It's a wonderful life

"Remember, we are not special. Many people in the world go through things like this and things even more terrible. It is what it is. But I am grateful for the life I had. I had a great life. I enjoyed to its maximum. I made many good friends. I have a beautiful family and two amazing children. It might end a bit too soon but these were years well lived. Life is wonderful!" (Andreas). Andreas asked me to come here and let his blog-friends know...

Last words

It’s amazing how fast things are happening now.  The entire year 2020 was a walk in the park, full of happiness, activities, travels, playing, working, all that.  Late last year, things took a turn for the worse.  The doctors have scrambled to keep up since then.  Now they have given up.  They’re giving me a few weeks to live.  In a way, this is reassuring.  It means that the doctors and I fought until the end.  We didn’t stop a moment too early.  I’ve done everything I could to beat the cancer. ...

Dying man

After I went home on Saturday, things seemed normal – whatever counts as normal these days.  I felt weak and spent most of the time in bed, only appearing occasionally for some meals, to meet certain physiological needs, and to watch an episode of Sherlock on Sunday night.  When I had lived in London, I had followed Sherlock, but the last three episodes aired after I left, and I have never had the chance to catch up.  Neither the fever nor the shivers returned.  It seemed that all was good, or at least on its way toward improvement.On...

Days in bed

One of these times when the posts weren’t flowing, and this time your premonitions were true.  It’s not looking good at all.  On Friday, I spent all day in bed.  I’m doing a proper rest day, I explained to myself.  They have them at the Tour.  For convenience’s sake, I ignored that they’re going on recovery rides on Tour de France rest days instead of lying in bed listening to the radio.  I just lay in bed, alternating between periods of mild to intermediate fever and mild cold shivers.  Something was clearly...

Two more misses

A few weeks ago in the Guardian, I encountered an article with the intriguing title The epic battle with cancer’s Death Star.  I correctly assumed the article would talk about KRAS, the protein that’s mutated in my cancer.  The subtitle suggested that “Forty years after the mutant genes that cause the deadliest cancers were discovered, drugs that target them could be approved”.  I dropped everything and basically ate my phone.The story is well written, starting with the lucky postdoc who identified RAS as an oncogene, a protein that,...

One near miss

It’s an unadjudicated problem among stylists of the English language whether narrowly missing a target should be called a near miss or a near hit.  There are good reasons for either phrase.  Near miss is much more popular, but it could be argued that if the miss was near, the target was hit.  Near does, after all, modify something as coming close to happening.  Merriam Webster has an entire page on this question and the curious history behind near miss.  I’ve experienced three near misses myself recently.Yesterday I finally...

Reality check

Last week wasn’t a good one.  The previous post makes this quite clear.  I worried myself into a hole that threatened to swallow me.  How I was feeling didn’t help but my state of mind was much more fundamental in this.  I don’t think I’m going to die this week or next.  There’s still too much life inside me for that.  On Sunday afternoon I grabbed myself by the collar of the shirt I was wearing and yanked myself from bed.  There’s nothing to be gained from wallowing in self-pity all day.The jolt of energy kept...