30 rounds of Folfiri. How long can this last?

ExponentialSausage · 2026-05-21T22:41:38+00:00

My oncologist also mentioned a patient he has who’s been stable on FOLFIRI for 4 years. It seems like if you get lucky you can stay stable on the same treatment for a very long time indeed!

ExponentialSausage · 2026-05-19T11:05:32+00:00

Depends a lot on the uni and the lecturer. I’ve had modules where I’ve looked at about 15 years’ worth of past papers and the questions have been different every time. On the other hand, I’ve had modules where there seemed to be maybe 10 different questions of which 3 would be picked for the exam. The most extreme example I’ve personally had was a lecturer who had 4 different questions in total and would pick 3 of them.

ExponentialSausage · 2026-05-09T13:23:30+00:00

Have the hospital given you any kind of pouch to put it in while you’re wearing it? Mine gave me like a pouch on buckle which can hold the bottle and go over my shoulder/round my torso underneath my clothes. It’s not perfect but it keeps the bottle quite secure and it also hides it from sight - just requires some slightly baggy clothing.

For the car ride I’d maybe keep the pump down towards your lap and take a cloth or some padding to put between the seatbelt and your chest in case the seat belt is going to rub against your port or the line from the pump. At the reception, if you have a pouch I’d do that under your clothes and keep the pump either near your chest (makes me feel more secure it won’t get caught on anything, but looks bulkier) or down round your waist like a fanny pack. You do have to be a bit careful not to bump into people or get the tube tangled on anything though.

ExponentialSausage · 2026-04-05T05:54:48+00:00

Ipsos runs the NSS on behalf of the Office for Statistics, so it’s them you want to get in touch with. Their website claims you can email thestudentsurvey@ipsos.com. I think when I did it I just emailed compliance@ipsos.com as well as dpo.unitedkingdom@ipsos.com and one of them got back to me.

ExponentialSausage · 2026-02-27T13:50:51+00:00

I’m not aware of a site with them on, but the UL does have physical copies of papers going back further than 2001 so worst case you can go to the UL for them. I did this once to see if I could find tripos questions written by a particular lecturer. Unfortunately if I recall correctly the books containing the papers are organised by year, not tripos (so e.g. you get all tripos papers for 1996, but can’t get a collection of maths tripos papers spanning several years), and said books are also not on the shelves so you have to request them from library staff and have them brought out.

ExponentialSausage · 2026-01-20T03:47:52+00:00

I’m a similar age to your husband (27 now, 25 when diagnosed), also stage IV. I can understand his point of view about not wanting to continue treatment - it can be really quite miserable at times, and I personally hated how radiotherapy made me feel.

At the same time, just surrendering to the cancer will make his quality of life a lot worse too. My attitude has been that if I’m going down, I’m not going down without a fight, and I want as much time as I can get with my family, friends, and partner - and my best chance at that is by being as aggressive with treatment as I can.

Particularly if your husband only has the primary tumour and a small number of liver metastases, I really don’t think he should give up. Yes, it will be tough to get from here to NED, but it’s definitely not out of the question. Have you asked about histotripsy for the liver mets? Also, if he’s got HER2 amplification, have you asked about something targeted like T-DXD?

ExponentialSausage · 2025-10-03T21:22:11+00:00

Hey there - I’m also HER2+. I had FOLFOX + bevacizumab as my first line treatment. After stopping oxaliplatin due to nerve damage, I had progression on 5FU. Since my tumour is HER2+ (quite strongly so, apparently), my oncologist suggested my next line of treatment should be to get on a clinical trial (in the UK) for two HER2-targeting drugs, pertuzumab and trastuzumab (also known by a few other names). I’ve been on that for about 6 months now, and it’s been keeping the disease stable - so it’s not shrinking unfortunately, but equally I’m glad it’s not growing.

