retinal tears and kinda two cataracts in my left eye and a retinal tear in my right eye. That put me on my back alot during a 5 month period at first then the cataract story continued right up till this Christmas. Due to a patch on my eye after the cataract operation, I also fell and gave my right shoulder a permanent injury!
But the big thing, that other meddling thing that got in the way was that my beloved Dad José Morales Jr died going on 2 years ago. That was the “end” of a long process of his illness…that was the hardest thing in my life bar none. It dominated my life for about a year. I can’t write about it without shedding a tear…its hard for me to grasp that I’ll be shedding tears for that man my whole life. I did so much growing up during that time. It blew up so much of my life.
Amazingly enough, it was during that time that I developed the first version of the LYMSP that seemed to work well. I don’t even know how I did that. I also gave up on a project that i conceived of during that time as well. I dreamed up, purchased and started a project on microRNA’s that it turns out I just couldn’t handle. I just couldn’t manage all that and I gave it up. I didn’t want to …I tried not too. But I wasn’t realistic…I just couldn’t do it. That is a regret that I have. I look back at the amount of work that I put into that. I put time, money, resources etc…and I threw it away. Its a regret. BUT, if I had to do it all over again, I’d drop it again so as to be there for my dad and mom during that most difficult of times.
I recollect a time that I had left my folks house walking to the bus to then take the subway and I was on the phone to my best bud Tony. I remember telling him that I could not do anymore …that I was totally totally drained…I had nothing else. Exhausted emotionally and physically…exhausted doesn’t do justice to how I felt….like i had nothing left. THat was a definite low point. Thank god for Anthony DeJesus! He would laugh reading what I just wrote!!
ANYHOW….I didn’t give up the LYMPS during that time. I stuck it out with that. So here I am having submitted the manuscript yesterday to the world’s biggest journal…not the one with the highest impact factor, but the hugest readership. I hope its accepted.
JFM
pepitothinking 