Unfortunately (for this scenario) it doesn’t appear that Jobs underwent chemotherapy. This from Wiki:
Jobs underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy (or “Whipple procedure”) in July 2004 that successfully removed the tumor.[53][54] Jobs apparently did not require nor receive chemotherapy or radiation therapy. [bolding mine]Link
This statement is bolstered by the fact that Jobs wasn’t away from Apple that long and never evinced the typical characteristics of chemotherapy, such as gauntness, loss of hair, etc.
I’m curious too as to whether or not subsequent liver transplants would be an option in the future? Let’s say his new liver lasts seven years or so, could he conceivably get another liver transplant at that time?
I doubt that chemotherapy damage had much to do with this. The most plausible scenario is that he received a liver because his cancer had recurred in his liver and ONLY his liver. Apparently this way of treating his type of cancer is not proven to be effective, but when you’re Steve Jobs, of course you’re going to try the experimental treatments that might have a chance of helping.
Possibly a giant lump of Jobs’ cash could result in a breakthrough in growing replacement organs in vitro? I can imagine one result of this episode being Steve realizing that there is more to a legacy than a lot of slick looking products eventually winding up on some future trash heap.
One of my cousins died waiting for a second liver, after rejecting his first. It can be a tightrope act balancing being sick enough to qualify for transplant and healthy enough to have it.
As the owner of a number of iPods that have gone down because one, replaceable-only-not-because-that’s-how-Apple-rolls part has failed - whether it’s the battery or the hard disk - I find this very upsetting.
If his liver failed, they should have been obliged to replace the entire Steve Jobs or, if it’s no longer under warranty, buy a completely new one.
He certainly lost quite a bit of weight. I don’t know if he’d qualify as gaunt, but I expect he was staying out of the public eye at his thinnest. And his standard haircut is only about 3/8" long. It only takes a few weeks to grow that back.
I hope he recovers, and I hope that hospital in Tennessee gets its new cancer-treatment wing.
Detailed analysis of the report at Daring Fireball. There are several oddities about the story and the reporting, particularly the sourcing for the article. Credibility at this point is sustained only by the WSJ’s reputation since no one has independently confirmed it; all other articles are sourcing from the WSJ article.
Do you mean he lost quite a bit of weight after his cancer surgery or are you referring to his recent weight loss?
Still, good points though.
Me, too. But we don’t really know at this point that cancer was the problem with his liver. I’m thinking that if his dramatic weight loss over the last year or so was due to cancer, he’d have had it treated long before his weight loss became so dramatic, not to mention the 180 he did over the problem being a hormone imbalance which changed to five months off a week laters.
I thought I remembered seeing that CNBC had confirmed it also and found this on their web site:
“Two sources confirmed to CNBC that Jobs had the surgery and another confirmed that his plane flew from San Jose to Memphis in late March.”
A friend of mine had a liver transplant in 1993, and he’s doing very well. He was 43 when he got his liver and had two young children. He was really sick with hepatitis and had about 1 - 2 weeks left when he got the call.
I don’t know if they still do this, but they used to assign a previous patient as a mentor to new liver transplant patients. As hajario I’m sure can attest, life after a liver transplant, especially the first year, is different. The idea of the mentor was kind of like a person to person support group.