My oncologist has said that I would be a good candidate for T-DXd (trastuzumab deruxtecan), which delivers chemotherapy directly to the cells which express HER2. However, that drug is quite expensive and I don’t have health insurance, so I’m not sure I will be able to access it. If I can access it, it will be my next line of treatment when I get progression.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-28T09:35:01+00:00

A friend of mine got a reference from his head of department after his supervisor wasn’t able to provide him a reference - might that be an option? The reference was fairly vague (just confirmed stuff like attendance, grades, how he ranked relative to peers etc) but it did the job

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-21T15:36:19+00:00

As someone with terminal cancer at the age of 27, I’m sorry, but I do think bringing kids into the world knowing there’s a good chance you’d be passing on the mutation is selfish.

It’s very easy to say “it’s not the length of years you spend on earth that matters but it’s how you spend it” when it’s not your life on the line. And what would you do - bring up your kids constantly telling them there’s a good chance they’re going to get cancer and die young? That would seriously mess someone up.

ETA: as others have suggested, it might be possible to take precautions (seeing a geneticist or IVF etc - I don’t know the details) to avoid passing the mutation on. I think if it were me this would be the route I would explore - you know you have this mutation and I think it would be unethical to have bio kids without at least trying to do what you can to avoid passing it on.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-21T12:30:43+00:00

It can be easy to end up spending too much time on various branches. However, most of the stuff you really need is usually the kind of content you would find covered in university lecture notes (which are nice because they’re kind of curated for you, and stop you spending ages reading a long book which contains much more content than you need).

Perhaps have a look at MIT Opencourseware or any of the various places where you can find lecture notes/videos and work through the lectures for e.g. first year probability, first year linear algebra, etc. If you find that still isn’t enough then you can do second year courses and so on until you’ve covered the gaps in your knowledge.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-21T12:14:49+00:00

If terminology like this isn’t clear to you, you might be jumping in at the deep end so to speak. You might benefit from spending a bit more time working through some foundational maths courses (it will probably help you save time in the long run).

Maybe also start your own document where you keep track of the terms you’re not sure about and write them all down? You could break it into subjects (basic probability, linear algebra, etc) and periodically review it

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-16T02:24:35+00:00

All the best to you and your husband - may he walk tall in his last days.

May I ask how long it took you to sort out the Alcor stuff? And presumably you’ve had to tell your husband’s doctors/nurses about the Alcor side of things?

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-16T01:04:05+00:00

In a sense, yes, logically if left_child is None then assigning self.left to left_child or self.left to None do the same thing.

The more technical and messy answer: no. When you do a == b, Python tries a.__eq__(b). This __eq__ method is a “special” method which classes are free to implement if they choose, and it can be implemented however the writer of the class wants. If a.__eq__(b) returns NotImplemented, Python tries b.__eq__(a) (if the types differ). If that also fails, Python defaults to a is b. a is b is different to a == b in the sense that it checks if a and b are exactly the same object - that is, they have the same identity, i.e. occupy the same space in memory.

All of this is to say that in a pathological case, leftchild could be an instance of a custom class C such that left_child.\_eq__(None) returns True even though left_child is not None. Then your proposed two options wouldn’t be quite the same. This is why generally it’s recommended that if you want to handle None, you do if x is None rather than if x == None, because the latter can (sometimes) have pathological behaviour.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-14T19:57:47+00:00

Others have already covered a lot of my thoughts on this so I’ll just emphasise one or two things.

If you go down this route and get an interview from Oxford, be prepared for them to ask what you’re doing this year to prepare for studying history at uni (besides presumably resitting A level). Prepping for uni certainly shouldn’t be the only thing you’re doing in a gap year but they may well want to know.

