AI in the Cancer Journey: How I'm Using AI to Help My Son

**Nathan Labenz** (0:01)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. By far, the most personal episode that I've ever done. Definitely not an episode I ever expected to be doing or wanted to be doing, but here we are. So it'll be a little raw. I've taken a bunch of notes and prepared for this, but really haven't scripted it out. So it's going to be a lot of recollection mixed in with practical anecdotes of AI and we'll see where all it goes.
The title says it all from a family standpoint. My son has cancer. Six-year-old Ernie, otherwise totally healthy kid, everything very normal. And even October 11th, we've gone back and looked at the history in quite a lot of detail at this point. As of October 11th, he had a huge weekend, jumping up and down on trampolines, bounce houses, just having a great time, seemed totally normal. And we never could have expected at that time how quickly things would have gotten really serious. And in all honesty, at one point, like, super scary in just the two and a half to three weeks following that time. The good news is, I won't keep you in suspense, the good news is that he has been diagnosed with Burkitt leukemia. He was initially diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, but they did find some of it in the bone marrow. And that makes it Burkitt leukemia, as we now understand it. This is one of the fastest growing cancers of all cancers. It has a doubling time of as fast as 24 hours, which is really crazy. And the good news, though, on the flip side of that, is that it is also one of the most responsive to treatment cancers of any known cancer. And so because the situation was getting pretty scary and his condition did seem to be worsening by the day, they actually did start at Children's Hospital of Michigan in our hometown of Detroit. They actually did start chemotherapy a day before getting the final pathology report back and having what they considered to be a definitive diagnosis because they felt the time, and we as parents were very much pushing for this at the time as well, time was really of the essence and it was important to get him into treatment even if we didn't have exactly full certainty on what was going on. At that point, it was pretty clear that it was cancer, and the good news is that that's now been about 10 days, and he has responded extremely well. Fortunately, basically a best case scenario in terms of his response. The mass of cancer, he had a big mass in his belly, lesions all over his abdomen, even some above the diaphragm, in the bone marrow, possibly in the cerebral spinal fluid, although that's a little bit ambiguous still.
But after the first wave of chemotherapy, something like maybe an 80% reduction in the central mass of the cancer, lots of the lesions and colonies that it had established around the body, totally gone, although not all, there are still a few that are left. And the best update that we got just in the last 48 hours before recording this is that, as of the last test, his bone marrow and also the spinal fluid was clear. And that's basically a best-case scenario response to treatment. And it means at this point, the overwhelming odds are that he will be cured, which means the cancer will go away and it will never come back. And he'll go on to live a, hopefully, a long and totally normal and healthy life. If that weren't the prognosis, I don't know that I would be sitting here recording this. Now, I really wanted to get to this milestone before sharing anything. And very fortunately for us and for him, he does seem to be responding about as well as one could hope. So that's the situation. And now with that, I'm going to basically try to tell you what I've learned about using AI in a medical crisis situation. I've said many times, if it were really serious, I would use both human and AI doctors aggressively. And that is what I did. And I think we definitely got a ton of value from it. Also learned a few things, I think, about how we could have used it better. And certainly, some ways in which it, like the human doctors as well, are not perfect. But nevertheless, the bottom line is just an unbelievable amount of value. So I hope that this will be interesting to the AI obsessed regular listener, but also hopefully it will be valuable to other people who maybe don't have as much AI experience and find themselves confronted with a medical crisis for themselves or for a family member, as we just have and are thinking, how can I make the best use of AI? So the first observation I think I want to make is just that exponentials are crazy. People say this a lot in AI, right? Where are we on the exponential? It looks flat behind you and vertical in front of you, regardless of where you are. Cancer is also an exponential. There's obviously a ton of different kinds of cancers, ton of different mechanisms, ton of different nuances to all the many different kinds of cancers. And that's really an important caveat that will come up again and again throughout this narrative.