Since last night I’ve been passing blood with my urine again. All I did was a little bit of super light clean up around the house during the day. But I felt the aggravation immediately inside my left abdominal area. Today it’s even worse. It’s not painful, just annoying and kind of scary. Now I also understand why my first doctor asked me several times if I wanted to have the stent removed. I can see how the discomfort could potentially turn into pain at some point. Coincidentally, I re...

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! What can I say: the sun is shining again today. Not literally, but you know what I mean. I got a call from the hospital yesterday, briefing me on the logistics for my upcoming surgery on Monday next week. We got to get there by 5:30am. This makes me believe that they must get to operate on me quite early. That’s great! The only problem: I had hoped to get in touch with my surgeon before the surgery, because I wanted to double check with him that he’s going t...

Today is one of these days. Everything is grey. The sky, the bank-account, the remaining credit-card limit and the even the cancer. I’m not trying to be a ‘pity-me’ cry-baby, but I just woke up that way. There’s this little sting in my chest and right thigh. It’s probably nothing, but in the overbearing grand scheme of cancer, you can’t help but to think that this must be little metastases forming up. Of course, I know it’s irrational, but on a day like today, I would even refus...

Okay, I wanted to do this for a while now. Attached is a snippet of my wife’s list of supplements she takes everyday. I think it’s a total of 60 pills, quite a load to swallow. The explanation of each supplement is my own one and might deviate from the manufacturers’. Please note: it is absolutely necessary that you work with a Health Care Professional if you decide to take supplements. He will be able to work out a plan for your individual situation. This is not something you shouldnâ€...

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a student of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He came across my websites and blogs  - this one here and my other one dedicated to my wife’s breast cancer. He’s writing a long piece for his master's project - kind of a long essay, a la the New Yorker - on the way that the online world has transformed the way we deal with death and disease, with particular interested in blogs and bloggers who take on this challenge. I agreed to help him...

I think I’m slowly emerging from the down I was going through for the past few days. Sue being a constant reminder of the positive and Gods grace, me learning to accept the fact that there are things beyond my control, plus a few little cheer-ups of all sorts and kinds  - for instance, look at the picture atop of this post: that’s my nice Hannah, she can light up a room instantaneously  - yes, I think I’m slowly getting back on track.

One of the most profoundly import things in life,...

This is going to be a very personal posting. I did something very embarrassing and stupid which I’m truly ashamed of. A few months ago my wife bought concert tickets to a Miley Cyrus show for last Sunday. Well, I’m born in ’72 and a die-hard Blues and Rock-Fan, so my interest in Miley’s work is rather limited, however, my wife wanted to give our two girls something exciting they would look forward to. Our younger one, Britney, didn’t really care about the concert. But Jenny got more...

Good Times – Bad Times

First, let me apologize to Sue, Kim and Ashley who had previously left comments on some of my posts. I am still relatively new to website building and all that, so I must have messed something up with the commenting feature. I spent several hours trying to fix it, with limited success. I ended up having the comments manually added back to the respective posts under my alias. Again, I’m sorry for that! I hope that from now on everything will work smoothly.

When Ann got diagnosed with her breast-cancer, we consciously decided to let our two daughters (I’m their step-dad) Jenny and Britney (15, 13) know what happened. As we went on to see doctors and go for treatments, etc. we certainly did not share all details with them all the time. Further to that, we tried to keep our fear and worries away from them.
And when I was diagnosed just a few weeks ago with kidney cancer, we told them right away, too.
We received a lot of criticism for deciding to ...