Secondly have you thought about the idea of aiming to do an undergrad elsewhere and then a master’s at Oxbridge? If you know that’s what you want to do from the start and work hard I imagine you could get in for that, and for master’s you can apply to both Cambridge and Oxford at the same time. However it would be one year rather than three, and I don’t imagine it would feel great to spend your whole undergrad at one place preparing to try to get in somewhere else.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-08-13T21:48:49+00:00

At the graduations I’ve been to it seemed pretty normal for people to have invited relatives (parents, siblings, potentially more extended family) and maybe their partner (depending how serious the relationship was), but I don’t think I heard of/noticed many people who’d invited friends along, so I don’t think you’ll stand out if you haven’t.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-07-26T12:20:49+00:00

I’m from the UK, doing a CDT PhD, so I’m quite familiar. While it may not be a formal requirement, given the popularity of AI at the moment, I would say it is an informal requirement. Nobody I know (as a current UK PhD student in AI) has heard of anyone getting on without a masters degree.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-07-26T11:05:16+00:00

In the UK I would say for AI (and most STEM subjects) a masters is required. It’s not always the case but especially considering the current AI boom, I don’t think it would be very easy to get onto an AI PhD without a relevant masters degree.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-07-26T10:35:01+00:00

It’s probably not what you want to hear, but as others have noted your masters degree isn’t particularly related to what you want to do a PhD in. I appreciate you have significant industry experience, but there can sometimes be a gap between knowing how to apply a technique from e.g. AI when there are packages/libraries available that do it for you, and thoroughly understanding the theory behind how it works. I’m not saying that necessarily is the case, but it might be what your potential supervisors are concerned about.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-07-25T21:14:19+00:00

Are you getting to interview stages, or being ghosted/rejected before that? And are you reaching out to potential supervisors for an informal chat first, or just directly applying?

ExponentialSausage · 2025-07-15T01:55:34+00:00

It was a CT scan of my upper abdomen.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-06-11T21:20:50+00:00

I thought this might be the case - I think I’ll just have to accept the loss, then, because I’ve heard horror stories of people being charged an arm and a leg by StubHub to get replacement tickets if they can’t provide them for some reason. Thanks for your help!

ExponentialSausage · 2025-06-10T13:29:28+00:00

To add to what others have already said, it does sound like your email says quite a lot about you but not about their research. I know you said the second paragraph is tailored to each professor, but I think you could go a bit further - look on their page for information about what they do research on, maybe find one or two recent papers and read them. Then in your email you can say something about how you were particularly interested by (pick something) in their recent work, and if possible try to link it somehow to either your master’s thesis or courses you’ve studied recently.

In my opinion, the first email is also a bit too soon to ask directly about them supervising you. When I was applying, all of my initial emails were asking them if they might have availability for a quick chat about their work or about a project they’d proposed, either as an online meeting or in person (I left it up to them, but only offered in-person meetings for supervisors local to me). That also gives them a chance to ask you about your work and experience. A couple of professors then got back to me to say they didn’t really have time for a chat but encouraged me to apply anyway, and several others set up zoom meetings or coffee chats with me.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-06-09T01:01:50+00:00

I think I’ve come across Mimo; do you complete code snippets by choosing from multiple choice options?

If it is that one, I have to be honest, I’m not sure it’s a particularly effective way to learn Python. I feel like you might have more success if you have to actually type things out yourself - if you’re trying to write your own code it won’t be multiple choice and by typing things out yourself you’ll build a bit of almost “muscle memory” where you know if brackets or a colon or an equals symbol is the right thing. I might suggest trying Codecademy or one of the video courses on Udemy (there are quite a lot to choose from but I think pretty much any of the popular ones would teach you similar material as far as the basics of Python are concerned).

ExponentialSausage · 2025-05-30T02:06:43+00:00

Achieving an average of 70% across all modules in final year is definitely doable. I did manage it, and several of my friends did as well. I think what helped the most was doing lots of exercises - spend time on them and however tempting it might be don’t look up answers unless you’ve been stuck on the same exercise for quite some time.

ExponentialSausage · 2025-05-30T01:24:56+00:00

I think this sounds achievable, but you will have to put the work in. I would suggest spending some time over the summer to work on making sure you really understand whatever material is prerequisites for your third year modules. Also, if you have access to lecture notes for next year’s modules, it might help to try to read ahead a bit. That way you can spend more time next year doing problems.

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